Andrew Marks

And it was very easy.

And then over time, people figured that out.

And they sort of figured out the next level of the game and whatever.

And the winning strategy turned into the very exploitable strategy.

And that evolution has happened a lot more times to the point that I'm probably terrible at poker now.

But anyway, I think the same thing has happened in markets.

And so back in the times when Buffett was starting...

Information about companies and the ability to transact in companies and actually even finding out about companies was extremely hard.

I mean, you had to go to the library, you had to take out the Moody's manual.

He was driving around buying stock certificates from farmers.

Yeah, I don't know if you've ever looked at a Moody's manual, but there's not that much there.

And so if you were interested in something, you had to mail away for the annual report and so on and so forth.

And then you had to call your broker and they had to figure out how to buy in a liquid stock.

And because there was so much friction to getting information and transacting, it was much more possible for value to be hidden in plain sight.

And I wasn't there, but I know this because Buffett says that this is exactly what he did.

You could look at something and just plainly see that the company just continued to march ahead and just plainly understand that it was undervalued relative to those prospects if you had conservative assumptions about the future continuing.

And nowadays, information is totally ubiquitous.

Anyone can buy a stock.

There's tons and tons and tons of smart people investing in the stock market, but there are also algorithms and machine learning and all this type of stuff.

And so it's very hard to believe that you can just have some sort of knee-jerk surface level understanding of something and just look at financials and have some very elementary view on something and have it be some sort of insight that's profitable.