I came across twitter poll by Shane Parish of Farnam Street (folks may also know of him through his The Knowledge Project Podcast), where in he asked his followers to twit their favorite Charlie Munger quote. It was an interesting poll and I thought it would be a good exercise for me to peruse through all the responses that Shane received and parse 10 of my favorite Munger quotes. Hence the title.

Before I venture into this exercise, I thought it would be good for me to take a temperature of where I stand with my investments, given the nice market rebound from last week. The chart below is smoothed-money weighted returns plot for my investment assets compared against S&P 500 returns for the year 2020 up until the Easter weekend.

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• In the past week, my portfolio has recovered quite a bit and as of this writing, I am down about -8.7 % for the year, compared to about -14.5 % drawdown in S&P 500 index.
• Except for a brief window of 2 weeks in first half of February, time period when growth stocks such as TSLA went bazooka, my portfolio (both retirement and non-retirement assets) has managed to beat S&P 500 index rather handily.
• I want to note however that money weighted averaging may not provide an apples to apples comparison to S&P 500 averages and the market beating performance may in part be due to cash injection into my portfolio. I hope to revisit this problem in my next blog post.
• Regardless, given the turmoil that is Covid-19, I am more than willing bear the pain of -10 % loss in my investment assets, especially considering the fact that these are paper losses
• March 23rd saw the bottom of markets, with S&P 500 down -30 % for the year when my investment portfolio was down about -26 %. It was the time when I reported networth status for March, which was down about -21 %.  Little did I know that we were to hit Covid-19 bottom, though, I did venture a guess based on historic precedence of Spanish Flu pandemic.

On to Charlie Munger Quotes (Italazied):

•  all investing is value investing
• The whole secret to investment is to find places where it’s safe and wise to non-diversify.
• Invert always invert. Turn a siutation or problem upside down. Look at it backward.
• The ability to change your mind is probably the best life skills you can ever hope to develop.
• In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time-none, zero
• If something is too hard, we move onto something else. What could be simpler than that?
• Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
• Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean
• If someone really deserves to be told to go to hell, it can always wait ’till tomorrow.
• If you see the world accurately, it’s bound to be humorous, because it’s ridiculous.

And finally, Nothing to add!

Video/Book/Article/Audio for the Week

• Article: Mohnish Pabrai: A Bull’s view in a virus shop
• Article: Yet another fascinating article from Value house, GMO, a reminder on it’s always darker before dawn
• Article: If you think Covid-19 impact on markets is bad, be glad its no where near great-depression
• Book: Good Stocks Cheap, a good book to imbue value investing principles, in times of turmoil
• Video: Pundits get it wrong all the time!