Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

"Super Investors"

Chris Davis: The Best Results Come From A Combination Of Value & Growth​


In his recent Semi-Annual Review 2021, Chris Davis discussed his strategy of selecting a few businesses that combine the best characteristics of both value and growth to achieve the best results. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Our ability to take advantage of this dispersion derives from our willingness to be highly selective. Selectivity means that we invest in fewer than one out of every 15 companies included in the S&P 500 Index. Just as with the best universities or best companies, the ability to select from a large pool of applicants creates the opportunity to choose only the most exceptional candidates and reject those that are average or worse. Our research efforts comb through hundreds of potential investments, seeking those whose business and financial characteristics can turn long-term investments into compounding machines.

In particular, we look for durable, growing businesses that can be purchased at attractive valuations and reject businesses that generate low returns, are stagnant, overvalued, overleveraged or competitively disadvantaged. While funds that passively mirror the S&P 500 Index are forced to invest in all companies, including those that we view as significantly overvalued or competitively challenged, our selective approach allows us to reject such companies. In this environment of wide dispersions, the ability to selectively reject certain companies and sectors from our portfolio may prove just as valuable as the ability to selectively invest in others.

While the growth/value categorization discussed above is helpful in illustrating both mania and opportunity, the best way to build wealth is by finding those select few businesses that combine the best characteristics of both categories. After all, categories do not build wealth. Nor do average businesses. Instead, generational wealth is built by investing in those select few businesses that combine durable and resilient growth with attractive valuations.

As can be seen in the adjacent table [below], by being extremely selective, we have built a portfolio that has the best of both growth and value. While the earnings of our portfolio companies have grown approximately 3% per year faster than average, they can currently be purchased at a 36% discount to the average. We consider this a value investor’s dream, as companies that grow profitably over time are more valuable than companies that don’t.

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To find such an attractive combination, our research goes beyond simplistic categories to identify growth businesses with attractive valuations, as well as value businesses with attractive growth.

You can read the entire review here:
Chris Davis: Semi-Annual Review 2021
 

Steve Cohen on Markets, Risk, and the Best Opportunities​


When Steve Cohen speaks, Wall Street listens. At a recent Goldman Sachs event, the hedge fund titan offered a rare look into his mindset. And while the times have changed, Cohen’s edge comes down to timeless principles — straight from the man himself.

“My interest in the markets started really young,” Cohen explained. “I had grandparents that used to talk about stocks they owned… I started hanging out in a brokerage firm in my hometown.” That early exposure evolved quickly. “I used to want to stay home from school and watch the tape… I learned to watch the tape. Now the world’s different today… essentially what it really was, was pattern recognition.”

That skill launched his career. “I was lucky enough to be hired by a local brokerage firm when I was 21… I was able to buy stocks, and I said, why am I hedging? Because I could sell it higher the next day.” He added, “I would never, ever allow anybody in my firm at that age to do that.”

Cohen’s investment philosophy has evolved. “There was so much more alpha 30 years ago… we used to take so much risk… But today we run completely differently. We’re much more conservative.” Why? “Now it’s much more competitive.”

As markets matured, adaptability became essential. “Most of the people I was either hired or competing against in the nineties are not in business today. Because they didn’t adapt… you’ve got to be in a constant state of learning.”

On today’s landscape, Cohen is clear: “We’re all somewhat headline-driven right now, which is a hard way to run money.” He’s cautious. “We expect slowing growth… even in ’26, we only expect growth in, say, the 1.5% range… I’m somewhat concerned on a short-term basis.”

Still, there are bright spots — especially AI. “You could already start hearing about the margin benefits that companies are going to accrue from implementing these tools… This is a technology cycle that’s probably going to be long-lasting, have duration, and going to have a massive effect on how we live our lives today.”

For investors, that means opportunity. “You can express these bets in all the big names… They’re not expensive… probably the winners.”

He’s also betting on private credit. “I think there’s a real opportunity there, a huge TAM… I’m really excited about that possibility too.”

Ultimately, Cohen’s focus is on people. “Trying to figure out what’s going on in people’s minds is really tough… So I think, you’ve got to ask… If I can create solutions to their problems… I’m way ahead of the game.”

At 69, Cohen isn’t slowing down. But he’s clear about one thing: “There is absolutely no shot” he returns to trading. “Been there, done that… The firm benefits so much more by me being free to have these conversations.”

You can watch the entire interview here:

 
Financial independence is the end goal many investors dream of – the freedom to live life on your own terms.

Whether it’s buying a home, taking time off or travelling the world, reaching that point means having the flexibility to choose how you spend your time and money. But in a world where the cost of living keeps rising, financial independence can feel harder to achieve than ever.

In this piece, we meet three young investors using ETFs as a core part of their strategy to get there.

Please note these examples are provided for illustrative purposes only and is not a recommendation to adopt any investment strategy. It doesn’t take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs, so you should consider its appropriateness taking into account such factors, and consider seeking financial advice.

The PhD graduate who believes investing really isn’t rocket science​



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Source: Supplied

Like many young investors, Will’s investing journey started during the COVID pandemic when he was looking for something to do with his money.

“I read every book I could get my hands on about passive investing,” he said.

After a few reads, he realised this was something he wanted to do. By then, he had also worked out what kind of strategy he wanted to employ.

“It’s just time in the market. Invest in the index. It really is not rocket science. It’s super simple, and the stats show you that you will likely outperform the active investor.”

When he began his investing journey, Will was a PhD student. He says his scientific background gave him the confidence to back a data-driven approach.

“For someone with a science background, you’re going to look at historical data. You’re going to run numbers; you’re going to look at probabilities. And when I view investing through that lens, and especially by focusing on the passive broad based market index funding strategies, the outcome in my mind becomes quite clear. That’s what gave me the comfort I needed to take the approach I did,” he added.

Will’s approach hasn’t changed since. He runs what he calls an “extremely boring” core through Betashares Direct, combining a broad market Australian shares ETF with a broad market US shares ETF.

When all is said and done, Will wants to achieve financial security in the long term. For him, that means investing enough to generate an income.

