And the book opens with a line that hit me immediately:

“Too many of the communications I get are meaningless. They don’t help me understand what action the writer wants me to take. They waste my time.”

Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with that reality.

Now I am the one generating content, and I want to avoid falling into that same trap. I want my messages to be as clear as they are effective. I don’t want to sound intelligent. I don’t want to write slogans. I don’t want to recommend things I don’t believe in. I want to create content I would enjoy reading myself.

That is why I read this book.

I am convinced that writing is like

thinking twice. It exposes inconsistencies, biases, unsupported beliefs, and the true depth of one’s understanding of a subject. Clear writing reflects clear thinking. While writing is a step toward clarity, it is a challenging and even painful process. But it is worth it.

The book’s main rule is simple: don’t mumble. If you want to say something, say it. Don’t make the reader guess what you are trying to communicate.

For me, the golden rule never to forget is: respect your reader, their time, and their attention. Write when you have something interesting to share, and write it as clearly as possible.

The book adds 18 more rules — I leave them at the end as a reference. With them, you are ready to write good first drafts.

Writing frequently will make you a better writer. But so will reading well-written books. You can feel when you are reading something that works. Find them and read them.

I did not expect to find Warren Buffett cited in a book about writing. But it makes perfect sense. Buffett wrote his letters with his sisters in mind — and for that reason, he explained complex topics in simple terms. Simplicity is the finest expression of understanding.

In the current age of AI, we are exposed daily to enormous amounts of content on any topic. But what is scarce — and what Buffett achieved in his letters — is the combination of depth and simplicity. He could write simply because he understood deeply.

While AI today is useful for accessing a sea of basic knowledge, it is still far from giving you deep insights. At this point in 2026, you can already smell when certain texts have been written by AI. I can even tell whether it was ChatGPT or Claude. Certain structures repeat themselves endlessly: “B is not B, it’s actually C, for reason 1, reason 2, and reason 3.” Or exaggerated but empty adjectives. Or absolutist conclusions with no evidence.

For this reason, I believe that in an ocean of “similar” content, what is authentic, clear, and grounded in common sense will be valued more than ever. At least by the audience I am trying to reach.

I decided to combine these rules with AI in a specific way: by creating an relentless editor. AI can detect, paragraph by paragraph, which rules are being broken or where improvement is needed. The heavy lifting is still mine to do. Because my reputation is on the line. And that work is essentially thinking, reflecting, and interpreting evidence. AI is just a tool that helps me improve my written communication.

If writing is like thinking twice, will writing well help you think better?

Here is the full set of rules, grouped by purpose:

Group 1 — Before you write, clear your mind
These rules define what you are going to say and for whom:
a. Define what you want the reader to do
b. Write down the 3 most important things the reader must understand to take that action
c. Visualize a specific person you are writing to

Only then should you start writing.

Group 2 — While you write
These help you be clear and precise:
a. Use short paragraphs, short sentences, and short words
b. Make your writing active and personal
c. Be specific: avoid generalities and quantify when possible
d. Avoid vague adjectives and adverbs
e. Cut unnecessary words
f. Write the way you talk
g. Understate, don’t overstate
h. Plain English, no jargon

Group 3 — What AI handles on its own
No spelling errors, no punctuation mistakes, no typos. Nothing that unnecessarily distracts the reader.

“…readers that make it to the end of our letters (we may be flattering ourselves)...”

Well, Nick — not only did I make it to the end of every single one, I’ve read them several times. Thank you for everything.

The first time I read the letters, I felt someone was putting into clear words all the vices I perceived in the investment industry that made me uncomfortable. It was like hearing a voice saying “you’re not so wrong.“ Nick wrote these letters twenty years before I read them. Those vices have existed for decades and will continue to exist for many more.

The Nomad letters were the seed of Portico. Even before I realized it myself.

When you read the Nomad letters, you realize that Nick and Zak made exactly the same decision over and over again across different domains: doing things right, with integrity, and without shortcuts. Not because it guaranteed extraordinary results — though it did. But because it was the only way to live coherently with what they believed was right. I am certain that even if Nomad had not multiplied capital tenfold in just over twelve years, Nick and Zak would have made exactly the same decisions. Every single one of them was evidence of the same thing — from the fees to the frequency of their letters, from the companies they bought to the ones they rejected. There is not a single exception.

The financial industry typically charges management fees tied to the size of the fund. Nomad was founded on a different understanding: fees should be a reimbursement of costs, nothing more. Over time, Nick came to recognize that the function of a fund manager does not create wealth. It only redirects capital created by others. The real value they could add was in choosing well who to entrust that capital to. That distinction justified a performance fee, but not an inflated management fee. The management fee was capped and declined as a percentage of the fund as it grew. From the very beginning, they wanted to share any economies of scale with their partners.

