Mark @MarkGrokLab

Mark Cuban says diversification is for idiots. He put $1.4 billion into a single stock. Then the dot-com bubble burst. In 1999 Yahoo bought his company Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in stock. Cuban's share was 14.6 million shares of Yahoo. He did not sell. He did not diversify. He did one thing. He bought insurance on the stock. He paid nothing for it. He locked in a floor price of $85 a share and gave up any gains above $205. Wall Street calls this a zero-cost collar. Yahoo hit $237 in January 2000. Then the bubble popped. The stock crashed from $237 to $13. Without the insurance his shares would have been worth $190 million. With it he walked away with over a billion dollars. They called it one of the top ten trades in Wall Street history. He used the money to buy the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. In 2023 he sold his majority stake when the team was valued at over $4 billion. Cuban tells investors that diversification is what you do when you do not understand what you own. He says buy and hold is a crock. He says if you understand something deeply, put your money there and protect it. Before any of this he was making $18,000 a year at a software store in Dallas. He got fired for closing a deal his boss told him not to close. He started his own company the next day. He sold it for $6 million. Then he built another and sold it for $5.7 billion. It doesn't matter how many times you fail, he says. You only have to be right once.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@verumxbt Fair point. He optimized for efficiency so well that concentration became the risk. The same decision that saved Apple in 1998 is the one Ternus has to unwind now.

Tim Cook studied industrial engineering at Auburn University. Tuition was $660 a year. That degree built Apple into a $4 trillion company. He grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama. His father worked in a shipyard. His mother worked in a pharmacy. He delivered newspapers for the Mobile Press Register starting at age 12. He woke up at 3 AM, threw papers on his route, napped, and went to school. He flipped burgers at the town's only fast food restaurant for $1.10 an hour. He was the first person in his family to go to college. After Auburn he spent 12 years at IBM. Then six months at Compaq. Then Steve Jobs called. Cook said later that five minutes into the interview he knew he wanted to join Apple. He called it throwing caution to the wind. When he arrived in 1998, Apple had a month of inventory sitting in 19 warehouses with over 100 suppliers. Cook closed 10 of the warehouses. He cut suppliers from 100 to 24. He got inventory down to six days. He told his team inventory is fundamentally evil. He said it is like dairy products. No one wants to buy spoiled milk. That invisible work turned Apple into what it became. Under Cook as CEO, revenue went from $108 billion a year to $416 billion. Market cap went from $348 billion to over $4 trillion. He returned more than $1 trillion to shareholders. He stepped down as CEO on September 1, 2026. On ISE Day he recorded a message for industrial engineers around the world. He said the field sits at the intersection of people and technology. It demands rigorous analytics without ever losing sight of human impact. The man who built the most valuable company in history did not study computer science. He studied how to move things and make systems work for people. His degree cost $660.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@MadCrash_X Simple doen't mean easy. Staying invested though a 50% drop while everyone around you sells, that's the part nobody mentions when they call index funds boring.

Jack Bogle founded a company that manages $11.6 trillion. He died worth $80 million. He could have been one of the richest people on earth. He designed it so he would not be. He had his first heart attack at 31. He would have six in total. In 1996 he received a heart transplant at 66. At Princeton he wrote his senior thesis on the mutual fund industry. Walter Morgan, the founder of Wellington Fund, read it and hired him. By 1970 Bogle was running Wellington. Then he approved a merger that nearly destroyed the company. Assets fell from $2 billion to $480 million. The board fired him in 1974. After getting fired he started a new company with a structure no one in finance had ever used. The investors owned it. Not the founders. Not Wall Street. The people who put their money in. He called it Vanguard. Then he created a fund that did not try to beat the market. It just bought every stock in the S&P 500 and held them. No analysts. No stock picking. On August 31, 1976 he launched the First Index Investment Trust. The underwriters tried to raise $150 million. They got $11 million. Wall Street called it Bogle's Folly. $10,000 invested in that fund in 1976 is worth $2 million today. Vanguard now manages $11.6 trillion. Its average fee is 0.07 percent. The industry average is 0.44 percent. That gap has saved investors more than $1 trillion. Warren Buffett said Jack did more for American investors as a whole than any individual he had ever known. Bogle's core belief was four words. Volatility is not risk. The market drops 10 percent every year or two. It drops 20 percent every few years. It drops 50 percent once or twice in a lifetime. Those drops are not risk. They are the price of admission. The real risk is panicking when the price goes down and selling at the bottom. The real risk is paying someone 1 percent a year to pick stocks that usually lose to the index. The real risk is not being in the market at all. The man who had six heart attacks and launched a fund that Wall Street called a folly never once confused a bad day with a bad investment.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@tridentasia FTX paid him $15 million to be a spokesman, he didn't invest in there. But you're right about the irony. The man who says if it doesn't pay you cash, don't touch it, took a check from a company that had none.