“Financial security, at its extreme, effectively means that whatever income you earn now through your job could become secondary to the income you receive through your share portfolio. When you achieve that, a whole new world opens,” Will said.

The investor looking for a ‘hack’ to home ownership​

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Source: Supplied

Amy’s idea of financial independence is simple and single-minded – she wants her investments to help her save for a house deposit.

“Ideally, I don’t want to rent forever and pay someone else’s mortgage off,” Amy said.

While she doesn’t have a specific timeline, she is sure about what she wants her future home to represent.

“I’ve moved around a lot, so I suppose for me it would be a ‘settling down’ moment when I purchase a home. I’m hoping my investments now will add a little more capital to what I’ve got.”

To help achieve this goal, Amy owns several Betashares ETFs including Australian and global shares exposures. One of the ETFs she is particularly excited about is HACK Global Cybersecurity ETF .

“I am in the energy sector, and I know there’s a lot of investment from the energy sector into the companies held in HACK’s portfolio,” she said. “A lot of businesses have recognised that they can’t afford a cyber hack and that’s the reality.”

The other way Amy is seeking to achieve her goal is to be a disciplined saver. Taking a leaf from her Mum’s book, she started her own 100 day investing challenge.

“On day one, you put in $1. On day two, you put $2. On day three, you put $3. By the time you get to day 100, you would have saved $5,050,” she noted. “When I was adding $37, I was thinking that it’s just $37. I can survive without $37 today.”

“I think of it like 21st century Dollarmites.”

The DCA investor with just 3 ETFs in his arsenal​

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Source: Supplied

Victor’s investing journey started as a teenager, trading individual shares while learning the ropes through online forums. Now a few years older, he’s shifted to ETFs over single stock picking.

“It’s just ‘set and forget’ and makes sure that you are going to reach your goal. It also means you’re not required to have a second job analysing the market,” he said.

He currently holds a few Betashares ETFs: the A200 Australia 200 ETF and BGBL Global Shares ETF . He has since added an emerging markets ETF to his portfolio.

Victor thinks it is useful to have “at least some exposure” to emerging markets.

Victor’s approach has also evolved over time. He now dollar cost averages his contributions into just three ETFs, adjusting weightings as needed, with no current plans to expand his portfolio.

“I really believe in the beauty of keeping a very simple portfolio,” he said.

Victor’s big dream is like Will’s – to earn enough from investing to choose how much he works.

“It’s not as important to me to retire early but financial independence is very important. Building up a comfortable nest egg gives you a lot more options.”

Written By Hans Lee

Hans Lee​

Hans is the Senior Finance Writer at Betashares. He focuses primarily on the retail edition of its Weekly Insights newsletter. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at Livewire Markets. His other previous professional experience includes stints at Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Australian. He has a double degree in economics and journalism and is a first-generation Filipino-Chinese Australian.

Individual investor and Investment ideas

18 June 2025
 

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Serial acquirers have historically proven to be fascinating from a strategic business perspective. These acquirers exist in many shapes and forms and follow different strategies. The most common approach is to acquire private companies, integrate them into their portfolio, and reallocate resources to maximize value. In this article, we explore the value-creation objectives of these companies and present a list of 100 of the most eminent serial acquirers worldwide.

Key Insights

  • The typical target: Serial acquirers generally target small, niche, and family-owned businesses.
  • Autonomy maintained: By operating under a decentralized organizational structure serial acquirers usually attempt to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit of the acquired companies.
  • Synergy creation: An additional aspect of value creation in serial acquirers is often achieved through synergies across the acquired companies by operational guidance and integration into the parent company’s network.

Why Serial Acquirers Acquire?​

The definition of a serial acquirer is a company that integrates private market acquisitions as a core component of its strategy (to drive long-term growth and increase shareholder value). These companies typically target smaller, niche businesses that often are family-owned. The targeted company might have solid financials and strong organic growth but may lack sufficient cash flow to pursue long-term strategies to reach its long-term objectives.

To maximize the potential of the acquired company, serial acquirers generally operate under a decentralized organizational structure. This allows acquired companies to maintain customer relationships and manage operations independently. The autonomy preserves the entrepreneurial spirit of these businesses while leveraging the financial strength of the parent company.

While capital may be the primary value driver in enhancing long-term value in an acquisition, opportunities for synergy creation also exist within the serial acquirer's portfolio companies. Mainly if the acquirer is a specialist rather than a generalist. The extensive expertise of these acquirers can help streamline operations, guiding efficiency and performance. Additionally, integrating parts of the acquired company into larger networks across the portfolio may enhance collaboration and resource sharing.

After being acquired, the cash flows from the acquired companies are pooled together and reinvested into further acquisitions. This creates a cycle of compounding growth, with the usual ultimate goal of generating attractive returns for shareholders. The value creation the serial acquirer hopes to achieve can be described as 1+1+1+1=5.

Further reading: The Three Cornerstones of Serial Acquirer Success

Our List of 100 Serial Acquirers​

While a serial acquirer’s focus may vary widely depending on their target preferences, the core motives remain the same: driving long-term growth and enhancing shareholder value. Across the globe, numerous serial acquirers have mastered this approach, achieving impressive success. Some may not be immediately recognized as serial acquirers – as acquisitions are just one part of their broader strategy – while others are clearly defined by a focused strategy of serial acquisitions.

Canada​

Denmark​

France​

Germany​


Italy​

Japan​

Norway​

Poland​

Sweden​

Switzerland​

United Kingdom​

United States​


Author: Philip Svensson
Reviewed by: Peter Westberg
Updated 14 May 2025
 

Robert G. Hagstrom: Darwinian Investing and Multidisciplinary Wisdom


Interview host: Kasper Karlsson
Reviewed by: Peter Westberg
Updated 8 May 2025

Robert G. Hagstrom is a name synonymous with thoughtful, multidisciplinary investing. As the author of The Warren Buffett Way, Investing: The Last Liberal Art, and other influential works, Hagstrom has long been a bridge between essential fundamentals and the broader intellectual frameworks that underpin successful investing.

