Back to Business

 To the many people I have met on this website over the past two years:

As you can see, it has been two months since I last updated the site. I spent last fall in Dallas during a family medical crisis. My father, Ken Davey, passed away in November, and, since then, I've been attending to family matters most of the time. If I were to write about this experience, it would read more like a black comedy than The Year of Magical Thinking. My Dad had a wit and a well-honed sense of drama, and he's continued to surprise and entertain us weeks after his death. Lately, I've been sorting through the hundreds of books in his collection, and finding little notes and what seem to be coded messages inside some of them that are understandable only to my sister and myself. Creating little puzzles that would harness my detective instincts was so very like my Dad.

The experience of being away from the website also has given me a chance to reflect on the purpose of this blog. When I was a Wall Street analyst, I was rewarded for being intensely curious. I was willing to raise questions and notice financial pattern deviations even when I didn't have the answers to why they were occurring. I tried to combine the "auditor's nose" with observations about the behavioral patterns of the companies I followed and their managements. It has been a pleasure and privilege to take these same skills online. 

With some exceptions, though, this kind of writing really belongs in a different forum that allows for more deeply realized explanations without the pressure of writing in real-time. So while I will keep posting on this blog, I plan to make it briefer, less instructive and more observational, more as a way to spark dialogue than to analyze news in depth.

Partly, this also is because I'm devoting more time to writing the book about investing. This topic has been written about thousands of times before in books and periodicals. Yet the body of work that exists has yet to capture how Warren Buffett really invests. In his own words, he has done this better than anyone -- but as those of you who follow him know -- has done so by giving out broad principles without a lot of specificity. It's a pragmatic strategy -- he doesn't need a "don't try this at home" sticker to warn the bottom 80% of his audience -- but the top 20% could use more information. Moreover, most people who are interested in Buffett's investing style have limited capital. They must act the way he did at the beginning of his career, when every basis point counted and every decision had a huge opportunity cost. Lastly, never in my lifetime have we lived in an era so demanding of good investing skills. Even in the chaos of the 1970s, the world did not face such perils as the era we entered around 2001. I believe that never before in modern times has clarity of purpose and the ability to sort out what is truly important mattered as much. You can't drive from New York to Boston by looking in the rear-view mirror. 

Now, I will post a couple of things and then go write for a while. It's good to be back.