Decision-Making

What a 90-day round trip in Lenovo taught me about deciding with limited information, in markets and in life At the end of July, I bought shares of Lenovo Group in Hong Kong at around HK$21. By mid-September they were trading near HK$38. By late October they were back near HK$22.1 The whole round trip took less than 90 days. The business did not reverse as dramatically as the share price did. Lenovo was still the world’s largest PC maker, and its August results showed a real improvement in server profitability. But those results changed what investors knew. Later, IDC’s preliminary figures showed Lenovo’s PC shipments down 22.6% year on year in the third quarter, while worries about AI financing grew. There was new evidence on both sides. I cannot put an exact percentage of the rise or fall down to fundamentals rather than expectations.2 ...

An operational epistemology I am not going to argue for anything. On the question of whether human beings can know the world, I have argued many times, and I have learned something uncomfortable: I am weak on that battlefield. The lines I was proudest of — the ultimate truth is faith, human beings cannot know, the world is not built on logic — each has a true first half and a conclusion that does not follow. ...