In this conversation, we discover the ideas that have shaped his thinking – from Mortimer Adler's principles on reading to lessons drawn from working alongside Bill Miller, one of the most innovative investors of our time. He discusses the importance of a latticework approach to understanding the world, challenges conventional definitions of value, and explores how dynamic, biology-inspired frameworks can better explain long-term market developments.

Hi Robert, you've said that you didn't truly know how to read until later in life, and recommended Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book, for anyone wanting to read in a way that goes beyond simply “getting through” the words. What did the book teach you about the art of reading?

Before Adler's book, I read every non-fiction book the same. I want to emphasize that my remarks here pertain to non-fiction books, not fictional books that are read for pleasure. One day, I scanned my library shelves looking for a book and it dawned on me that I had read a great deal of books, many of which didn't deserve the hours needed to complete.
Adler's How to Read a Book helped me appreciate that not every book deserves equal treatment. Some are worthwhile, others are not. Before allocating your valuable time to reading a book, Adler provides readers with a three-step process that begins with systematically skimming – taking a quick glance at the table of contents, preface, and bibliography to see if there is anything new or interesting.
If the decision is to proceed, next comes superficial reading which is a kind of speed-reading process to move through the book as quickly as possible. At the end of superficial reading, you then can decide whether, or not, the book deserves a deeper treatment, called analytical reading. If so, you again start reading the book, but this time more slowly, with a notebook nearby to write your thoughts and observations. By the end of the analytical read, you intellectually own the book.
No doubt, by following Adler's methodology I have been able to consume many more books, and most importantly, in a highly efficient and productive manner.

Outside of investing, what are some of your biggest passions or hobbies?
Outside of my passion for investing, set aside my continual love and caring for my family, is writing. Nothing excites me more than staring at a blank piece of paper with thoughts racing around my head. It was C.S. Lewis who said, “We do not write to be understood. We write to understand.” I guess you could say my passion for writing feeds my desire to try and understand how things work.

Could you share a bit about what inspired you to write investment books like, among others, The Warren Buffett Way and Investing: The Last Liberal Art? What motivated your deep dive into multiple disciplines to enhance your investing approach?
To fully answer this question would require multiple pages. Let me be succinct. I wrote The Warren Buffett Way in 1994 after ten years of studying Warren and Berkshire Hathaway. His long-term, business-driven approach to investing resonated with me in a way that short-term trading did not. I felt if I could write a book about Warren's methods and philosophy I would, in turn, be able to better master his investment approach.
Writing Investing: The Last Liberal Art was my attempt to answer Charlie Munger's suggestion that becoming a better investor required one to achieve worldly wisdom. This was made possible by building a latticework of mental models from various disciplines to gain a wider understanding and more insightful view of the world. This, in turn, said Charlie, was essential to becoming a better investor.

In Investing: The Last Liberal Art, you highlight how art appreciation – better observing and interpreting meaning and context – can inform investing. How do these skills translate to the stock market, and how can they help investors make better decisions?
“Most mistakes in investing occur because an investor defaulted to the wrong explanation of what would happen principally because they miss-described what was occurring.”
If you were a liberal arts major, it's likely you might have taken an art appreciation course that teaches students a broad range of skills that go into analyzing and interpreting the visual arts. Just as a painting may have multiple descriptions, so too does investing.
Investors often default to an easy straightforward description of an investment without recognizing there could be other, multiple descriptions of the same investment. Art appreciation teaches one how to see multiple descriptions of the same visual.
It was the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who said, “Failure to explain is caused by failure to describe.” Most mistakes in investing occur because an investor defaulted to the wrong explanation of what would happen principally because they miss-described what was occurring.

In your latest book, Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind, you explore Buffett's thinking process. Can you elaborate on the concept of the “Money Mind”?
It is best to think of Warren Buffett's idea of a Money Mind as one that is multi-dimensional in their thinking. Self-confident, rational, pragmatic, independent in their behavior, and not overly influenced by what others do. Warren believes those who possess a Money Mind can resist the “institutional imperative.” A lemming-like tendency to imitate what others do simply because they, and many others, are doing the same thing.

Robert G. Hagstrom's essential reads on investing.

During your 14 years with Bill Miller at Legg Mason, what were the most significant lessons or insights you gained?
“The most important insight I gained from Bill was the willingness to continually evolve in how I think about the world. That I shouldn't become stranded on a desert island of absolutes believing that I have learned everything there is to be learned.”
I first met Bill Miller in 1984. I was an investment broker at Legg Mason and he was director of research. Bill would periodically recommend books on philosophy, psychology, history, biographies, and finance. I would track down the book and then give him a call with questions. We soon became good friends.
After I wrote The Warren Buffett Way, Bill asked me to join him at Legg Mason Capital Management. He was managing the Legg Mason Value Trust, the only mutual fund to beat the S&P 500 Index for 15 years in a row. Bill asked me to manage a growth equity investment strategy based on the tenets outlined in my new book.
All during this period, and the years following up to this day, Bill has always been generous in his willingness to share what he has learned. He has an intellectual generosity that is rare in the competitive field of money management. The most important insight I gained from Bill was the willingness to continually evolve in how I think about the world. That I shouldn't become stranded on a desert island of absolutes believing that I have learned everything there is to be learned.
Importantly, Bill was the very first investor to evolve through all three stages of value investing. From the low accounting factor approach recommended by Benjamin Graham, to buying better businesses articulated by Buffett and Munger, to becoming one of the the first value investors to solve the puzzle of how to value technology companies.
Had Bill Miller not evolved in his thinking he would have never beaten the market for 15 years in a row and become the legendary investor that he is today.

How should one best adopt a similar mindset of continuous development?
Read, Read, Read. You cannot evolve and move forward if you cease to learn. Don't be naïve to think you know everything – or worse, that you now know everything there is to learn about the future. Be pragmatic in your approach. Observe what is working, try to figure out why it is working, and then try to determine if it is sustainable. Lastly, try to value it.

