Draco
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http://espn.go.com/pdf/2016/0406/nba_hinkie_redact.pdf
Long read but has some interesting parts
"A contrarian mindset
This one is tricky, and getting more so in a league as healthy and popular as the NBA that is covered
by beat writers, columnists, bloggers, commentators, and fans minute-to-minute. If you want to have real
success you have to very often be willing to do something different from the herd.
A few examples might help. Step away from basketball and imagine for a moment this is investment
management, and your job is to take your client’s money and make it grow. It’s January 1, 2015 and the
S&P 500 is $171.60, exactly the same price it has been since January 1, 1985. No fluctuation up or down.
Flat every single day. And your job for every day of the past 30 years is to make money for your clients by
investing. What would you do?
In the NBA, that’s wins. The same 82 games are up for grabs every year for every team. Just like in
1985 (or before). To get more wins, you’re going to have to take them from someone else. Wins are a zero-
growth industry (how many of you regularly choose to invest in those?), and the only way up is to steal share
from your competitors. You will have to do something different. You will have to be contrarian.
Howard Marks describes this as a necessary condition of great performance: you have to be non-
consensus and right. Both. That means you have to find some way to have a differentiated viewpoint from
the masses. And it needs to be right. Anything less won’t work.
But this is difficult, emotionally and intellectually. Seth Klarman talks about the comfort of
consensus. It’s much more comfortable to have people generally agreeing with you. By definition, those
opportunities in a constrained environment winnow away with each person that agrees with you, though."
Long read but has some interesting parts
"A contrarian mindset
This one is tricky, and getting more so in a league as healthy and popular as the NBA that is covered
by beat writers, columnists, bloggers, commentators, and fans minute-to-minute. If you want to have real
success you have to very often be willing to do something different from the herd.
A few examples might help. Step away from basketball and imagine for a moment this is investment
management, and your job is to take your client’s money and make it grow. It’s January 1, 2015 and the
S&P 500 is $171.60, exactly the same price it has been since January 1, 1985. No fluctuation up or down.
Flat every single day. And your job for every day of the past 30 years is to make money for your clients by
investing. What would you do?
In the NBA, that’s wins. The same 82 games are up for grabs every year for every team. Just like in
1985 (or before). To get more wins, you’re going to have to take them from someone else. Wins are a zero-
growth industry (how many of you regularly choose to invest in those?), and the only way up is to steal share
from your competitors. You will have to do something different. You will have to be contrarian.
Howard Marks describes this as a necessary condition of great performance: you have to be non-
consensus and right. Both. That means you have to find some way to have a differentiated viewpoint from
the masses. And it needs to be right. Anything less won’t work.
But this is difficult, emotionally and intellectually. Seth Klarman talks about the comfort of
consensus. It’s much more comfortable to have people generally agreeing with you. By definition, those
opportunities in a constrained environment winnow away with each person that agrees with you, though."
