Seth Klarman

Uh, Adi has always made me a better operator, but even now, I would rather hire great operators than do it myself because it's not my strong suit.

But my, my favorite book of all time is, um, uh, Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman.

Um, I, um, I own a copy of that book.

It, it, I don't know if you've heard of it before, but basically there were 5,000 published.

My start in this business from a professional perspective, I graduated from college in 2011.

And it's funny in hindsight, if you go back and look at articles in 2011, 2012, not to single anybody out, but there's a particular quote from Seth Klarman that I'm thinking of where he effectively said, He thinks it's likely that equities will deliver zero return over the next decade.

That was a common sentiment in that period in terms of, okay, we've had a run out of GFC, but that juice has been squeezed.

And now we're in 2011, 2012, and people are talking about bubbles again.

He talked about the margin of safety and he talked about how critical it was for investors to have a margin of safety.

Now, Seth Klarman, of course, made this concept into a concept that caught on.

And in fact, his book is almost legendary in its reach.

Legendary partly because it's so widely tracked by value investors and also legendary because it's so difficult to get.

In Warren Buffett's 1996 letter to shareholders at Berkshire Hathaway, he explicitly distinguished intelligent investing from complexity and argued that investors need to be able to evaluate selected businesses within their own circle of competence.

So whether we're talking about Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Benjamin Graham, Howard Marks, Terry Smith, Joel Greenblatt, Seth Klarman, John Templeton, even Monish Pabrai, their approaches aren't identical.

Far from it.

They've bought different types of companies.

And they just kinda don't get this argument where it was, like, something that just came, like, from the start 10, 12 years ago intuitively to me.

And I think it's like how you hear investors, like contrarian investors like Seth Klarman and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger talk about how it's like, it's, it's almost like a genetic trait.

You know? It's just like some people cannot, cannot comprehend it this way.

I don't know why.

And I talk about this all the time.

I'm reading the likes of Buffett, Munger, Carey, Peter Lynch, Joel Greenblatt, Seth Klarman, Howard Marks.

I read these guys' books.

I study them.

We really are.

We're dissecting the latest Q2 2026 Form 13-F filing for Seth Klarman's Val Post Group.

Yeah.

So we're looking at a $5.41 billion portfolio here.

Right.

OK, toolkit assembled.

Let's get into the mind of Seth Klarman, because if you read his legendary book, Margin of Safety, you quickly realize his entire worldview is built on, well, absolute preservation.

Yeah.