Lauren Wu dot com

1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
2. Don't worry about what people think; they don't do it very often.
3. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian anymore than standing in a garage makes you a car.
4. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
5. If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before.
6. My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.
7. Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
8. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
9. For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
10. If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.
11. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of cheques.
12. A conscience is what hurts when all of your other parts feel so good.
13. Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.
14. Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.
15. No man has ever been shot while doing the dishes.
16. A balanced diet is a biscuit in each hand.
17. Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.
18. Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.
19. Junk is something you've kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.
20. There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
21. Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
22. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
23. Thou shalt not weigh more than thy fridge.
24. Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world.
25. It's not the jeans that make your ass look fat.
26. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, & never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings".
27. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness".
28. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
29. You should not confuse your career with your life.
30. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
31. Never lick a steak knife.
32. The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.
33. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we put the clocks back (i.e., daylight saving time).
34. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
35. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.
36. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.
37. A person, who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)
38. Your friends love you anyway.
39. Thought for the day: Never be afraid to try something new.
40. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

I peered over D's shoulder as he was reading Forbes magazine and the last page caught my eye. It contained a page of quotes all relating to "laziness":

• "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy." -- Edgar Bergen
• "Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything". -- Floyd Dell
• "No ethic is as ethical as the work ethic." -- John Kenneth Galbraith"
• "Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind." -- Leonardo Da Vinci
• "I have all my life long been lying in bed till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good." -- Samuel Johnson
• "Laziness is a good deal like money; the more a man has of it the more he seems to want." -- Josh Billings
• "Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement." -- Henry Miller
• "When the idle poor become the idle rich You'll never know just who is who or who is which." -- E.Y. (Yip) Harburg
• "A lazy man is never lucky." -- Persian Proverb
• "What use is a good head if the legs won't carry it?" -- Yiddish Proverb
• "A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends." -- Cyril Connolly
• "I suspect guys who say, 'I just sent out for a sandwich for lunch' as lazy men trying to impress me." -- Jimmy Cannon
• "The lazy are always wanting to do something." -- Vauvenargues

As a general rule, I don't talk about work, but I'm trying to find some interesting books on investing and I dug up this old email from a colleague on Mauboussin's 10 rules for Expectations Investing:

1. Follow the cash. Investor returns come from two sources of cash—dividends and changes in share prices. But a company cannot pay dividends unless it is able to produce positive cash flows. So without the prospect of future cash flows, a company commands no value. Stock prices therefore reflect transactions between investors willing to sell the present value of a company’s expected cash flows and buyers who are betting on higher cash flows in the future. Cash flow is how the market values stocks.
2. Forget earnings and price-earnings multiples. Savvy investors don’t rely on short-term metrics such as earnings and price-earnings multiples because they fail to capture the long-term cash-flow expectations implied by the stock price. Indeed, the most widely used valuation metric in the investment community, the price-earnings multiple, does not determine value but rather is a consequence of value. The price-earnings multiple is not an analytic shortcut. It is an economic cul-de-sac.
3. Read market expectations implied by stock price. Rather than forecast cash flows, expectations investing starts by reading the collective expectations that a company’s stock price implies. By reversing the conventional process, you not only bypass the difficult job of independently forecasting cash flows but you can also benchmark your own expectations against those of the market. You need to know what the market’s expectations are today before you begin to assess where they are likely to move in the future.
4. Look for potential causes of revisions in market expectations. The only way for an investor to achieve superior returns is to correctly anticipate meaningful differences between current and future expectations. Investors do not earn superior returns on stocks that are priced to fully reflect future performance. Where do you look for revisions? Changes in volume, selling prices, and sales mix trigger revisions in sales growth expectations. Revisions in operating profit margin expectations originate from changes in selling prices, sales mix, economies of scale, and cost efficiencies.
5. Concentrate analysis on the value trigger (sales, costs or investment) that has the greatest impact on the stock. Identifying the so-called turbo trigger enables investors to simplify their analysis and channel their analytical focus toward the changes with the highest payoffs.
6. Use competitive strategy analysis to help anticipate revisions in expectations. The surest way for investors to anticipate expectations revisions is to foresee shifts in a company’s competitive dynamics. For investors, competitive strategy analysis integrated with financial analysis is an essential tool in the expectations game.
7. Buy stocks that trade at sufficient discounts from expected value. The greater the discount from expected value, the higher the prospective excess return—and hence the more attractive a stock is for purchase. The sooner the stock price converges toward the higher expected value, the greater the excess return. The longer it takes, the lower the excess return.
8. Sell stocks that trade at sufficient premiums over expected value after accounting for taxes and transactions costs. The higher a stock price’s premium to its expected value, the more compelling the selling opportunity. Investors should sell a stock for three reasons: It has reached its expected value, better investment opportunities exist, or the investor revises expectations downward. But even these reasons may not be decisive after incorporating taxes and transactions costs into the analysis.
9. Don’t overlook other significant value determinants that don’t appear in the financial statements. For example, ignoring employee stock options can lead to a significant underestimation of costs and liabilities. Past grants are a genuine economic liability and future option grants are an indisputable cost of doing business. In contrast, real options, the right but not the obligation to make potentially value-creating investments, are often a meaningful source of value for start-ups and companies in fast-changing sectors.
10. Heed the signals sent when companies issue or purchase their own stock. An acquiring company’s choice of cash or stock often sends a powerful signal to investors. Under the right circumstances, buybacks provide expectations investors a signal to revise their expectations about a company’s prospects. Correctly reading these signals provides investors with an analytical edge.