The real reward for Nick and Zak would only come if they were able to multiply their partners’ capital over time. The fund started with a success fee of 20% on returns exceeding 6% annually. But the performance at the beginning of the partnership was so strong that Nick realized a perverse incentive was taking root: they could have invested in treasuries and kept collecting success fees for decades. Nomad proposed changing the mechanism to align even more closely with their partners. The performance fee would accumulate in a reserve that would only be paid out if returns were sustained over time. If the fund fell, the money would go back into their partners’ pockets. And it did. During 2008, to the disbelief of their peers in the industry, Nomad returned fees. While some saw it as irrational, they were building long-term relationships with their partners. Skin in the game as few dare to practice it.

“Job one, two and three for your manager is investment performance, not asset gathering.” — Nick Sleep.

When you establish this kind of relationship with your partners — where you stop being the administrator of other people’s money and become a partner with the same destination — the pieces start to fall into place on their own. If your compensation depends purely on performance and not on size, you don’t need to do marketing. If you don’t need marketing, you can close the fund. If you can close the fund, you can choose your partners. And if you can choose your partners, you secure one of the most sustainable competitive advantages in investing: the ability to think and act rationally.

Nick understood that the “aggregated patience of his investor base“ was a real competitive advantage. Not only because it eliminated short-term pressure, but because it allowed manager and partners to make decisions with the same horizon. That is difficult to replicate.

Nick wrote to his partners twice a year and came to question whether that was even too frequent. After all, how much does a company change in six months when your horizon is five years or more?

Life at Nomad was so simple that, seen from the outside, more than one person might have mistakenly concluded they weren’t doing much. A regulator even asked them skeptically whether they had left some zeros off their reported transactions.

But there were Nick and Zak, “in their slippers“, having read more than a thousand annual reports and interviewed more than three hundred companies in just eighteen months. The real work at Nomad — reading, reflecting, deciding — leaves no trace.

You can feel how all those hours of reading and reflection shaped Nick and Zak’s thinking. At the beginning of the partnership there were more than twenty investments — Deep Value, Special Situations, Quality — all bought at what was estimated to be a 50% discount to the replacement value of assets. A tangible, measurable margin of safety, often anchored in the physical.

Over time, the fund began to concentrate into what Nick called the “Terminal Portfolio.“ This was a select group of companies written on a wall — the “wonderful, honestly run compounding machines.”

To make this list, companies had to be led by intellectually honest and economically rational people. All the time. They had to have chosen to outcompete through superior thinking and disciplined capital allocation for many years.

But to earn a place in the “real” portfolio, these companies had to be cheap — or as Nick would say, trading at “fair price.” The margin of safety evolved and required a price that reflected a no-growth scenario — because if your analysis of the business model anticipates that the company will grow for decades, all of that optionality comes for free. You buy a mouse that will become an elephant.

Nick and Zak were patient. They knew that Mr. Market, obsessed with the short term, would eventually offer those prices. Amazon lowered prices when it could have raised them. Costco maintained low margins and paid its employees 80% more than its competitors. These kinds of companies shared their economies of scale with their customers. And in the sharing lies the key. While Mr. Market only saw costs and depressed margins in the quarter, these decisions were securing decades of growth. “It’s all about the destination,” as Nick would say.

Paradoxically, these companies were mirrors of Nomad. Founders motivated primarily by building something extraordinary, not by getting rich. Willing to sacrifice the short term for the long term. These founders practiced the same deferred gratification that Nick and Zak practiced at Nomad. The conviction that if the product is extraordinary, customers will eventually respond.

Once Nick and Zak found them at a discount, they pulled the trigger, and the three pieces fell into place. Manager, partners, and founders looking in the same direction. Focused on the destination. All coherent.

And then came the hardest decision: not selling. Nick recounted the case of a well-known asset management firm that, in the 1970s, discovered that having sold IBM thirty years earlier had been a colossal mistake — that single position would have been worth more than all of their assets under management. No doubt everyone agreed to learn from the mistake. And they went back to their desks as if nothing had happened. Around the same time, they sold Walmart. Thirty years later, that position would also have been worth more than all of their assets under management.

Nick constantly asked himself whether they should sell Amazon after it had doubled. But they would review new opportunities, and always reached the same conclusion: the best opportunities were already in the portfolio. Sometimes, what you’re looking for most is right there, in front of your nose.

Every day you don’t sell is a decision. It sounds easy. But it is incredibly difficult to sustain over time.

Nick and Zak must have spent 99% of their time understanding the “engines of success“ of their companies and their destinations. But they also defined key variables to monitor along the way. For Amazon, it was market share gains and positive growth during the Great Financial Crisis. For Costco, it was sales growth as it reached greater scale and was able to lower prices further.

