Author: Yuval Taylor

This article is the sixth in a ten-part series loosely based on Michael J. Mauboussin’s white paper “Thirty Years: Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors.” See “Part One: Be Numerate,” “Part Two: Understand Value,” “Part Three: Properly Assess Strategy,” “Part Four: Compare Effectively,” and “Part Five: Think Probabilistically"…

The Netflix Prize The Netflix Prize was a competition begun in 2006 to predict user ratings for films. Competitors were given ratings scrubbed of information about the users, and were challenged to find, using machine-learning methods, an algorithm based only on the raw data. Netflix provided each team with about…

This article is the fifth in a ten-part series loosely based on Michael J. Mauboussin’s white paper “Thirty Years: Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors.” See “Part One: Be Numerate,” “Part Two: Understand Value,” “Part Three: Properly Assess Strategy,” and “Part Four: Compare Effectively” for previous installments. And…

Understanding the rules of probability—how to bet—can be a valuable asset for investors. Every day I come across investors who think that regression to the mean has nothing to do with correlation, who don’t bother to think about odds, and who take wild stabs at position sizing. Until relatively recently,…

I just finished reading Alphanomics by Charles M. C. Lee and Eric So, published by a small academic press in 2015. The subtitle is The Informational Underpinnings of Market Efficiency, but that doesn’t really give a sense of the book, which essentially summarizes the last five decades of academic research…

This article is the third in a ten-part series loosely based on Michael J. Mauboussin’s white paper “Thirty Years: Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors.” See Part 1: Be Numerate, Part 2: Understand Value, and Part 3: Properly Assess Strategy for previous installments. And please keep in mind…

This article is the third in a ten-part series loosely based on Michael J. Mauboussin’s white paper “Thirty Years: Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors.” See How To Be A Great Investor, Part 1: Be Numerate and How To Be A Great Investor, Part 2: Understand Value. Please…

For me, the key to successful investing is to approach it like you would a game—a deadly serious game, but still a game. In order to win, you have to: Think in terms of probabilities, not in terms of gut instincts. Every choice you make should maximize the probability of…

This article is the second in a ten-part series loosely based on Michael J. Mauboussin’s white paper “Thirty Years: Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors.” For the first part, see How To Be A Great Investor, Part 1: Be Numerate. Please note: in this article, I’m departing from…

Let’s talk about the Container Store Group (TCS) for a moment. If you look at the current quarter’s estimate and compare it to the “actual” analysts’ figure for its EPS four quarters ago, its EPS growth rate is –25%. If you look at the latest reported quarter (GAAP EPS) over…