Bill Miller famously combined value and growth investing. How did his approach challenge or align with the philosophies you wrote about in The Warren Buffett Way?
Warren Buffett said all intelligent investing is value investing. In Berkshire's 1992 Annual Report, he articulated, for the first time, that value investing had nothing to do with low price-to-earnings ratios, low price-to-book value, or high dividend yields but had everything to do with the discounted present value of companies' future cash flows. Whether the company was a slow growth “value” stock or a rapidly growing “growth” stock it could be a value investment.
When Bill read this, it helped him to pivot from exclusively owning low accounting factor stocks to purchasing stocks with higher cash flows and higher returns on capital which ultimately led to better stock returns. When I joined Legg Mason Capital Management, my portfolio invested in growth stocks valued by the discounted cash flow model outlined in my book. Bill's Value Trust owned a combination of both classic value stocks that were undervalued along with growth stocks that were also undervalued.
It is important to note that Bill had already reached the conclusion that both “value” stocks and “growth” stocks could be undervalued many years prior to me writing The Warren Buffett Way.

You've mentioned reading a surprising amount of philosophy during your time with Bill Miller. Could you elaborate on how philosophical frameworks shaped your understanding of value investing?
I would say that my experience working with Bill Miller led me, with his help, to study the deep well of intellectual thought that is philosophy. Particularly the works of William James and the philosophy of Pragmatism along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy of language.
James' philosophy of Pragmatism is aligned with Darwin's evolutionary theory which is central to understanding markets. Whereas Wittgenstein's thoughts on language, that words you choose give meaning that form a description that then provide an explanation, helps one to understand variant perceptions in markets. It is hard to imagine how one can successfully navigate markets without this understanding.

Can you give an example of how these philosophical ideas helped you see value in companies others overlooked?
Classic value investors have a tendency to be stubborn and absolute in their definition of value. Relying on outdated low accounting factors to greenlight whether something is of value. At the same time, turning up their nose at high-multiple stocks that are outperforming the market.
By recent example, classic value investors have continued to claim that the Magnificent 7 were and are overvalued – that they were and are in a bubble ready to burst. A pragmatist would look at the Magnificent 7 to try to determine why these stocks were going up in price substantially higher than the rest of the market.
One had to only look at the earnings per share growth over the last five years to clearly see that, on average, these stock prices (ex-Tesla) were simply tracking earnings per share growth. On top of that, these companies had far superior returns on capital which further justified higher stock prices. William James would tell you to examine what is working and why. Figure out the “cash value of the idea.”
By the way, Amazon has been a high multiple stock for 25 years and it became a $2.4 trillion business. Over that time period, the stock price of Amazon compounded at a 27% average annual return versus the S&P 500 Index which compounded at a 9% average annual return. I guess you could say that despite almost every classic value investor telling you Amazon was overvalued, it turned out to be an amazing value stock.

Both Charlie Munger and Bill Miller have emphasized a latticework approach to investing and life, one that is based on a working knowledge of a variety of disciplines. How has this concept evolved in your thinking, and are there any new disciplines you now find essential?
In Investing: The Last Liberal Art, we argued there was much to learn from reading fiction, particularly mysteries written by Edgar Alan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and G.K. Chesterton. I continue to believe there is much more about investing that can be learned from reading literature including the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Henry James, and Shakespeare to count just a few from a much longer list.
Reading great works of literature imposes on the reader experiential learning that is long-lasting. It's different and has a different impact than reading non-fiction.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn describes paradigm shifts as moments when anomalies challenge the prevailing framework, leading to a fundamental change in understanding. You've suggested that investing may require a similar shift – from viewing markets through a static, physics-based lens to a dynamic, more biology-inspired perspective. How can this shift influence modern strategies?
There are still investors who continue to view markets within the dominant mean-reversion paradigm articulated by Isaac Newton. Others believe the better description of markets is biological, as described by Darwin. I think short-term markets can be navigated through the lens of physics while for long-term investors biology is the better metaphor.
What I find troubling is that long-term investors are constantly being held accountable to the laws of physics while not given much credit for their appreciation of the value-creating and destruction that occurs in evolutionary markets.

Can you elaborate on how a biology-inspired approach helps identify value creation or destruction in markets over the long term?
One can read Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian-American economist, made famous with his work on “creative destruction,” introduced in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) to understand that markets are a dynamic process where new entrants (innovators) disrupt existing industries driving new ideas while destroying old ideas. Combining Schumpeter with Charles Darwin will give investors the insights necessary to appreciate that markets will constantly change.

What qualities in a business do you find most predictive of long-term value creation?
High returns on invested capital.

Reflecting on your career, what has been your biggest investment mistake, and what did it teach you?
Owning a company that's value was ultimately determined by a government decision. Betting on committee outcomes is tricky.

What do you think are the most common mistakes investors make, and how can they be avoided?
That which is going up in price is good and that which is going down in price is bad. It may or may not be the case. Or as Warren Buffett once said, “Polling does not replace thinking.”

What key characteristics do you look for in a company that makes it a compelling long-term investment opportunity?
First, I think the most compelling long-term investments are companies operating in the largest total addressable market (TAM) – the global market. Being a U.S. investor why would I limit my revenue opportunity to 343 million US consumers when there are nearly 8 billion consumers worldwide.
Secondly, I'm attracted to asset-light companies that don't require massive amounts of capital reinvestment just to stay in place. Typically, asset-light companies have higher returns on capital which is the primary fuel for compounding long-term value.
Lastly, I'm attracted to companies that can quickly scale to size thereby making it difficult for the second, third, or fourth company to become a meaningful competitor.

Investing requires both mental discipline and emotional resilience. What habits or practices help you stay balanced and focused?
What has helped me more than anything in my investing career is “unplugging” the financial media. I rarely watch financial news networks. If I do, I almost always have the TV on mute. I don't listen to economic or market forecasters as it is well-known that complex adaptive systems are inherently unforecastable. And I don't listen to uneducated stock pickers who tell me that a low P/E stock is attractive while a high P/E stock is unattractive.
This leaves plenty of time to read annual reports and industry journals which work to increase knowledge at the expense of just adding more useless information. In short, I work to establish boundaries that limit market noise.