Defining key variables not only provides analytical grounding for an investment thesis. It prevents you from falling in love with attractive narratives. But more importantly, it is what distinguishes “intelligent patience” from “stubbornness.” If the variable is progressing as expected, you have evidence to maintain conviction. If it deviates, you are obligated to revisit your beliefs. Without it, there is no way to tell one from the other. And if you waited five years observing nothing and lost everything, nobody rewards that patience.

Key variables also serve as psychological support during the journey. A long-term investor decides to buy in a minute. Let’s say their horizon is five years. The next 2.6 million minutes, in theory, they will do nothing. Every minute of inactivity is a decision in itself. It becomes deeply necessary to define something observable that confirms or rejects the initial thesis. Something that allows you to step back from the swings of the market — or rather, to take advantage of them.

In my experience, when there is little skin in the game and compensation depends little on performance, investment ideas are defended as part of your identity. The ego replaces capital as what is at stake. Gratification no longer comes from generating returns but from being right — or worse, from appearing to be right. Skin in the game forces you to stay rational, flexible, and humble. Because when it is your own money and your own freedom on the line, admitting a mistake is a rational economic decision. Nothing more.

Being rational, flexible, and humble means acknowledging something uncomfortable: “Just a few big things in life are knowable,” as Nick would say. And this had direct consequences for his portfolio: “And it is because just a few things are knowable that Nomad has just a few investments.”

Contrary to popular belief, for Nick, diversification was not prudence but insurance against lack of conviction. The industry diversifies not because it has many ideas, but because it has very few. And this is just one more expression of their process: focus on what matters, leave the rest out.

Nick did not reach these conclusions overnight. He discovered them over years of observation, practice, and reflection. And he was able to do so because he eliminated everything that could distract him. What remained was a space for reflection. And what emerged from that space was surprisingly powerful.

“Good investing is a minority sport,” as Nick would say. And it probably always will be. I do believe it is a skill that can be learned, but I also believe that much more is needed for it to fully develop: a conducive environment, a calm mind, and the willingness to do things right even when no one is watching.

Nick and Zak did it for just over twelve years. Then they dissolved Nomad because they had reached their destination. They had the companies they wanted. They were not going to sell any of them. The work was done. What remained were the letters — more than a decade of thought written with an honesty that the industry rarely allows itself.

Portico was born from those letters. But that is another story.

If you can’t answer it, you are probably speculating, not investing. And speculation, over the long run, has only one destination.

Without a competitive advantage, outperforming the market over the long term is closer to luck than skill. And to be clear, when I say “long term,” I mean more than a decade. Not 1, 3, or 5 years.

In investing, there are three sources of competitive advantage: informational, analytical, and behavioral. I didn’t invent this. It’s something Bill Miller, the only mutual fund manager to beat the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years, from 1991 to 2005, articulated more than 10 years ago.

The informational advantage refers to possessing material information that others don’t have and acting on it. I won’t say much more about this one for two reasons: i) in the age of social media, any “new information” becomes “old information already priced in by the market” within seconds, and ii) acting on privileged information is illegal.

The other two are more interesting.

The analytical advantage refers to reaching conclusions that are superior to the average using the same public information, and as a result, making better investment decisions consistently over time.

The behavioral advantage is the most durable because it is rooted in human psychology and, therefore, the hardest to change. As a species, we are wired to behave irrationally under pressure, and financial markets are pressure-generating machines. The ability to behave more rationally than the crowd, consistently, is a durable source of value creation.

When you analyze a company, you blend different disciplines to arrive at a range of its intrinsic value. Accounting, Microeconomic Theory of the Firm, Industrial Organization Theory, Probability and Statistics, Game Theory, and even Logic and Epistemology. All of them imperfect tools for explaining the world as it actually is. On top of that mix of disciplines, you add an almost infinite abundance of facts, news, and numbers. Discerning their importance and weighting is such a complex exercise that the probability of everyone reaching the same analytical conclusions is virtually zero. By definition, a large population will reach “average” or outright “wrong” conclusions, and a few people will reach “superior” ones.

The key to making the analytical advantage a durable source of value creation is deliberate practice. You must walk the path. And allow yourself to learn along the way. Without a feedback loop, you can repeat the same mistakes as many times as it takes until your capital disappears. You must aim to be as rational as possible.

One expression of the behavioral advantage is the minimization or absence of biases such as “Illusion of Control,” “Overconfidence,” or “Self-Serving Bias.” When those biases decrease, humility, skepticism, and curiosity find space, and with them, a feedback loop that improves every decision. If the facts are changing in front of you, your beliefs should change too. And that’s fine.

