Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: Keeping With Year End Traditions

 "Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

                        - Henry David Thoreau 

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: Keeping With Year End Traditions

 "Keep a clear eye toward life's end. Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God's creature. What you are in His sight is what you are and nothing more.

Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing that you have received....but only what you have given; a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice and courage."

                                 -Francis of Assisi

 

 

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: Keeping With Year End Traditions

 "The true test of civilization is not the census, not the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out."

                            - Emerson 

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: Keeping With Year End Traditions

 "There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second."

                        - Logan Parsall Smith 

Feel free to go back to December 2023 https://edwardquince.blogspot.com/2023/12/  

and December 2024 for more https://edwardquince.blogspot.com/2024/12/

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The one about the six foot man

(Expanded from April 9, 2025)

In April, volatility reminded us of Howard Marks’ most memorable metaphor: the six-foot man who drowned crossing a stream five feet deep on average.

The Danger of Averages

You don’t live on averages. You live through drawdowns.

Leverage narrows the range of survivable outcomes. You can be right long-term and still be ruined on a bad Tuesday.

The Financial Takeaway

Survival is the only road to riches.

Leverage doesn’t add value—it magnifies outcomes. Build a margin of safety large enough to withstand bad luck, not just bad analysis.

Assume the stream has deep holes. Invest like someone who wants to stay in the game.

Fortune favors the unlevered—or at least the perpetually cautious.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The one where doing nothing is the hardest work

 (Expanded from January 13, 2025)

We opened 2025 with Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria’s Nomad Investment Partnership—proof that inactivity, when disciplined, can be wildly profitable.

Strategic Inertia

Nomad understood something markets hate: time is the only exponential variable in compounding.

Their solution was radical restraint. Minimal trading. Minimal reporting. No performative busyness. They avoided the “say-something syndrome,” recognizing that frequent updates create the illusion of progress while sabotaging patience.

Scale Economies Shared

They backed businesses like Costco and Amazon that shared scale economies with customers—lower prices, higher loyalty, wider moats. Growth came not from squeezing margins, but from widening trust.

The Financial Takeaway

Your edge isn’t brilliance. It’s boredom tolerance.

If news won’t matter in five years, don’t give it five minutes. The hardest work in investing is often resisting the urge to appear active.

As Munger said: it’s the waiting that makes the money. Most people can’t stand the quiet.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The One About The Pope

(Expanded from May 12, 2025)

Somewhere between earnings season and FOMC minutes, we found ourselves reading papal encyclicals.

Stay with me.

Capitalism Without Virtue

In Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus, Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II offered a critique more incisive than most hedge fund letters: capitalism without virtue becomes a thinly disguised totalitarianism.

This is not theology—it’s systems analysis.

When labor is treated purely as a cost, not a vocation, fragility follows. When work becomes “Work for Work’s Sake,” dignity erodes. When profit becomes the only regulator, fraud eventually sneaks in through the side door.

The Financial Takeaway

Markets are powerful servants and terrible gods.

A company that grinds its workforce down may boost margins briefly, but it is eating its seed corn. Social liabilities compound just as surely as financial ones.

True wealth includes autonomy, meaning, and peace. If your returns rely on moral bankruptcy, you’re borrowing performance from the future—and the interest rate is punitive.

Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The one with the falcon and the donut

(Expanded from May 5, 2025)

In May, we wandered briefly away from charts and into something far more revealing: a CEO driving his own product.

Lyft CEO David Risher introduced two concepts worth their weight in free cash flow: Falcon Mode and Enshittification.

The Donut Dilemma

While driving for Lyft, Risher picked up a rider named Anne. Her commute decision depended entirely on price. At $20, she’d go in. At $40, she’d stay home. That day the fare was $30—barely tolerable.

She paid it only because she had donuts in the backseat for her team.

A spreadsheet would log this as a successful transaction. Reality logs it as resentment.

Fighting Gravity

This is enshittification in action—the slow degradation of a product in the blind pursuit of profit. Cory Doctorow’s framework is simple: first platforms serve users, then they exploit them, and eventually they extract everything they can from everyone involved.

It’s not malicious. It’s gravitational.

The cause is additive bias—solving problems by adding layers instead of removing friction. Metrics improve while experience decays.

The Financial Takeaway

Falcon Mode is the antidote: operate at altitude, but retain the ability to swoop.

Dashboards tell you what happened. They rarely tell you why.

For investors, beware of businesses that grow by extracting rather than creating value. If the model depends on customer irritation and employee exhaustion, it is not compounding—it is consuming.

Quality is felt before it is measured. If you wouldn’t ride the product, don’t own the stock.