Author of The Owner's Memo
Joined April 2011
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Tim Isgro retweeted
I heard a fascinating story about human behaviour today.
A tour guide at a historic castle was getting very high ratings from tourists.
They went to see what he was doing differently.
On several of the rooms he had used the red velvet ropes to block the doors.
These were normally used when the rooms were being repaired or cleaned. He had put them up at the beginning of each day.
During g the tour he would look around and say to the group “would you like to have a quick look in here?” And they would say yes in hushed tones.
He would ceremoniously unclip the rope and let them through into the room. A room that was always a normal part of every tour.
This simple little bit of theatre made people love the tour that much more.
Humans love what we can’t have.
Tim Isgro retweeted
Larry David is one of America’s unlikeliest icons, and one of history’s purest founders.
In our latest profile, Correspondent-at-Large @blakejharrisNYC—who spent six years talking to Larry for his new book—explains what makes Larry so special, and why it took him so long to break through.
Larry was a mediocre student with a middling social life. His first two jobs—selling bras and driving cabs—ended quickly. At 25, he called his mother from a hotel room: “Ma, nothing good is ever gonna happen to me.” She urged him to become a mailman.
Soon after, he found what he thought would be his calling: stand-up comedy. His material was funny, but he rarely finished a set. If somebody in the audience looked at their watch, or didn’t laugh when he thought they should, Larry stormed off.
14 years later, aged 39, he got a break. He was asked to write his first sitcom script for a big new Showtime series. Only an eighth of what he wrote survived the edit, but the episode was still his. He was broke, and the writing credit could have sparked his career. But Larry refused to put his name on it.
Even with Seinfeld, Larry nearly hit self-destruct. The pilot performed worse than almost any other show NBC had ever tested. Still, the network ordered four episodes, one of the smallest orders in TV history. Larry barely made it through them.
When the studio installed a showrunner to oversee the scripts, Larry endured the man’s notes, then said “NO. I’m not doing one thing,” and walked out. In the summer of 1991, with the show finally starting to work, NBC wanted Jerry and Elaine to get married and have a baby. Larry quit in the parking lot and wished everyone good luck. Jerry stood with Larry, and NBC caved.
Larry’s friend and comedian Bill Scheft put it this way: “He doesn’t [act this way now] because he has fuck-you money. It’s the opposite. He has the fuck-you money because he’s always acted this way.”
Read the full profile by Blake, author of Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David.
colossus.com/article/many-fa…
Tim Isgro retweeted
(1/6) From @GoogleDeepmind’s AlphaGo to AlphaZero, we saw machines find moves that reached beyond what we’d imagined for them. No one taught them those strategies. They emerged from reinforcement learning: playing, failing, and trying again under a single binary task reward for success or failure. Inspired by them, we couldn’t help but wonder: what might a robot discover if we gave it that same freedom to learn?
That question led us to AlphaNIST. Starting tabula rasa, with that same binary reward plus only a simple control cost, a single policy solves all 20 @NIST assembly tasks at a 98.2% success rate in simulation. More surprising still, AlphaNIST can complete 10 different tasks in a row, receiving that reward only once, after all 10 are done.
Just as AlphaGo’s strategies surprised its creators, AlphaNIST discovered dexterous strategies we couldn’t have come up with ourselves.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.13354
Website: alpha-nist.github.io
Tim Isgro retweeted
An excerpt from one of my favorite 9/11 articles. May we be people who prioritize what really matters, regardless of the circumstances.
Tim Isgro retweeted
I imagine one of the more dangerous points in life is when you achieve a high level of success doing something you were never really meant to do.
Don’t mistake being exceptionally good at something (perhaps something you never consciously chose) for living your true purpose.
Tim Isgro retweeted
What a lot of people don’t understand about design is that the hardest part can be completely invisible, yet constantly draining.
Maybe all you see in the end is a simple layout, and you wonder why it took five hours. But during those five hours, the designer was sitting at their desk the entire time, struggling, testing, going back to square one, starting again, adjusting things inch by inch.
Sometimes an entire day goes by and it looks like nothing has been produced. But in reality, the designer has already killed five or six different directions in their head, and every single one of them took real mental energy.
People often think design is just a sudden idea that comes to you in a second. But more often than not, you have to think intensely and continuously for days and days before you arrive at that one seemingly effortless moment.
Anyway, enough talking. Back to thinking.
Tim Isgro retweeted
Fable says today is “plausibly the most significant single day in the history of mathematics”
An internal version of Astra, @OpenAI’s next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.
We believe it will be a major step for scientific reasoning. openai.com/index/ten-advance…
Tim Isgro retweeted
I have been thinking a lot lately about how similar these two quotes are that run around in my head.
“I profoundly believe that 50 through 70 are the peak performance years for professional investors.” - Gavin Baker
“I have the answers to the test now. You can’t surprise me on defense. I’ve seen it all. I’ve processed 261 games, I’ve played them all. It’s an incredibly hard sport, but because the processes are right and are in place, for anyone with experience in their job, it’s not as hard as it used to be. There was a time when quarterbacking was really hard for me because you didn’t know what to do. Now I really know what to do, I don’t want to stop now. This is when it’s really enjoyable to go out.” - Tom Brady
Tim Isgro retweeted
We can spend our lives looking for meaning, achievement, and happiness on the outside. We will never find it.
