Day: October 15, 2025

It is not uncommon for investors to want to scale new businesses. We are currently seeing it in the AI story, where businesses are trying to find new customers and gain scale in what is believed to be a burgeoning industry. While there may be a winner, there tend to be many losers when it comes to scaling new industries. We like far more predictability in analyzing companies, which time and time again draws us to old industries. Banking is a roughly 600-year-old industry. The energy industry has been around since the first fire, but the oil business has been around since the 19th century. We will use this letter to explain to the investors of the strategy why these industries currently have so much in common. […]

We’ve been doing a great deal of reading about prior exciting and maniacal periods in the U.S. stock market. This is as much to remind us of why the tortoise won the race in Aesop’s fable. Once in Golconda and The Go-Go Years by John Brooks covered the 1920s and 1930s (Golconda), as well as the late 1960s (Go-Go). Eboys, the story of Benchmark Capital and eBay, covered 1998-2000. Most recently, we read a terrific article in The Wall Street Journal titled “Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off,” written by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan. […]