Equanimity matters too. A great analysis is worthless if you sell in a panic after a 20%+ drop with no new information. Under losses, the brain activates the same response as it would to a physical threat, and that response is not designed for making good investment decisions. The same happens if you only buy as the price rises because you’re afraid of missing out. Equanimity is what allows you to avoid confusing a price drop with a real emergency, or a price rise with a guaranteed opportunity.

Yet I believe one of the most overused expressions of the behavioral advantage is long-termism.

Long-termism is the ability to defer gratification. Since human beings are psychologically wired to prefer immediate gratification, being a genuine long-term thinker makes you an oddity. Someone different.

In investing, long-termism is the ability to hold an investment long enough for a company’s intrinsic value to be reflected in its price. Ignoring the noise. Waiting for time to do its work.

Many “well-intentioned” investors claim to invest with a long-term perspective, but few can actually execute it. Not because of a lack of willpower. It’s a structural impossibility. The investment industry presents an abysmal “commitment mismatch.” When you value a company, you discount its future cash flows from today to “perpetuity.” Much of the value rests on that concept of perpetuity. Capturing that value requires staying with the company through the process. Not for a quarter, not for a year, but for several years.

Yet the vast majority of funds investing in these companies offer daily, monthly, or annual liquidity windows. How can a manager genuinely invest for the long term if the capital they manage can disappear tomorrow? It simply doesn’t work.

This is why being a long-term investor is a structural competitive advantage that most of the market cannot replicate. Not only because our psychology pushes us in the opposite direction, but because even if we wanted to, the structure makes it impossible.

Time is the key input for superior returns to materialize. Genuinely thinking long term becomes a luxury available to few.

That is why I believe Portico has a genuine opportunity to endure. With my own capital, no nervous investors, no liquidity to provide, and no benchmark to follow, it gives me the willingness to do anything and the ability to do nothing. It gives me the time to ask myself before any decision: what is my edge here?

Portico is exactly that: a space where thought finds its time. Without distractions. Where inactivity is not seen as a weakness, but as the expression of a competitive advantage: patience. The best investment decisions rarely come from noise. They come from reflection.

At Portico you will find the logbook of my own capital: full skin in the game. Complete transparency over the investment process. Documented investment theses. I aspire to turn $1 into $10 over a reasonable period of time — 10 to 15 years — by investing in companies the market significantly undervalues. With no geographic or sector restrictions that would limit the ability to find good opportunities.

To be clear about what you will NOT find here: I will not publish articles to maintain a cadence. I will only publish what I genuinely believe adds value. I will stick to companies, industries, and mental models — not macroeconomics. I don’t invest under the assumption that I have an edge in forecasting macro better than others. No unnecessary jargon. I don’t want to sound intelligent. I just want to be right.

If you are looking for a space of honest investment ideas, with real capital on the line and a genuinely long-term investment horizon, Portico is the place for you.

Excited about the idea, I have to present it to an investment committee where it gets analyzed from every possible angle.

There’s just one catch: this idea has to fight its way into a portfolio that already holds 45 positions. Not because 45 good, asymmetric ideas were found. But because the fund tracks a benchmark with 90 positions.

In the committee, everything gets discussed: why the opportunity exists, what I might be missing, the business model, unit economics, return on invested capital, management quality and their capital allocation track record, board composition, incentive structure, competition, industry dynamics, regulation, growth opportunities, different valuation methods, and a long list of et ceteras.

After extensive deliberation — sometimes requiring multiple committee sessions — the idea gets “approved.” But given the stock’s characteristics around size, liquidity, and statistical behavior, the decision is to allocate 0.5% of the portfolio.

As Mohnish Pabrai would say: “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose much.” Except that with 0.5% of the portfolio, I don’t win much either when heads comes up.

Was I playing the right game?

The committee acted exactly as the system demands. That system is designed to preserve capital. Not necessarily to grow it.

And that started to create a void in me.

I love studying, learning, and teaching. I was lucky to start my professional career in the financial industry — because for 15 years, that’s exactly what I did: search for the next great investment idea. But it was reading the letters of Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria about their Nomad fund that made me truly understand I wanted to play a different game.

While Nick wrote about the importance of his investors’ “aggregated patience” as a competitive advantage, I was managing capital against a 90-position benchmark, with nervous investors, and zero skin in the game.

Nomad and my fund both ran deep analyses on companies, both searched for the next great investment idea. But the rules of the game were completely different.

I decided to leave the industry. Because you only live once, and it’s worth trying to live it on your own terms. I know that if I don’t try now, I will regret it when I’m 80. Moving to another country with my wife and daughter helped make the decision. But the decision had already been made.

Now I invest my own capital. I can analyze any company in the world, concentrate when it’s worth it, and do nothing when it’s not. Old school. Nothing sophisticated.

That’s how Portico was born.