This is what passes for prophecy on Wall Street… They treat interest rates like weather forecasts: endlessly debated, perpetually wrong, and completely irrelevant to anyone building something real. As I wrote in The Only Bet That Counts 📖, the market’s priesthood “chant incantations about the Fed’s next move,” because that’s easier than doing the hard work of conviction. If this is how Goldman spends its time, it explains why the real builders stopped asking the economists for permission. Rates don’t create monsters. Founders do.

The rats call it policy. They chew through the grain, piss on what’s left, and tell the farmers it’s fertilizer. Currency debasement is how the Fed fattens the few and starves the many.

He said I was “probably right” five times. About Wall Street. About index funds. About conviction. Once is luck. Five times is a trend. 😉

Bezos writing through an –80% drawdown is the blueprint: judge the business, not the ticker. I argue the real edge is endurance: doing almost nothing while your thesis plays out and the crowd panics. And yes, read every one of his shareholder letters. It’s a master class in long-term investing, customer obsession, and building through volatility. 📖

Everyone wants to charge the hill. Few can sit through the siege… As I wrote in The Only Bet That Counts 📘, the agony of waiting is the true battlefield. Markets don’t reward courage once, they reward patience a thousand times over. Conviction isn’t dying for your idea. It’s living with it long enough to look foolish.

📉 The Turkish Lira has lost 97% of its value since 2010. People call that “inflation.” Let’s be honest, it’s currency debasement. What happened to Turkey isn’t an anomaly, it’s a preview. Every fiat currency eventually does this, only at different speeds. The invisible tax doesn’t show up on your payslip. It shows up in your rent, your house price, your medical bills, your children’s future… The game isn’t to beat inflation. It’s to outrun the system designed to make you poorer.

The average holding period has collapsed from 7 years to less than 1. That’s not evolution, that’s financial ADHD. When everyone’s trading like day gamblers, the only real edge left is time. Patience has become the ultimate form of contrarianism.

Everyone loves when Burry goes short, it gives people the illusion that someone knows. But as I wrote in The Only Bet That Counts 📖, “The market isn’t a debating society waiting to be persuaded by your brilliant thesis. It’s a vast, chaotic ocean, and your meticulously crafted research is a paper boat in a hurricane.” Burry may be right. He may even time it perfectly. But conviction isn’t about predicting the storm; it’s about surviving it. The monsters of creation, like Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon and Apple, don’t die because someone took the other side of the trade. They die when they stop compounding belief. The bears win attention. The bulls who can suffer in silence win decades.

Yes, earlier is better, but only if you understand what’s being compounded. In The Only Bet That Counts I explain: “The dollar in your bank account is not a stable unit of value… It’s a political instrument, a melting ice cube.” That $2M “goal” at age 67? At 3% inflation, it’s worth just $580k in today’s dollars. At 4%, only $375k. What looks like compounding is often just currency decay disguised as progress. You don’t beat inflation with a savings plan, you outrun it with conviction.

Forget whether AI’s a bubble. That’s a spectator’s question. Bubbles distort prices, not progress. The market punishes the speculators so the builders can inherit the ruins. When the smoke clears, the monsters of creation will still be standing. Bezos compared it to Amazon’s early days: “Our stock went from $113 to $6, while every internal metric improved. The market and the reality had completely diverged.”

This list isn’t about wealth, it’s proof that concentration, not diversification, built the modern aristocracy.

What’s interesting about this list isn’t the wealth, it’s the pattern. At least seventeen of the twenty richest people on earth built their fortunes from a single, obsessive bet on one idea. Not “diversified exposure.” Not balanced portfolios. One dominant franchise, scaled through decades of compounding conviction. In The Only Bet That Counts 📖 I wrote: “The long-term upward march of the market is not a democratic phenomenon. It’s a story of staggering inequality, driven by a microscopic handful of outlier companies, the monsters of creation.” This list is the human form of that law. It’s the power law made flesh, proof that concentration, not diversification, built the modern aristocracy. They didn’t own the index. They became the index.

“This isn’t another investment guide; it’s a philosophical awakening.” 📖 New 5⭐️ review from the U.S. calls The Only Bet That Counts a “stock manifesto.” From quitting the market to re-entering with conviction, that’s the transformation this book was built for. Grateful to readers who see beyond the charts and into the philosophy of conviction. 🙏

Luck plays a role, but it’s often the story the losers tell themselves about the winners. In The Only Bet That Counts 📖 I wrote: “What they call luck is often just pain endured long enough to look like destiny.” Conviction isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about surviving long enough to own it.

In The Only Bet That Counts 📖, I wrote that “the market doesn’t reward activity, it rewards endurance.” Most investors don’t lose because they’re wrong. They lose because they can’t wait long enough to be right.

The irony is that what people call “diversification” today isn’t safety, it’s disguised concentration. When 40% of the S&P 500 sits in ten companies, every index investor is already making a massive bet, just without realizing it. As I wrote in The Only Bet That Counts 📖: “In a world governed by power laws, diversification becomes an act of deliberate self-sabotage….” The question today isn’t whether you’re concentrated. It’s whether you’ve chosen your concentration, or had it chosen for you.

In 2008, NVIDIA’s margins collapsed from 45% to 35%. Stock down 83%. Investors begged Jensen Huang to pivot or sell. He refused. He doubled down on CUDA, a bet no one understood. While others fled the storm, he built the architecture of the AI age. Conviction isn’t loud when it matters most, it’s lonely. But that’s when it counts. The Only Bet That Counts 📖

Everyone worships the breakout. No one studies the buildup. In The Only Bet That Counts 📖 I wrote that conviction looks like stagnation, until compounding exposes who really had it.

Conviction isn’t about being right, it’s about staying when everyone else sells. Conviction is the fuel. Compounding the engine. Time the test.