I’m reading a book that I’ll reveal to you soon.
Honestly, it’s blowing my mind. I’m pulling out brutal ideas that anyone can apply to their financial system no matter how much money they have. But today, I want to share one concept that hit me like a brick when I read it.
It’s about a CEO who literally invented a new way to measure profits just to avoid paying taxes.
Before that, the only metric that mattered was EPS, Earnings Per Share. That’s what the market watched. That’s what the system rewarded. What every analyst cared about.
But there was a problem: the more profit you showed, the more taxes you paid. And this CEO, who wasn’t stupid, said: “Why would I do that?”
His name was John Malone. One of the most savage, visionary, and aggressive telecom executives in history.
He said, “I don’t want to optimize EPS. I want to optimize real cash flow. What I actually keep. Not what’s on paper. And I’ll do it using leverage, depreciation, amortization, and interest. Because all of that reduces taxes without killing growth.”
That’s how EBITDA was born. A metric designed to play a different game.
But that’s not even the most important part.
The real killer idea, the one I want to talk about, is a philosophy Malone shared with a handful of the greatest capital allocators in history. And it goes like this:
What happens if you never sell? Ever. You only buy.
Think about it for a second. Never sell. Just buy more. Buy when the system screws up. Buy when everyone’s dumping. Buy when assets are illiquid, unloved, forgotten.
And never sell. Not even to take profits. Not even to rotate into something “better.” Nothing.
Why does this idea change everything?
Because if you’re not going to sell, you don’t need to predict the future.
You don’t care whether the asset will go up tomorrow, or in a year, or in ten. You’ve already decided you’re not selling. So you only care about one thing:
Is it cheaper today than it was yesterday?
If the answer is yes, you buy more. Period.
Gold drops 40%? I buy
REITs crash 60%? I buy
Bitcoin falls 30%? I buy
Small caps hit five-year lows? I buy
You see what happens?
You make decisions based on the past, not the future. And the past already happened. It’s real. It’s visible. You can measure it. It doesn’t lie.
And if you’ve built an antifragile box with consistent flow, available margin, and a well-built portfolio, you can strike every one of those crashes without hesitation.
And never sell.
That makes your system radically simple. Radically robust. And increasingly powerful.
This isn’t theory. This is exactly what some of the greatest capital allocators of the last 50 years have done.
Let me give you two more examples.
First: Henry Singleton, CEO of Teledyne.
He didn’t do roadshows. Didn’t talk to analysts. Didn’t care about market opinions. He bought companies when they were cheap, bought back his own stock when it was dirt cheap, used debt with surgical precision, and never sold anything.
For 27 years, with no master plan, no written strategy, no slide decks, he multiplied shareholder capital by 180x.
His whole philosophy? Buy cheap, hold forever, don’t do stupid stuff.