Reflections on 2025

To my subscribers: I imagine most of you signed up because you like reading company analysis. I regret that, on that front, the field remains barren. Work makes it tricky for me to write too specifically, so I can’t promise to put anything out. Still, I enjoy writing. In that vein, this website will cover a wide range of topics. These may be related to investing theory or specifics. They will also be more abstract: politics, philosophy, competition. I will use it as a place to collate my thoughts. Given the change of direction, I have manually unsubscribed all of you immediately following the publication of this post. You are, of course, welcome to subscribe again, but I thought it would be polite given the change in emphasis.

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I have learnt a lot this year. I learn a lot every year and unlearn many things I thought I had learnt in prior years. I rather like this process.

I love the idea that one should always cringe a little at what one wrote a few years ago and cringe a lot if one goes back further. That embarrassment means you’re still discovering things and refining the way you see the world.

So, with the knowledge that I’ll read this in a few years and tut at my naivety, here are five things I learnt in 2025.

Exposure is underrated

I often reflect on the fact that I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was 15, but I knew with absolute certainty when I was 19.

Between those two ages, I saw a small advert in the paper for a pre-University placement at Deutsche Bank. I liked economics, but no one in my family worked in finance. I didn’t even know anyone who worked in London. It was totally outside my frame of reference.

It took very little time at that job to realise that what I loved – games, markets, deep reading, taking risk – meant the world of investment was perfect for me.

But this was an enormous stroke of luck. I saw the advert, I applied for it, and I was lucky enough to bamboozle the interviewers. I’ve kept getting luckier since.

In most parallel universes, I went off to study, blissfully unaware of this world. Maybe I ended up coming to it later. Maybe I didn’t. Life is path-dependent, and early decisions snowball unpredictably.

The most impactful way to help people – particularly young people – is to show them a world they haven’t yet seen. Our aspirations reflect those around us and the people we’ve met.

Lots of people labour under the hope that the world will reward the more intelligent, talented or harder working. They’re wrong. These things are often gating factors. You need to be clever, yes: but beyond that, in the great character sheet of life, the real inequality might be whether or not you get the exposure which provides a framework for your ambitions.

We are dangerously obsessed with minimising uncertainty

Data is proliferating, and we hold the means to analyse, predict and optimise at a scale impossible to imagine a few decades ago. The trouble many measured people have is knowing when to stop analysing and start acting. It is an ongoing challenge in my own life.

I am, constitutionally, an optimiser. I wrestled with crippling decision paralysis when buying a car because I wanted to analyse every metric I could. The decision had to be perfect. That’s forgivable with a car – but when I also struggled to buy an airfryer, it became farcical. The easiest decision is no decision, but no decision is usually the wrong decision.

My challenges can be seen across domains, too, which is why I am so confident there is truth in it.

It is self-evident our political bureaucracy has also veered in this direction. The proliferation of loud and visible opinions has warped incentives. Endlessly seeking safe consensus among special interest groups has entrenched a sclerotic state, where nothing of note can happen.

I also see it in boardrooms. In years past, businesses were run by the weird and wonderful. They cultivated a sense of buccaneering risk-taking – the desire to shoot for the stars. West Coast America still has this, and I think its ability to stare risk in the face is precisely why it is doing so well.

Nowadays, businesses are:

• Managed by CEOs who are typically employees, not founders
• … supervised by non-owner boards primarily motivated by reputation maintenance
• … who meet investors whose overwhelming objective is to not look stupid and not get fired

The rational decision is thus to contain risk. To tweak. Make minor incremental changes. Drive for middle-ground consensus. Above all, make sure you are eminently explainable and rational and sensible.

Yet in minimising uncertainty, we are intensifying risk. This is a paradox investors are intimately familiar with. Sticking cash in a bank account for your entire working life makes you highly certain it’ll be there at the end. But there’s an enormous risk as to whether the cash will be sufficient for you to exist beyond the breadline.

In a world full of accountants, we need more pirates. When risk is undersupplied, the danger is in being too safe.

Accountability is key

I’ve been trying to figure out what makes the most effective leader I know so effective. It can be distilled into one concept: demanding accountability. Clear ownership, explicitly high standards and the sense that there is nowhere to hide.

