The Fight That Costs More Than the Prize: Maynard Smith and Price’s 1973 Logic of Animal Conflict, the Stags That Settle It by Roaring, the Ships That Turned Back a Day Before Anyone Noticed, and Why the Long-Term Equity Investor Should Prefer the Business That Avoided the War to the One That Won It

Cover: bar chart of average pay-offs in the 1973 Maynard Smith and Price simulation

Written by

Manish Goel, FCA

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←Required, Not Disclosed: How to Read the Internal Audit Function of an Indian Listed Company

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The Queue Is a Clock: John Little’s 1961 Identity L = λW, a Housing Pile Measured in Months, and Why the Long-Term Equity Investor Divides Every Stock by Its Flow

The Half-Life of Facts: Burton and Kebler’s 1960 Borrowed Metaphor, Poynard’s Forty-Five-Year Measurement of Clinical Truth, and Why the Long-Term Equity Investor Dates Every Input to a Thesis

Hanlon’s Razor: Bloch’s 1980 Printing of an Older Warning, the Arithmetic of Intent and Error, and Why the Long-Term Equity Investor Writes the Tripwire Before the Surprise

Occam’s Razor: Ockham’s Fourteenth-Century Rule of Parsimony, the Bayesian and Predictive Case for It, and Why the Long-Term Equity Investor Counts the Assumptions in a Thesis