This week in charts
Homeowner equity by province
Home price to income - Toronto
Home price to income by country
Mortgage payments vs. income – Canadian cities
Commodities vs. bonds – 10-year rolling annualized returns
Tech credit spreads vs. Oracle 5-year credit default swaps (CDS)
U.S. IPOs
Asset mix by household income
Russel 2000 Index returns
The Untold Story of Charlie Munger’s Final Years
Charlie Munger owned a house with spectacular ocean views in Montecito, Calif. The Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman had designed the entire gated community, which locals called “Mungerville.” At one point, he told a friend he expected to spend his last years there.
Instead, Munger chose to remain in his longtime home in Los Angeles. The place didn’t even have air conditioning. During a heat wave three years ago, friends brought electric fans and bags of ice to cool his library.
Munger didn’t care. The home was close to people he liked and projects he found stimulating. Rather than a quiet life by the sea, Munger spent his final years chasing gutsy investments, forging unlikely friendships and facing new challenges.
When Munger died two years ago, weeks before his 100th birthday, the billionaire investor was among the nation’s most beloved businessmen, celebrated for his wit and wisdom—and the role he played helping Warren Buffett build Berkshire Hathaway into a trillion-dollar company.
The unexpected last chapter of Munger’s life is less well-known. In the year before his death, Munger made over $50 million from a bet on an out-of-favor industry he had shunned for 60 years. He revved up his real-estate activities, working with a young neighbor to place big, long-term wagers, unusual for a nonagenarian. He faced down health challenges and wrestled with the future.
“Even a week or two before passing away, he was asking questions such as, ‘Does Moore’s Law apply in the age of AI?’” recalls his friend Jamie Montgomery, referring to whether artificial intelligence would see exponential gains like those experienced in computational power.
Friends and family say Munger’s eventful last period offers lessons for investors—and a blueprint for how to age with grace, equanimity and purpose.
“To the day he died, that mind was running,” says Munger’s stepson, Hal Borthwick. “He never stopped learning.”
This week’s fun finds
This week, Product Manager Olivia F. organized a moai from one of Toronto’s legendary Italian sandwich shops (est. 1984). There were three kinds of sandwiches, a variety of salads and even a panettone. We all left stuffed and even saw some of the World Cup pool draws!
The Math Shows Jackson Pollock Painted Like a Child Would
Jackson Pollock’s paintings look like beautiful accidents. The 20th-century painter spilled, drizzled, and flung paint from brushes, cans, syringes, and sticks at canvases laid out on the floor in seemingly haphazard and unchoreographed fashion. The resulting blizzards of emotion and color dazzled audiences and made him famous.
But while art lovers admire the work, scientists have long aimed to understand the laws that govern them—in part to help devise tools that could help distinguish his paintings from imitations. Recently, one international team set out to see whether his process was closer to how children or adults might paint. To answer that question, they asked a group of adults aged 18 to 25 and children aged 4 to 6 to make paintings in the style of Pollock, by pouring paint onto canvases.
The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollacks more than did those from adult painters. They published their results in Frontiers in Physics.
To arrive at this conclusion the scientists used two forms of statistical analysis: fractal analysis and lacunarity. Whereas fractal analysis measures complexity, lacunarity reveals something more subtle: the rhythm and space in a complex network. Measuring lacunarity has helped scientists understand natural systems such as galaxies in the universe. They also asked people to rate the finished paintings, and used their findings to assess two famous art works: No. 14, by Jackson Pollock, and Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly, by Max Ernst, who used his own distinct paint pouring technique.
The researchers found that the children’s art featured lower fractal dimensions and higher lacunarity—they were simpler, with less detailed fine structure, and showed more clumping, with larger gaps between clumps. Adult paintings showed the opposite: higher fractal dimensions and lower lacunarity. In other words, the adult works had more complex detailed patterns, while the lines of paint were more evenly spread out.