Many of us spend years searching for answers in the wrong places. We look to other people for approval. We look to organizations for validation. We look to money, titles, and accomplishments to tell us that we are doing well and living a good life.
Here is the simple truth: no one can tell you what is meaningful for you but you. No one can define real achievement for you but you. And no one can make you happy but you.
This does not mean other people do not matter. They do. But the most important questions in life cannot be answered by your boss, your friends, your family, or society. They can only be answered by you.
If you want a meaningful life, decide what matters to you. If you want to feel successful, define achievement on your terms. If you want to be happy, take responsibility for your happiness.
Look for the answers to the most important questions inside yourself.
Life is good.
Marshall
Tim Isgro retweeted
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.
stratechery.com/2026/whos-af…
Tim Isgro retweeted
Same here.
Eventually, LLM’s will drop the manufactured tone and be able to mimic good communication more and more. So, I try to stick with my writing style and have faith that readers know I’m a real human. It also helps to understand that there will always be people who mindlessly cry “slop” without having done any work themselves. Trying to eliminate any objections to my writing is a losing game.
Tim Isgro retweeted
"There are many reasons that ocers might sell. They may need the money to pay their children’s tuition or to buy a new house or to satisfy a debt. They may have decided to diversify into other stocks. But there’s only one reason that insiders buy: They think the stock price is undervalued and will eventually go up."
- Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street
Tim Isgro retweeted
I was 26 years old when Peter Lynch handed me this.
April 28, 1983. I was the auto and retail analyst at Fidelity.
Peter was in his prime, on his way to building the greatest mutual fund track record in history:
29.2% annual returns for 13 YEARS STRAIGHT, growing Magellan from $18 million to $14 billion. The Babe Ruth of investing.
I'm looking at the principles he had typed up on a single sheet of paper that I've kept in my files for 42 years and I believe now is the perfect time to revisit them again.
Let me walk you through a few:
Rule 1B: "You need an edge to make money. Do not rely on a combination of hope and good luck."
Today's retail investor has no edge. He has Reddit, Robinhood, zero-DTE options and a TikTok algorithm pushing him into whatever stock just ripped 200% the day before.
That's hope and good luck wearing a fancy costume.
Rule 1E: "Purchase stocks like one would purchase a business."
Tesla trades at over 360 times earnings on a business deteriorating in real time, Oracle has $206 billion in liabilities against $39 billion in equity, MicroStrategy is a leveraged Bitcoin holding company priced like a software firm, and don't even get me started on SpaceX, that piece of garbage you'll be able to trade tomorrow...
Nobody in their right mind would buy these as actual businesses. They buy them as stories, narratives, and lottery tickets.
Peter would have called it the same way I do - these are not investments. They are speculations. GAMBLING.
Rule 1G: "Study the balance sheet and cash flow statement."
The hyperscalers spent over $380 billion on AI capex in 2025. Goldman says the measurable productivity payoff does not arrive until 2027 at the earliest.
Oracle just reported NEGATIVE $23.7 billion in free cash flow for fiscal 2026 while borrowing at a pace that would make a leveraged buyout firm nervous. The cash flow statements are screaming but nobody is reading them.
Rule 1I: "Avoid the long shot."
This one cuts the deepest.
The entire market has become a long shot.
OpenAI is projected to post roughly $74 billion in operating losses in 2028 ALONE while priced for transformation tomorrow. Bitcoin treasury companies are multiplying off thin air.
The retail investor of 2026 is making one long-shot bet after another and calling it a portfolio.
Rule 3A: "When the fundamentals change, sell your mistakes."
Tesla's fundamentals have changed.
California registrations are down 24% year over year and inventory days went from 10 to 27. Musk himself admitted on the last earnings call that Hardware 3 cannot achieve unsupervised FSD, breaking a promise made to 4 million customers.
The fundamentals have screamed change. But the stock is still at $385.
The mistakes are not being sold. They are literally being doubled down on with leverage.
Rule 3I: "A 30-50% profit in 12 months is great. Mediocre in three years."
Today's retail crowd expects 30-50% in a WEEK. Then they wonder why they get wiped out the second the hype stops.
And my favorite - Rule 3J: "Develop your own style and stick to it."
That is the entire game right there.
I developed mine sitting across the hall from Peter Lynch in 1983, watching him work, reading his notes, getting my own research handed back to me covered in his pencil marks. Then in 1984, my first full year managing money, I ran the #1 mutual fund in America. The Fidelity Overseas Fund was top 2 for the next six years running.
I did not get there by chasing narratives. I got there by following the sheet of paper you are looking at right now.
42 years later, this single page contains more wisdom than every Fintwit thread, CNBC segment, and Wall Street price target combined.
Peter retired in 1990 with the greatest mutual fund record in history. Then he sat down and wrote books explaining exactly how he did it.
Only a few "investors" these days read them.
And almost nobody is reading the balance sheets, the cash flow statements, or studying actual businesses today either.
They are chasing AI, crypto, and whatever pumped yesterday.
The wisdom on this page is timeless and it's more important than ever.