For investors just starting out, what practical advice would you give for identifying high-potential, long-term investments?
First, you must decide if you are going to become a short-term trader or a long-term investor. If you have decided to become a long-term investor, re-read the answer to the previous question. If you want to become a short-term trader. Good luck. You'll need it. Only the rarefied few consistently add money, net of gains minus losses.

If you were to write a more niche book on business and investing, what would its focus points be, and why?
As a rule, I do not discuss a book I am working on not knowing if the idea will be worthy of publishing. It may or may not. I have always appreciated a much-used quote – “Writers never finish a book – they just stop writing.” I continue to write.

Finally, if you could recommend one book (besides your own!) or source of inspiration that has had a profound impact on your life, what would it be and why?
This is a tough question to answer. So many good books written by so many great writers. But if forced, I would recommend a reader purchase the Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders 1965-2023 available on Amazon's Kindle. (There is a paperback version available for the years 1965-2014). Berkshire's letters include every important investment lesson a long-term investor would need to know.
From how to think about a business, the management that runs the business, the economics of a good business, and how to value a company. There are lessons on individual companies including insurance, banking, energy, utilities, media, food, beverage, and transportation. In addition, there are accounting lessons, economic insights, psychological missteps to avoid, and the important philosophical underpinnings that are necessary to become a successful investor.
When I wrote Inside the Ultimate Money Mind, I tabulated that Warren had written 874 pages to shareholders between 1965 and 2019. Add another five years (the 2024 Annual Report will arrive in the first week of March) you will have close to a thousand pages written by the greatest investor in the world. Nothing else in the investing library compares.
 
AMAZON'S 2024 ANNUAL LETTER

Dear Shareholders:

2024 was a strong year for Amazon.

Our total revenue grew 11% year-over-year (“YoY”) from $575B to $638B. By segment, North America revenue increased 10% YoY from $353B to $387B, International revenue grew 9% YoY from $131B to $143B, and AWS revenue increased 19% YoY, from $91B to $108B. For perspective, just 10 years ago, AWS revenue was $4.6B; and in that same year, Amazon’s total revenue was $89B.

Amazon’s operating income in 2024 improved 86% YoY, from $36.9B (an operating margin of 6.4%) to $68.6B (an operating margin of 10.8%). Free Cash Flow, adjusted for equipment finance leases improved from $35.5B in 2023 to $36.2B.

Apart from the financial results, we made our customers’ lives meaningfully better and easier. In our Stores business, we substantially expanded selection, continued lowering prices (independent research firm, Profitero, found Amazon the lowest-priced online U.S. Retailer for the eighth year in a row), and for the second year in a row, we shipped at record speed to our Prime members. AWS launched a slew of new infrastructure and AI services that make it even easier to build remarkable customer experiences, including our latest custom AI silicon (Trainium2), a new set of frontier foundation models in Amazon Nova, and significant expansion of available models and features in our leading Generative AI (“GenAI”) services Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. Prime Video continued to offer compelling original shows, including new seasons for Fallout, Reacher, The Boys, and The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, movies like Road House, The Idea of You, and Red One, live sports like Thursday Night Football and UEFA Champions League in Europe (with the NBA and NASCAR coming in 2025), and new selection, highlighted by Apple TV+ joining Prime Video Channels. We launched a series of new Kindle devices that included a new color version, a larger Scribe option, and our fastest Paperwhites ever (the collection of which drove the highest Kindle unit sales for a single quarter in over a decade). And, we continued to add more selection, price transparency, and same day shipping for Amazon Pharmacy.

These accomplishments are a subset of what the team launched in 2024, but represent a lot of invention, hard work, and thoughtful execution across Amazon. I’m thankful for my teammates and their delivery this past year (some of which you can see in our 2024 results, others of which won’t be visible for the next few years).

A Why Culture

Every year in my annual letter, I try to share insight into what makes Amazon tick. At the highest level, we’re aiming to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, making customers’ lives better and easier every day. This is not easy to do in general, let alone year after year. In fact, it’s actually quite hard, especially with the rapid rate of change in technology, customer habits, and new products from large and small companies alike. If we want to have a chance at succeeding in our mission, we have to constantly question everything around us.
We’ve had this long-held philosophy at Amazon about two-way and one-way door decisions. A two-way door decision is one where if you get the decision wrong, you can walk back through that door, revert to where you were, and there are few (if any) ramifications. You can make these decisions quickly and locally. A one-way door decision is one where it’s quite difficult (if not impossible) to walk back through that door if you get the decision wrong, so these decisions are made more methodically. But, both of these constructs assume the door is unlocked. A lot of invention is about trying to open doors that have historically seemed bolted shut. And, over the past 30 years, we’ve found one of the most important keys to unlock these doors has been a simple question: “Why?”

“Why does this customer experience have to be this way?” “Why can’t it be better?” “What are the constraints—why must we accept them?” “Why can’t we invent around that?” “Why will it take so long to get to customers?” Why?

My Dad has told me that I was the kind of kid who kept asking why, perhaps to an annoying extent. He’s also reminded me how shortly after I joined Amazon in 1997, he tried to persuade me to work somewhere more traditional (and on the east coast closer to family)—only to realize that I’d already found the perfect fit.

That’s because Amazon is a Why company. We ask why, and why not, constantly. It helps us deconstruct problems, get to root causes, understand blockers, and unlock doors that might have previously seemed impenetrable. Amazon has an unusually high quotient of this WhyQ (let’s call it “YQ”), and it frames the way we think about everything that we do.

Starting in 1995, we asked why can’t we offer customers every in-print book?

Then, we asked, why limit ourselves to in-print—why can’t we also offer every out-of-print book?

Why not offer every book, ever written, in any language—all available within 60 seconds on a device that’s light and fits in the palm of your hand (Kindle)?

When we offer reviews, why must they all come from professional “experts?” Customers are great resources and will be brutally honest. Why not include customer reviews even if they sometimes dissuade a purchase?