Kevin O'Leary will not own a single stock that does not pay a dividend. He learned this rule when he was seven years old. His mother taught it to him at the bank. Georgette Bookalam worked at a children's clothing company in Montreal. She saved 20 percent of every paycheck. Every paycheck she put the money into two things. Large-cap dividend stocks and telecom bonds. No more than 5 percent in any single position. No more than 20 percent in any sector. She did this for 55 years. She hid the account from both of her husbands. She taught her sons the rule. She never showed them the results. When she died, the executor called O'Leary. You need to come down here. Your mother has died a very wealthy woman. Her portfolio outperformed most hedge funds. A woman at a children's clothing company beat Wall Street with two rules. Buy things that pay you cash. Never touch the principal. O'Leary built his entire investing philosophy around those two rules. He says over the last 40 years, 71 percent of the stock market's total return came from dividends. Not price appreciation. Cash. He calls his portfolio a chicken on a spit dripping cash. Everything has to generate yield, he says. The family lives off that. The charities live off that. If a stock does not send him a check, he does not own it. He founded O'Leary Funds in 2008. By 2012 it managed $1.2 billion in assets. Every position had to pass one test. Does it pay you to hold it. Then in 2021 he took $15 million from FTX to be their spokesman. A crypto exchange with no dividends. No cashflow. No yield. By November 2022 it was worth zero. The man who built a fortune on his mother's rule about never touching the principal lost $15 million on something that had no principal to begin with. The best investor he ever met never managed a fund. She managed a paycheck.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@RetiredBroker00 His mother's track record says otherwise. 55 years, two rules, no fund manager involved.

@Mama1998Jo40731 The sale was the bubble. The collar was the skill. Anyone can get lucky once, keeping $1 billion when Yahoo drops 94%. isn't luck, it's knowing exactly what you're holding.

Mark Cuban sold a company that made $22 million in revenue and lost $16 million a year. Yahoo paid $5.7 billion for it. Six months later he was the only person from that deal who kept the money. In 1995 he and Todd Wagner started AudioNet. It streamed live audio over the internet. They renamed it Broadcast.com. By 1998 it went public. By 1999 Yahoo bought it for $5.7 billion in stock. Cuban's stake was 14.6 million Yahoo shares worth $1.4 billion. But it was all stock. And he was locked in for six months. He understood two things. The stock was overvalued. And six months is a long time in a bubble. He called Goldman Sachs and built a zero-cost collar. He bought puts at $85 a share to protect the downside. He sold calls at $205 to pay for the puts. It cost him nothing. Yahoo peaked at $237 in January 2000. Then the dot-com crash hit. By 2002 the stock fell to $13. Without the collar his $1.4 billion would have become $190 million. With it he kept over $1 billion. He bought the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million in 2000. Sold the majority stake in 2023 at a $3.5 billion valuation. He started Cost Plus Drugs in 2022. Buy generic drugs at cost. Add a 15 percent markup and a $5 fee. No middlemen. Over 2,200 medications. Every one of these was something he understood cold before he spent a dollar. Then there was Uber. In 2009 Travis Kalanick offered him a $250,000 stake at a $10 million valuation. Cuban said he would only do it at $5 million. Kalanick walked. That stake would be worth $2.25 billion today. Cuban said it later on TV. I mean, I have done OK. But still. He is worth $6 billion. His most expensive lesson was a $250,000 check he never wrote.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@levifizg And that's the irony. O'Leary's rule woud've kept him out of the greatest compounders in history. The rule works, until it doesn't.

@v_nefodov Glad you got value from it.

@shevaxgod Timing wasn't lucky, he hedged the moment he could. Most people would've watched $1.4 billion ride the crash all the way down to $190 million. He build the collar instead.

@shevaxgod Appreciate it man.

