Links

For those interested, Matt and I at Boyles were included in the latest issue of Value Investor Confidential, a subscription newsletter that allows one to sign up for a 2 Week Free Trial to test the service. 

Jason Zweig reposts an old Ben Graham speech masterpiece (LINK)

Buffett: No stock market bubble, but few bargains (video) (LINK)

Farnam Street: Ray Dalio: Open-Mindedness And The Power of Not Knowing (LINK)

Related book: Learn or Die [This book was also released on Audible a couple of days ago.]

Howard Marks on Bloomberg TV, discussing the topic of his last memo (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Value Investing Podcast: Guy Spier on The Education of a Value Investor (LINK)

Tyler Cowen talks to Peter Thiel (video) (LINK)

Related book: Zero to One

Hayman Capital Targets Shire in Next Pharma Battle (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz: Years after the global financial crisis, William Isaac and Senator Bob Kerrey address questions surrounding Fannie and Freddie's Conservatorship. (LINK)

The April issue of the Mutual Fund Observer (LINK)

Research paper: The mortality of companies (LINK)

The firm is a fundamental economic unit of contemporary human societies. Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character of firms have produced mixed results regarding their lifespans and mortality. We examine a comprehensive database of more than 25 000 publicly traded North American companies, from 1950 to 2009, to derive the statistics of firm lifespans. Based on detailed survival analysis, we show that the mortality of publicly traded companies manifests an approximately constant hazard rate over long periods of observation. This regularity indicates that mortality rates are independent of a company's age. We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector. Our results shed new light on the dynamics of births and deaths of publicly traded companies and identify some of the necessary ingredients of a general theory of firms.

Can you win at anything if you practise hard enough? [H/T @tferriss] (LINK)

Related book: Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

The Healing Power of Your Own Medical Records (LINK)

The latest Nature Podcast (LINK)

I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend For Life [H/T Bill Bishop] (LINK)

I'm continuing to enjoy the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. While I had linked to this last month, I had forgotten to watch it, and now that I'm into the book I thought I'd link again to: Edge #437 - Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman: A Conversation

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Before asking you what are the questions you are asking yourself, I want to say that I've now read your book Sapiens twice and in that book you do something that I found pretty extraordinary. You cover the history of mankind. It seems to be like an invitation for people to dismiss it as superficial, so I read it, and I read it again, because in fact, I found so many ideas that were enriching. I want to talk about just one or two of them as examples. 

Your chapter on science is one of my favorites and so is the title of that chapter, "The Discovery of Ignorance". It presents the idea that science began when people discovered that there was ignorance, and that they could do something about it, that this was really the beginning of science. I love that phrase. 

And in fact, I loved that phrase so much that I went and looked it up. Because I thought, where did he get it? My search of the phrase showed that all the references were to you. And there are many other things like that in the book.