This cascades down an organisation. The fish rots from its head, but it can also prosper from it. A leader who demands accountability from her direct reports and does not accept sloppy excuses forces those people to not accept sloppy excuses themselves. At every level, the buck stops.

Most viscerally, I remember the feeling of trying to bullshit someone who has internalised this. The trick on the receiving end of bullshit, as I now understand it, is to not give up – to not do the English thing, in taking your foot off the gas when you can see your counterpart squirming. That instinct makes things comfortable in the short-term but is corrosive in the long-term.

Ok, so you’re waiting on the figures? Do you know why they haven’t responded? Is there anything else you could have done in the meantime? How did you follow-up when things weren’t moving? How long have you been waiting on this? Did you give them everything they needed quickly enough in the first instance? Are you saying we need to change partners, if they are this slow? What’s your alternative to the current state of affairs? Can you see why this makes my onward steps challenging?

Nothing about this is domineering or adversarial, although it is uncomfortable. The beauty, it seems to me, is that you typically only need to do it once. When you’ve developed a reputation for being unbullshittable, the ‘default option’ for everyone around you becomes to simply get things done.

Adversity is the only reliable filter for skill

You learn very little about people and businesses when conditions are easy, because success in a favourable environment is ambiguous. It might be skill, but it might just be a fair wind.

This is most obvious in investment management. If Cathie Wood, the tech investor, makes 40% in a year with the NASDAQ up 20%, have you learnt anything about her talent? It might be that she’s the reincarnation of Warren Buffett. Or, she might just be incredibly leveraged to one particular set of conditions. It’s impossible to disentangle the two, and much of the business media world is built on creating heroic narratives which ignore this fact.

If, on the other hand, a manager makes 5% within a sub-market down 15%, that tells you something much more interesting. The outcome is far less likely to be random, and much more reflective of actual skill.

You see this in football. The best footballers in the world often disappoint after leaving a club where they dominated. We tend to attribute exceptional performance to individual genius, stripping away the context of where they flourished. The club might have been built around them, the tactics particularly suiting them, or the rest of the team might have complemented their talents.

The same logic applies inside businesses. If you want a higher hit rate in identifying talented salespeople, don’t start with the best performers in the best division: the unit with the strongest brand, the most marketing support, and the product which flies off the shelves. They’ve had an easy life.

Find the guy who’s grinding out a creditable performance selling the tired, ten-year-old product that nobody really wants anymore. There’s your grafter. It’s success in the face of adversity.

None of this is to say that success in good times is meaningless – it’s just less informative. Sure, if you’re searching for true greatness, you’ll probably still find the very best people in the very best environments. Geniuses exist on a separate plane and succeed regardless of conditions.

But if you want undervalued talent, the answer is easy. Look in the unsexy places other people don’t.

Live to minimise your regrets

I will finish with the most clichéd section, because it bears repeating. Having kids has made me look back wistfully.

Always write. Always communicate. And always express your emotion – not in a performative way, but a heartfelt one. We all self-censor endlessly, out of fear of looking stupid or ill-informed. I think there’s a wisdom that comes in realising everyone else is grasping in the same way. We all sit one phone call or one stupid question away from deeper connection because the first step feels so off-putting.

I can think of hardly anything I regret saying or doing in my life, and many things I regret not saying or doing. And this is not just rose-tinted hindsight bias. Most of us are wired to under-react in a predictable way. This is a structural flaw.

The thread that runs through much of this note is that we all tend to be risk averse, status quo loving and fear uncertainty – particularly short-term uncertainty with an unknown pay off. This is why we don’t tell people we love them, we maintain a predictable but arm’s length facade with our friends, and we stay in jobs to avoid the fear of a new situation.

Most of us are biased toward inaction. That desire to maintain the current state of affairs is a good trait, evolutionarily. In a world where survival was far from guaranteed, it’s a super baseline. But the opportunity cost of it in the modern world is enormous.

Be the catalyst! Tell your friends why they’re so important to you. Write a letter to someone you love. Challenge things you would’ve let slip in search of an easy life.

And grasp 2026!