The Palantir Newsletter

Oh troika, winged troika, tell me who invented you? Surely, nowhere but among a nimble nation could you have been born in a country which has taken itself in earnest and has evenly spread far and wide over half of the globe, so that once you start counting the milestones you may count on till…

A good general [or trader] plans in two ways: for an absolute victory and for an absolute defeat. The one enables him to squeeze the last ounce of success out of a triumph; the other keeps a failure from turning into a catastrophe. – Max Brand As the second quarter of 2020 comes to an…

You seldom get what you go after unless you know in advance what you want. Indecision has often given advantage to the other fellow because he did his thinking beforehand. – Maurice Switzer After experiencing a March many of us would rather forget, April was a welcome relief. During March, the viral curve was rising…

No this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. – Winston Churchill Perhaps some are breathing a sigh of relief: the 1st quarter of 2020 is over. The quarter began with such promise. It was a quarter which saw new…

There’s almost no chance of a recession this year. – Barron’s Roundtable (January 2020) “Speculators are obsessed with predicting-guessing-the direction of stock prices. Every morning on cable television, every afternoon on the stock market report, every weekend in Barron’s, every week in dozens of market newsletters, and whenever business people get together.” – Seth Klarman…

I would define True Courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it. – General William T. Sherman What a difference a couple of weeks makes! It seems like ages ago that we were concerned about the growing impact of the COVID-19 Virus on Italy and…

There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know. – Donald Rumsfeld U.S. Secretary of Defense 2001-2006 A couple of months ago we kicked off a new year,…

In many ways the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America parallels the historic British vote to leave the European Union.  Perhaps the most striking example of the parallel nature of these two events is the failure of modern pollsters to accurately delineate the probability of a Trump…

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. -Donald Rumsfeld I believe that Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote is particularly…