Psychological resilience via the honey badger
The speakers argued that successful investing requires a psychological blend of thick skin to filter noise and loose skin to remain non-attached to outcomes.
The argument
Drawing from Stoic and Buddhist traditions, the guest argued that armoring oneself completely leads to brittleness and lack of learning, while reacting to every market tick leads to panic. The best investors filter out short-term noise but remain flexible enough to accept when a core thesis is genuinely broken.
Hear it yourself
"And if Tweedy was the market maker, we might say we buy 100 shares at ten and if you want to buy them from us, we'll sell them to you at 10:50. So that's that's how the firm got got going. And one of the early partners was Howard Brown, the deceased, father of my retired partner, Will Brown, and deceased partner, Chris Brown. And it just kind of chugged along doing that business until the nineteen seventies when a a fellow by the name of Tom Knapp, who had sat side by side at Ben Graham's firm, with Warren Buffett."