It´s time
The next decade won´t play by the old rules
The old rules are losing their power. The next decade will not look like the last one & most of the frameworks we grew up with will not be enough.
I grew up as a classic value investor. Ben Graham, Buffett, Munger, Klarman, Greenblatt and Later I moved closer to Peter Lynch and Stanley Druckenmiller. I studied what the best private equity people did. I learned from Mark Rowan. I took a lot from Josh Kushner and Peter Thiel.
Today the style that feels most useful is a mix of Druckenmiller and Thiel: invest, then investigate AND competition is for losers. Find the absolute category-defining companies that have almost no real competition and dominate their space. Then size them properly and stay with them.
That is not the environment I was trained in but our environment has changed.
What is different
Technological change is moving faster than anything we have lived through. AI, robotics, space infrastructure, energy systems, the speed is not linear. Most people still try to measure it with tools built for a slower world. A traditional DCF on something like SpaceX or the next layer of AI infrastructure will look ridiculous and like an error. The model can’t capture the scale if the technology actually works. That does not mean every big claim is true but it means that old valuation tools are incomplete.
Rules are also being written differently. SpaceX is a public company on the Nasdaq. 10 or 15 years ago most people would have said a company with that profile and that level of government entanglement does not belong there (ETF inclusion) in the same way. But it’s there, the listing happened & the rules flexed.
Geopolitics has the same flavor. Wars continue in Europe and the Middle East. The United States takes direct action in places like Venezuela and the public reaction is muted compared with earlier decades. Large parts of the population appear to have checked out. A fighting society at least shows attachment. An opted-out society is quieter and, in some ways, harder to read. When people stop caring about the collective rules, the people who still act can move faster.
You see the same pattern in markets and in information. Sentiment and flows now decide a lot of short-term price action. Recoveries and sell-offs happen quicker than they used to. AI trading systems and social arbitrage compress the time window. The luxury of six weeks of deep research before acting is disappearing on certain opportunities. Druckenmiller’s “invest, then investigate” becomes more relevant when the window is short.
What this means for us as investors
I am not interested in predicting every political twist.
The companies that can compound for the next 10 to 20 years will likely be the ones that sit at the center of real technological and industrial shifts the ones with durable advantages and very little true competition. SpaceX is the clearest current example in my portfolio. Amazon is another & Palantir is another. Their valuations are stretched but they operate in domains where the ceiling is still being rewritten.
Classic value hunting in small obscure names does not work anymore like it used to. It is no longer the highest probability path if your goal is large absolute wealth over a decade. The distribution of outcomes appears more skewed. A small number of category-defining companies can capture outsized value while everything else fights for scraps.
That is why I simplified. I sold the names that did not meet the bar and concentrated into the ones I believe can still multiply from here. When sentiment creates a clear dislocation (like Palantir) I am willing to act faster than I would have five years ago.
The honest part
None of this is comfortable if you were trained the old way. Expanding your imagination enough to hold the possibility of a multi-trillion-dollar SpaceX while still demanding evidence is extremely hard & psychologically challenging. Holding two opposing ideas at once: extreme ambition & disciplined capital allocation, is the actual skill.
Most people will keep using the old maps. Some will call every big outcome impossible until it is obvious. A smaller group will try to update their thinking in real time & change/ adapt when the facts/ environment change.
I am in the second group. The rules of yesterday are not automatically the rules of tomorrow. The data, the speed of technological change and the way power and information now move all point in the same direction: the next decade will not be a clean continuation of the last one.
Adapt or accept lower odds. That is the practical conclusion for an investor.
Thanks for reading!
FJ
btw this is our current portfolio performance as of today for those who are interested:
Positions & avg. entry
Oscar Health, Ticker OSCR, avg. entry $13.19, current ~$27.67, +109.8%
Amazon, Ticker AMZN, avg. entry $247.55 current ~$278.09, +12.3%
Natera, Ticker NTRA, avg. entry $210.00, current ~$318.35, +51.6%
SpaceX, Ticker SPCX, avg. entry $123, current ~$138.74, +12.8%
Palantir, Ticker PLTR, avg. entry $133, current ~$175.23, +31.8%
Recursion, Ticker RXRX, avg. entry $3, current ~$3.22, +7.3%
The order still reflects the original portfolio weight.