Notes
What the house learns from keeping a family's wealth over time: method, measurement, memory. Few notes, written to last.
A company in difficulty: the director's guide
Cash-flow trouble, suspension of payments, confidential prevention, reorganisation, sale plan, liquidation: the procedures, the deadlines and the players, explained step by step for directors.
Read the note · The methodThe pre-pack sale: selling a business in discretion
Prepare the sale confidentially during a conciliation, then execute it fast in a collective procedure: steps, deadlines, advantages and limits.
Read the note · The acquisitionBidding at the hearing: how to build a takeover offer
Who can bid, what the offer must contain, how the court chooses (jobs, creditors, guarantees) and what the acquirer gets.
Read the note · The playersJudicial administrator or creditors' representative: who does what?
One defends the company, the other the creditors: telling the two officers apart and knowing every player in the procedure.
Read the note · The mythCassandra: the curse of seeing true
Apollo gave her the gift of reading the future, then condemned her never to be believed. From Homer to Aeschylus to the Cassandras of the markets and the climate: the story of the prophetess of Troy, and why our intelligence bears her name.
Read the note · The methodThe consequences of consequences: thinking an opportunity past its first effect
The first effect of an event is in prices within hours. Three questions to propagate a shock to its second and third-order effects, and two safeguards against storytelling.
Read the note · The methodMeasuring the reliability of investment forecasts: the Brier score
Born of weather forecasting in 1950, adopted by judgement research: how to grade the accuracy of predictions, separate skill from luck, and turn it into a capital allocation rule.
Read the note · The methodThe investment decision journal: separating skill from luck
Record every decision before the outcome is known: the thesis, the assumptions, the price, the horizon. The three biases the journal neutralises, and how to review it.
Read the note · The patternWhy nine family fortunes in ten do not survive the third generation
The Williams & Preisser study, its critics, and the lesson that survives scrutiny: fortunes die from within, through scattered information and fading memory.
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