Why not offer more than Books? What about Music, Video, Electronics, Tools, Kitchen, Apparel, Home Furnishings?
Why not practically everything?

Why should we be the only sellers of these items? Millions of third-party merchants and small sellers offer similar or unique items. Why not let customers choose the selection, price, and delivery speed they prefer from among these millions of sellers?

After struggling for a couple years to create awareness for sellers’ selection, we asked ourselves why not show their selection on the same product detail pages as our first-party selection (where all the traffic was)?

Why not allow our sellers to also store items in our fulfillment network, enable those items to have fast, Prime delivery, and fulfill those items for sellers (a program called Fulfillment by Amazon)?

Why not experiment with relevant advertisements in our store to expose customers to new sellers and items (versus only what our algorithms might surface based on past purchases)?

Why does every company need their own capital-intensive datacenters and infrastructure? Why should every development team keep reinventing services like compute, storage, database, and analytics? Why should builders spend 80% of their time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting vs. their unique customer experience? Why not build a set of services (AWS) to solve that for internal and external builders?
Why do I have to buy a physical video to watch a movie? Why do I need cable or linear TV to watch amazing TV shows (Prime Video)?
Why can’t I get my Prime shipping benefits on other websites than just Amazon (Buy with Prime)?

I can go on. But, you get the idea. Every one of these Whys have led to significant invention, and every one of them have made customers’ lives better and easier. Some of these seem obvious now. But at the time, these were provocative questions that required curiosity, risk-taking, experimentation, and persistence to make these into success stories.

Enabling a Why Culture

If you believe having high YQ is critical to inventing for customers, how do you enable it? In my opinion, it’s not solved with one mechanism. It needs to be built deeply into your culture and leadership team, and has to be fiercely protected over time if you’re lucky enough to be successful. Here are a few of the strategies we employ.

Create leadership principles that set the tone. We have 16 Leadership Principles that guide our behavior. They’re all integral underpinnings to our YQ, but I’ll touch on three in particular:

Are Right a Lot

“Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.”

When we first instituted this leadership principle, some people incorrectly assumed it meant that the best leaders were the ones whose ideas were chosen (i.e. they were right, a lot). It led to some people overly digging in and fighting for their ideas. There’s nothing wrong with pushing for what you believe. But, in my experience, the best leaders want to hear others’ views. They don’t wilt or bristle when challenged; they’re intrigued. Effective leaders change their minds when presented with new compelling information (which makes it ironic how people dismiss politicians as “flip-floppers” when they change their position). Ultimately, leaders are responsible for getting to the best answer for customers, regardless of whose original idea is chosen.

Learn and be Curious

“Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.”

In the nearly 28 years I’ve been at Amazon, the biggest difference in the relative growth of companies and individuals has been their aptitude to learn. At a certain point, some leaders seem to lose their thirst to learn. It’s hard to know the reason in each case, but it’s as if some people find it too exhausting, too time-consuming, or too threatening to not have all the answers. Regardless, the day we stop learning at Amazon is the day we risk undermining what we’re capable of building in the future. People with high YQ are always curious how they can get better, become wiser, and incorporate their new knowledge into better customer experiences.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”

We don’t just empower people to challenge one another, we obligate them to do so if they disagree. Questioning, asking the hard questions, forcing the discussion (versus silently thinking a mistake is being made) is necessary to getting to better answers for customers. “I told you so” has no currency at Amazon. It’s also important to focus on the second part of this leadership principle: disagree and commit. While constructive debate is useful; at some point, teams need to make a decision and take action. From that point on, everybody—even those who advocated for a different solution than the one chosen—must commit to making that decision a success. That means the team goes all in—no pocket-vetoing nor hedging between other options. That’s the only way we can preserve speed and confidence that if an issue is heavily debated, the team will ultimately pull together.

Create norms that support the Why. Similar to how our Leadership Principles guide our behavior, we’ve built norms over the years that guide how we work. Here are a few examples:

Narratives. We stopped presenting information to each other inside the company via powerpoint in 2004. Given how high level powerpoints are, we found that powerpoint was easy for the presenter to prepare, but harder for the audience to understand the substantive issues. Instead, we moved to writing narratives with a maximum of six pages in the body. Narratives are harder for the presenter (it’s hard to write a thoughtful six-page document that highlights the key issues in enough detail to be crisp and clear), but much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right Why questions.

Working backwards documents. When we build services or features, before we start coding, we write Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (“FAQ”) documents. The Press Release is intended to ensure that what we’re proposing building is remarkable to customers (so we don’t get to launch and ask “wait, why did we think customers would find this interesting?”). And, the FAQ is designed to force ourselves to ask the hard questions about which customers will use this capability, what they’ll like most, what they’ll be most disappointed with, why are we drawing the launch line where we are, why is it better than current alternatives, how should we think about pricing, what pricing dimensions we recommend, and why have we made the architectural decisions we have. The Press Release and FAQ are how we work backwards from customers, and how we push ourselves to ask questions customers would if they were in these meetings.

Be together whenever possible. There are many paths that can lead to breakthrough innovation. Occasionally, a lone genius comes up with a brilliant idea, and everyone else simply executes it. While that can work, it’s not how we typically operate. Amazon invention is deeply collaborative. It starts with a seed of an idea, then a group of smart, mission-driven people refine, challenge, and build on it together. And, we’ve found that this process is far more effective in person than remote. Of course, you can invent with everybody remote (and some cultures seem to prefer that). However, in my experience, it doesn’t compare to being in the same room. The energy, the pace, the spontaneous brainstorming, the willingness for people to jump in, the way ideas evolve in real time, and the post-meeting iteration is much better when in the same room—and yields better outcomes for our customers and teams. With what’s happening in AI right now, and the likelihood that every customer experience we’ve ever known will be reinvented, there has never been a more important time, in my opinion, to optimize to invent well.

Tolerating messy meetings. It’s hard to “schedule” innovation. You can’t book 60 minutes to invent Amazon Prime, or AWS, or Alexa+, or Fulfillment by Amazon, or Regionalization in our Fulfillment Network, or Project Kuiper. These inventions are borne out of somebody asking why we can’t change what’s possible for customers, and then they take on a life of their own, often meandering down multiple dead ends before getting to a final destination. This might bother some regimented folks. But, when we’re inventing, we accept the process being beautifully imperfect.

