“Invert, Always Invert.”
Dear Partners and Friends,
We are Invert Investment Partnership. We are destination investors with a decades-long horizon. We believe that the best work happens when you have the courage to simplify, the discipline to focus, and the patience to wait.
The following captures our core thinking:
1. “Invert, always invert.” : Our name is our strategy. It is a tribute to the late Charlie Munger’s favorite mental model, inspired by nineteenth century German mathematician Carl Jacobi. It is our favorite way to problem solve: backward. Instead of asking "How do we achieve outsized returns?" we ask "What will kill us?" By systematically avoiding the "death" of a portfolio—leverage, overpayment, and complexity— we find that success tends to take care of itself. As Charlie said, we don’t need to be brilliant; we just need to be consistently not stupid.
2.We focus on risk inversion first, the returns follow: our focus is our filter.
We concentrate on “diworsification”: Diversification is often a disguise for ignorance. We hold no more than 10 high-conviction names. If a company isn't one of the ten best ideas in our world, it won’t show up in our partnership.
The “No” list - we say no to shorts, margin, and “sin” industries. We believe in limited downside and asymmetric upside, and in doing good by doing well.
Price, Value & Margin of Safety. We see risks in overpaying for any company, however great it may be. “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” We are happy to sit on our hands until Mr. Market offers us an opportunity that is too good to ignore.
Quality as the long-term margin of safety: We prioritize wonderful companies at a fair price over fair quality companies at a wonderful price. Quality is the ultimate antifragility.
3.We hunt for the giants of tomorrow: Every giant started small. We focus on small and micro-cap space – a fishing pond often overlooked and best fit our circle of competence. This niche allows us to do "scuttlebutt" research and stress test first principles through in-depth due diligence and management meetings. We find them early, buy them when they are small, and intend to hold them until they become the larger caps of the future.
4.Slow is smooth, smooth is fast: Our long-term evolution is to become Slow Horse, a holding company with equities and businesses in compounding trust, capital, knowledge, and positive impact that will outlast us. The horse in the long journey on our website is a snapshot of our inversion process in motion: steady, patient, and independent from the crowd.
At Invert, we choose research and performance over marketing. On our journey to build “a seamless web of deserved trust,” we seek partners who prefer a weighing machine over a voting machine and those who share our belief that in the long run, the slow horse will prevail.
May we continue to nurture the slow horse in us,
Invert Investment Partnership
