You’ve talked in your writing about a lot of different types of investments – technology, pharma, retail, real estate, etc. – but you haven’t touched on commodities like coffee or oil. Has it not come up because that's not really something that you favor or think about in investing? I don't love commodities, but only because the prices are generally set by your least efficient competitor. In other words, it's difficult for the best commodity producer to be better than the wor

Invest in inflation. It's the only thing going up. Will Rogers Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man. Ronald Reagan Welcome to the GDS Investments 2021 Mid-Year Letter. Since I wrote to you at the end of 2020, I spent a lot of time analyzing the inflationary pressures of (what we then hoped would be) post-pandemic life in America. I did that while considering the dangers which inflation poses and about which Preside

Many companies reinvest their cash flow or new capital back into the business. Sometimes that strengthens the business, and sometimes it goes nowhere. How do you discern smart capital reinvestments from dumb ones that will hurt the business in the future? I don’t want to overcomplicate this discussion, so let’s start with a simple definition of reinvestment as money a company spends today in the hopes of generating future revenue growth. Fundamentally, this is a question of c

Summer 2021 was supposed to be wild and carefree, the so-called “Hot Vax Summer” (as CNN Business wrote back in May) that would show the U.S. getting back to normal “post” COVID-19. Instead, the Delta variant gave us a fourth wave of the pandemic that, in some places and according to some metrics, has been even bigger than the third wave. And as recently as July, I was answering questions about the pandemic easing! Yet the situation is clearly different than it was, with over