capital deployment and curiosity. compiling for myself, scroll at your own risk
Atlanta, GA
Joined August 2018
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Vingilot retweeted
Charlie Munger believed that you have a duty to become wise
“I almost worship reason."
"You can argue that Henry Singleton did, too, and certainly Warren Buffett does, too."
"The people I know that are good, they feel you have a duty to become as wise as you can be by constantly studying things and thinking about it.”
I’m excited to share this previously unreleased 2022 conversation between Charlie Munger and Todd Combs.
As with any Munger talk, the subjects are both deep and wide. I’ve pulled out the ideas that most resonated with me and published a full transcript.
A special thank you to the Singleton Foundation, Todd Combs, and William Thorndike for giving me the permission to share this with you.
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3Y8…
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=H4J9_tlC…
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Transcript: fs.blog/knowledge-project-po…
Vingilot retweeted
A lot of wealth advisors don't think about themselves as a business.
They should.
If you have loyal clients and the ability to attract new clients, you = revenue.
It doesn't matter if you're W2, 1099, RIA, BD or wirehouse.
When you explore a move to a new firm, they're evaluating you like a business.
The recruitment package can start to look a lot more like an M&A deal than a salary and bonus negotiation.
Upfront transition money.
Equity.
Profit interests.
Phantom stock.
Forgivable notes.
Revenue share.
When wealth advisors explore new firms, they don't enter job interviews.
They enter merger negotiations.
Vingilot retweeted
A lot of financial advisors know exactly what they make today.
Very few know what they could make somewhere else.
Your current compensation is based on the economics of the firm you’re at.
Your market value is based on what another firm is willing to pay for your relationships, production and ability to grow.
Those numbers can be very different.
I’ve seen advisors find out they were significantly undervalued only after they started having conversations with other firms.
You don’t know your market value until you test the market.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to leave.
It just means you should know what your options are.
Vingilot retweeted
Game theory explains why working harder inside a broken system is the worst response to that system. Because a system is never truly broken. It's just producing exactly the outcomes its own incentive structures were designed to produce, whether intentional or not. Working harder inside this system increases your output in the payoff matrix, but it simply won't change the actual structure of the system's matrix. Thus, the correct response is not more effort. Instead, you must aim to identify whose interests the current structure serves and position yourself in favor of those interests rather than against them. Change the game, or play the game that is actually being played. Either way, you must stop optimizing for the game you wish it to be and start acting realistically.
Vingilot retweeted
Huge Roth conversion mistake:
Withholding taxes on the conversion if you are under 59.5
This leads to a 10% penalty on what you withhold since it is seen as an early distribution
You should try to use cash to pay those taxes
Vingilot retweeted
The biggest risk in the short run is being invested when you need the money.
The biggest risk in the long run is not being invested at all.
Even the worst 30-year period in S&P 500 history - which included the Great Depression and World War II – produced tremendous wealth.
Vingilot retweeted
The older I get, the more I realize how much of your life is shaped by the stories you tell yourself. I’m not ready. I’m too late. I’m bad at this. I never follow through. Be careful. You believe what you repeatedly rehearse. Tell better stories. Then prove them through action.
Vingilot retweeted
Your entire life will change when you learn to love what most people avoid. Wake up early. Focus. Move your body. Eat real foods. Obsess over one thing. Read old books. Be present. Listen intently. Change your mind. Have difficult conversations. The recipe for a good life.
Vingilot retweeted
jordan peterson on choosing a partner for marriage:
1. Attraction isn't optional. it's weird and biological. scientists once rated men by how symmetrical their faces were, then had them wear the same t-shirt for a day. women rated the symmetrical men's body odor as more attractive. smell alone gave it away.
2. after attraction, trust is everything. no marriage survives without it. you have to be able to tell each other the truth.
3. think of marriage as handcuffing yourself to someone. you tell them the truth, they tell you the truth, and neither of you gets to run away. that's what forces you to actually grow instead of hiding.
4. our culture massively undervalues marriage. it's roughly a third of your life. kids are another third. skipping either one is a bigger mistake than people realize.
5. look for someone who'd be a good mother. if a woman's in her mid-twenties and still doesn't know she wants kids, that's usually a sign something's off psychologically. not always. but usually.
Vingilot retweeted
I’m convinced that the most underrated trait in a romantic partner is that they bring peace into your life. Days are filled with enough chaos and uncertainty. Being able to come home to someone who defaults to emotional consistency, who creates a peace, is massively underrated.
Vingilot retweeted
Major cheat code for life: Become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines. There's immense power in rejecting that trend. Slow down. Create space to think clearly.
Vingilot retweeted
Hot take: Universities charge $300,000 for a degree that teaches you skills any LLM can do for free. At some point we need to have an honest conversation about whether higher education is the greatest individuals misallocation of capital in recent history.
Vingilot retweeted
Client-facing financial advisors in the US are brining home an average of $403,963 a year
@citywirewealth
Vingilot retweeted
Many advisors and their clients use strategies that will avoid taking distributions from asset classes like equities during down years – for instance, setting aside “buckets” as a reserve against market crashes, and/or creating a series of “decision rules” that might simply state outright that equities will only be sold if they’re up, otherwise bonds are liquidated instead, and cash/Treasury bills will be used if everything else is down at once. kitc.es/4wCnuyB
Yet when such a decision-rules strategy is paired with simple rebalancing, it turns out that the outcome is no better than merely managing the portfolio on a total return basis without the decision rules at all!
Vingilot retweeted
There are really two ways most financial advisors increase income over time.
Grow production....
Or improve structure.
Most advisors spend almost all of their energy focused on the first one.
Getting more clients.
Growing revenue.
Increasing AUM.
All important.
But very few spend enough time thinking about structure.
Payout structure.
Support model.
Ownership.
Capacity.
Enterprise value.
The same advisor with the same clients can end up with completely different outcomes depending on the structure around them.
One advisor builds a high-income practice entirely dependent on them.
Another builds a business with leverage, scale, and equity value beyond their own production.
That’s one reason this industry has become so interesting over the last 10–15 years.
There are more ways to build than ever before.
Increasingly, the advisors with the best long-term outcomes are optimizing for both production and structure at the same time.