Operate like a startup (in our case, the world’s largest startup).

We strive to operate like the world’s largest startup. What does that mean?

First, whatever we're contemplating building has to be focused on solving a real customer problem or meaningfully improving a customer experience. Companies can get off track prioritizing technology because they’re excited about the technology. Great startups are on a mission to change what’s possible for customers.

Second, we have a disproportionate need for builders. These are inventors. They’re people constantly dissecting customer experiences, even ones that seem pretty good today, and asking why they can’t be better. They’re divinely discontent (maybe annoyingly so for team members proud of what they’ve previously built), and never feel like the job is done.

Third, we want owners. One of the strengths of Amazon over the first 30 years is that we've hired really smart, motivated, inventive, ambitious people who have been great owners. And, that means that our teammates are constantly asking themselves, “What would I do if this was my own money?” “What would I do if I started this company and I was the majority owner?” “Hey, I know I’ve only been asked to own a part of this project, but I’m not sure if the other parts are being driven well—should I stick my nose into this and make sure or just trust somebody’s got it?” Owners feel accountable. They care deeply about the quality and effectiveness of what they own, and view the company’s mission as their mission (we want missionaries, not mercenaries). That's part of what our effort to increase the ratio of individual contributors versus managers is about. We want flatter organizations where our owners doing the work feel like they own the two-way door decisions (which are the vast majority), can move rapidly, and are fully accountable for solving the Whys of their customer experiences.

Fourth, speed disproportionately matters for every business, in every industry, at all times. It’s a false binary to argue that you can move fast or deliver high standards. If you want to be fast, you can be fast, and still be high quality. We’ve done it for many years (though we can still be faster). Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it’s a priority, reinforce it constantly, organize and remove structural barriers, and build in modular ways that enable pace. But, speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it. We have this persistent feeling, throughout the company and in every business in which we operate, that there are closing windows all around us. We operate in fiercely competitive market segments, with highly talented, well-funded, ambitious companies at every turn. Customers are always looking for something better. We spend a lot of time identifying how to unlock these experiences for them as quickly as possible, and know if we don’t, somebody else will.

Another way to gain speed is to eliminate bureaucracy. There is a difference between process and bureaucracy. When you're running something at scale, you need mechanisms to deliver the right experience and constant improvement for customers. However, as companies grow and add more managers, unneeded processes get layered on that add little value. Last fall, I asked teammates across the company to send me bureaucracy examples that they were experiencing. I’ve received almost 1,000 of these emails, and read every single one. Builders hate bureaucracy. It slows them down, frustrates them, and keeps them from doing what they came here to do. As leaders, we don’t always see the red tape buried deep in our organizations, but we can sure as heck eliminate it when we do. We’ve already made over 375 changes based on this feedback. We need to move fast, and we are committed to rooting out bureaucracy that ties up time and dispirits our teammates.

Fifth, you have to be scrappy. As businesses succeed and get larger, they sometimes forget how things got started. We built Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) with 13 people; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with 11 people. Managers can confuse themselves that the way to grow and get ahead is to accumulate large teams. Historically, we’ve had periods where we’ve allowed this thinking to hold sway. But, it’s not the way we fundamentally think about building teams and products, and have adjusted to reflect that again. Our best leaders get the most done with the least number of resources required to do the job. They pride themselves on being lean.

Sixth, you have to be willing to take risks. This sounds easier than it is. You need clever enough people to identify worthwhile bets. And if you have these inventive, ambitious builders with high standards, they’re not used to failure. They suspect external (and maybe internal) ridicule awaits them if they try something very different that doesn’t work out. So, people often play it safe. But, you can’t achieve something extraordinary for customers by playing “not to lose.” If your Whys take you down an invention path that delivers an experience that doesn’t look like what’s been done before, let customer obsession be your compass. You rarely, if ever, change the world by doing the same thing as everybody else.

And finally, you have to care most about delivering compelling results for customers. It's not how charismatic you are. It's not whether you're really good at managing up or sideways. What matters is what we actually get done for customers. That’s what we want to reward.

Next generation Whys
While the team and I feel quite optimistic about the progress and potential of our existing businesses, we have plenty of new Whys we’re asking. Below are a few of them and some quick thoughts.

Why is AI so important? Will it really have as much impact as some claim and when?

Generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know, and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized. The early AI workloads being deployed focus on productivity and cost avoidance (e.g. customer service, business process orchestration, workflow, translation, etc.). This is saving companies a lot of money. Increasingly, you’ll see AI change the norms in coding, search, shopping, personal assistants, primary care, cancer and drug research, biology, robotics, space, financial services, neighborhood networks—everything. Some of these areas are already seeing rapid progress; others are still in their infancy. But, if your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive. How soon? It won’t all happen in a year or two, but, it won’t take ten either. It’s moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen.

OK, I buy AI is big; but why invest this much this quickly?

Fundamentally, if your mission is to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, and you believe every customer experience will be reinvented by AI, you’re going to invest deeply and broadly in AI. That’s why there are more than 1,000 GenAI applications being built across Amazon, aiming to meaningfully change customer experiences in shopping, coding, personal assistants, streaming video and music, advertising, healthcare, reading, and home devices, to name a few. It’s also why AWS is quickly developing the key primitives (or building blocks) for AI development, such as custom silicon AI chips in Amazon Trainium to provide better price-performance on training and inference, highly flexible model-building and inference services in Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, our own frontier models in Amazon Nova to provide lower cost and latency for customers’ applications, and agent creation and management capabilities.

There is also substantial capital investment required. In AWS, the faster demand grows, the more datacenters, chips, and hardware we need to procure (and AI chips are much more expensive than CPU chips). We spend this capital upfront, even though these assets are useful for many years (in the case of datacenters, for at least 15-20 years). We only start monetizing this capital investment many months after we spend the capital, and over many years—which leads to attractive long-term FCF and ROIC (as people have seen in AWS over the last several years). But in periods, like now, of unusually high demand (our AI revenue is growing at triple digit YoY percentages and represents a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue run rate), you’re deploying a lot of capital. We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know, the demand is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and our customers, shareholders, and business will be well-served by our investing aggressively now.

