Andrew Marks

And I just think it takes exceptional people who can exhibit exceptional judgment, who can attract and retain other exceptional people and all the things that go into being a great founder to build those sorts of things.

My view on selling is consistent with the general way that we talked about the value and sort of growth dichotomy, which is that what matters in investing is really deeply understanding what you own and why you are making the investment and what you're playing for.

And when it comes down to making a decision about selling or not, what matters is understanding those sorts of things and then also understanding your opportunity cost.

I mean, your money has to go somewhere.

And so you have to think about decisions relative to each other.

But the point of the memo was that, first of all, most people don't think about opportunity costs.

And most conversations about selling are sort of academic, thinking about, should you sell this investment in a vacuum or whatever?

But outside of that, most people make selling decisions based on price action, if it's up or if it's down or whatever.

And most people confuse price action with fundamentals.

Oh, this company has been up and to the right for years, and so it must be a compounder or must be compounding value intrinsically.

So I think you should make your selling decision based on why you made the investment and how things have evolved and what you could be playing for.

Take a simple example.

Let's say you can buy a dollar for 50 cents.

Well, that's obviously a good thing to do.

But if it reprices to a dollar, you should probably sell it because there's no more in the investment.

However, let's say there's a contract where you can get a dollar and

But then every year, the value of what you can claim compounds by 20%.

And you can buy that contract for 50 cents.

Well, you can buy it for 50 cents.

Let's say it goes to $1.