Warren Buffett said he could guarantee 50 percent a year. The only condition was that you give him less money, not more. In 1999 he told Business Week: I think I could make you 50 percent a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that. He was not guessing. He had already done it. In 1950 he found a small insurance company in Omaha called National American Fire Insurance. The stock traded at $27 a share. The company had earned $29.02 per share the year before. One year of earnings was more than the entire stock price. The book value was $135. He was buying it at 20 cents on the dollar. Nobody followed the stock. Most holders had bought certificates decades earlier and forgotten about them. Buffett went door to door buying shares from people who did not know what they owned. In 1951 he found Western Insurance Securities. It had earned $29.09 per share. The stock traded between $3 and $13. He later called it the cheapest stock with the highest margin of safety he had ever seen. Between 1949 and 1954 he turned $10,000 into more than $100,000. He was in his early twenties. He bought into Sanborn Map Company in the late 1950s. The stock traded at $45 but the company's investment portfolio alone was worth $65 per share. The market was valuing the actual business at less than zero. He bought Dempster Mill Manufacturing at $15 to $30 a share when the book value was $75. He eventually owned 70 percent of the company and sold at $80. These were tiny companies. Nobody on Wall Street was looking at them. That was the entire point. From 1957 to 1969 his partnership averaged 29.5 percent per year before fees. He started with $105,100. By the time he closed it the fund held $100 million. Then the money got bigger. And the returns got smaller. He told the Wall Street Journal in 2009: with tiny sums to invest, it is extraordinary what you can find. Most of the time, big sums are one hell of an anchor. Berkshire Hathaway is now worth over $1 trillion. Buffett cannot buy a small insurance company in Omaha anymore. He needs entire railroads and energy companies just to move the needle. The man who built the greatest track record in investing history said the single biggest advantage a small investor has is the one thing he lost along the way. Size.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@recketino The best problem to have and the one nobody warns you about.

@gridbreak_ Nobody talks about borrowing $4,000 from your dad after running a hedge fund. That's the part that actually built Bridgewater, not the comeback, but the ego that had to die first.

Ray Dalio ran the largest hedge fund in the world with exactly one employee. Himself. That's what he was down to in 1982, after he went on TV and predicted a depression. He was so confident he said it publicly. The depression never came. The market did the opposite, an 18-year bull run. He lost everything. Had to fire his whole team and borrow $4,000 from his dad just to pay the bills. He called it a blow to the head with a baseball bat. Then he called it the best thing that ever happened to him. Here's why. He stopped asking "am I right" and started asking "how do I know I'm right." That one shift became the entire operating system of Bridgewater. Every opinion weighted by track record, not title. Every meeting recorded. Every disagreement pushed into the open. He built an app where employees rate each other in real time during meetings, on a scale of 1 to 10, and everyone sees every score. A 24-year-old employee, fresh out of college, once rated Dalio a 3 out of 10 in a meeting. In front of everyone. He didn't fire her. He put the rating in a TED talk and told the world. Today Bridgewater manages $92 billion. Dalio is worth $18.9 billion. The man who lost everything because he was sure he was right built an empire by making sure he'd never be that sure again.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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@verumxbt That's the move though. He didn't kill the certainty, he gave it rules. The system is just his confidence with a leash on it.

Warren Buffett spent $1.3 billion on Coca-Cola stock. Today that position pays $848 million per year in dividends. He has never sold a single share. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska. At six years old he was selling Coca-Cola bottles door to door for a few cents of profit each. At 11 he bought his first stock. Three shares of Cities Service Preferred at $38.25 each. The stock dropped to $27. His sister reminded him every day that he was losing her money. When it recovered to $40 he sold. Total profit: $5 per share. The stock later hit $202. He went to Columbia Business School. Studied under Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing. In 1956 he started the Buffett Partnership in Omaha with $100,000. Over 13 years it compounded at 31 percent annually. In 1962 he started buying shares of a failing textile company in New England. The stock was $7.50 per share. The company was called Berkshire Hathaway. He wound down the textile operations. Started buying other businesses. Insurance companies. Candy shops. Newspapers. Furniture stores. He turned a dying textile company into a holding company for everything he wanted to own. In the fall of 1988 he started buying Coca-Cola. Over the next year he spent $1.3 billion. It was the largest position Berkshire had ever taken. After multiple stock splits Berkshire now owns 400 million shares worth $35 billion. The position pays $848 million per year in dividends. That is a 65 percent annual return on the original investment from dividends alone. In August 2011 he called the CEO of Bank of America. The stock was collapsing. He offered $5 billion in preferred shares and got warrants to buy 700 million common shares at $7.14 each. The deal took one day. When he exercised the warrants in 2017 the shares were worth $17 billion. Profit on the warrants alone: $12 billion. He tells students to imagine they have a punch card with 20 slots. Every investment punches a hole. When the card is full you are done for life. He said from those 20 investments, maybe three or five would make you rich. In July 1991 Bill Gates met Buffett for the first time. Gates did not want to go. His mother had invited Buffett to a family dinner. Gates thought investing was parasitic. They talked for hours. Gates later said Buffett asked amazingly good questions nobody had ever asked him. A single share of Berkshire Hathaway that cost $7.50 in 1962 is worth $759,350 today. Forbes puts Buffett's net worth at $145 billion. The man who has been investing for 84 years did not build a $145 billion fortune by finding more opportunities than everyone else. He built it by having the discipline to ignore almost all of them.

Shevaxgod @shevaxgod

2 weeks ago

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