Why do chips and AI have to be this expensive for customers?

AI does not have to be as expensive as it is today, and it won’t be in the future. Chips are the biggest culprit. Most AI to date has been built on one chip provider. It’s pricey. Trainium should help, as our new Trainium2 chips offer 30-40% better price-performance than the current GPU-powered compute instances generally available today. While model training still accounts for a large amount of the total AI spend, inference (which are the predictions or outputs of the models) will represent the overwhelming majority of future AI cost because customers train their models periodically, but produce inferences constantly in large-scale AI applications. Inference will become another building block service, along with compute, storage, database, and others. We feel strong urgency to make inference less expensive for customers. More price-performant chips will help. But, inference will also get meaningfully more efficient in the next couple of years with improvements in model distillation, prompt caching, computing infrastructure, and model architectures. Reducing the cost per unit in AI will unleash AI being used as expansively as customers desire, and also lead to more overall AI spending. It’s like what happened with AWS. Revolutionizing the cost of compute and storage happily led to lower cost per unit, and more invention, better customer experiences, and more absolute infrastructure spend.

Why have personal assistants not yet taken off? How can Alexa help?

A great personal assistant can answer virtually any question and get things done on your behalf. There have been no digital solutions that can do both yet. That is, until Alexa+ arrived. Alexa+ is not only comparably intelligent to the leading chatbots, but can take a plethora of real actions for you. She can play music, play video, move media from one of your devices to another, set alarms and timers, control your smart home, order across hundreds of millions of ecommerce items, make reservations for restaurants or Ubers, order concert tickets, alert you when your favorite artist announces a tour, find a plumber to fix your sink, and memorize whatever you’ve done on Amazon. This is pretty game-changing for consumers, and just the start of what Alexa+ will do. We have over 600 million Alexa devices out there today, and expect Alexa+ to play an even more vital role in the lives of these hundreds of millions of customers in the future.

Why can’t we get items to customers even faster? Does it matter?

Every year, people ask whether we’ve reached the law of diminishing returns on speed of delivery. Our data shows this not to be the case. When we promise faster delivery times, customers complete purchases at a meaningfully higher rate and shop with us more frequently. Amazon Prime started with unlimited, free, two-day delivery for a million products; it’s now grown to over 300 million items, with tens of millions available in one day (or better). An increasing number of deliveries happen same day. This speed improvement is primarily due to our regionalization redesign of our fulfillment network, our new placement algorithms, and the introduction of our innovative same-day fulfillment centers. Although we’ve set speed records for two consecutive years, we’re still honing these innovations, and have others planned. And, don’t forget Prime Air, our drones that will get items to customers inside an hour. We are not done improving speed.
Why can’t people in small towns enjoy the same fast delivery speeds as people in cities?

As some other companies are abandoning small-town customers due to cost to serve, we’re going the other way—we’re investing to serve our rural customers even better. We’ve already expanded Same-Day and Overnight Delivery to dozens of smaller cities and towns across the U.S., with more coming. This expansion will provide even faster Amazon delivery speeds for many millions of customers, particularly in less densely populated areas, enabling us to deliver over a billion packages each year to customers living in 13,000 zip codes spanning 1.2 million square miles.

Related, why can’t we help the hundreds of millions of people without broadband connectivity?

There are about 400-500 million households around the world, most in small, rural towns that don’t have access to broadband connectivity. They can’t leverage the Internet to learn, shop, do business, access entertainment, and communicate the same way people take for granted in bigger cities. This digital divide is what Project Kuiper, our low Earth orbit satellite network, aims to solve. We’re just launching our first production satellites, and will ultimately have over 3,200 in orbit over the next few years. While capital-intensive to launch, we believe Kuiper will be a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.

Why does healthcare have to be so stressful?


Healthcare, especially in the U.S., is quite frustrating. It’s hard to get fast appointments with primary care physicians, often harder with specialists. There’s a lot of waiting around. Physicians spend only a few minutes with patients. Then, patients have to drive somewhere (often not close) to get their medications. And, when they get to the pharmacy, they’re often surprised by the pricing, what’s covered by their insurance, and what you can easily access that’s not behind a locked shelf. Customers deserve better. It’s why you see such positive customer sentiment and growth for Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, and we continue to iterate quickly on selection and transparency for Amazon Pharmacy, and physical clinic capacity for One Medical.

These are some of the Why questions we’re asking ourselves right now, and I’m excited about the future inventions to come. We’re not going to be bored any time soon.

When I first started working, I thought it was unfathomable that my Dad worked at the same place for 45 years. How could that be? That’s so long. I used to tell my friends that would never be me. Now, with almost 28 years and counting at Amazon, I have to answer those same friends with their own Why question.

After all these years, why are you still at Amazon?

I’m obviously a Superfan, but there are several compelling parts to working at Amazon. First, I’m not sure that any company prioritizes customers as relentlessly as we do. Lots of companies say they will; few follow through. Second, it’s challenging to find a company where you can make a bigger impact on the world than you can at Amazon. Third, we make significant long-term investments and bets in both inventions and people. This allows our teams to iterate on ideas, and make the right long-term decisions for customers and the company. And, I’ve never encountered a more intelligent, creative, ambitious, hungry, hard-working, and missionary group of teammates than we have at Amazon. In my opinion, this is a remarkable set of qualities to have at a company. And, for builders who want to change the world, and who have fire in their belly, there’s no better place to be than Amazon.

We operate like the world’s largest startup in large part because of our culture of Why. We don’t always get everything right, and we learn and iterate like crazy. But, we’re constantly choosing to prioritize customers, delivery, invention, ownership, speed, scrappiness, curiosity, and building a company that outlasts us all. It remains Day One.


Sincerely,

Andy Jassy
President and Chief Executive Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.
 
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