Writing
The chronicle. What I am doing, how I am doing it, and what I think about deals, sales, marketing, finance, and the occasional current event.
Start here
Three essays that carry the whole argument.
- The frameworkBankruptcy Investing - Book Review
- The caseHow to build a self-sustaining trucking company and have the government pay for itHere's how I'd set it up, and what the numbers look like on a $40 million deal.
- The mistake100 Baggers - Book ReviewLorenzo Ayres reviews 100 Baggers by Christopher Mayer: what 365 hundredfold stocks reveal about compounding, and why it challenges his own deal structure.
Investing
Special situations, long-term plays, and market notes, run through my own frameworks. Never a buy call.
Business
Sales, marketing, operations, finance, deal structuring, offers, people. The systems as actually run.
Deals
The chronicle. A deal I am working on or just closed, told from inside, with the numbers left in.
Nothing published here yet. The first one is coming.
Books
The whole shelf.The book of the month, and what each one changed about how I structure.
- Oct 29, 2026Bankruptcy Investing - Book Review
- Oct 27, 2026100 Baggers - Book ReviewLorenzo Ayres reviews 100 Baggers by Christopher Mayer: what 365 hundredfold stocks reveal about compounding, and why it challenges his own deal structure.
- Oct 22, 2026There’s Always Something to Do - Book ReviewLorenzo Ayres reviews There’s Always Something to Do, Peter Cundill’s journals, and the margin-of-safety lessons he applies as an operator.
- Oct 21, 2026The Great Salad Oil Swindle - Book ReviewLorenzo Ayres reviews The Great Salad Oil Swindle: how a 1963 fraud set up Warren Buffett’s American Express bet, and four lessons for investors and operators.
- Seth Klarman, 1991Margin of SafetyRisk first, reward second, and the book that made those one idea instead of a trade-off.
- Maurece Schiller, 1955 to 1966The special situations booksFive forgotten books from the fifties, and the ancestor of every strange structure I get excited about.
- Mohnish Pabrai, 2004Mosaic: Perspectives on InvestingPabrai's first book, written before anybody was listening, and better for it.
- Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn, 2008globalization: n. the irrational fear that someone in China will take your jobThe Greenwald almost nobody reads. Watch him take a fear everybody repeats and walk it back until it falls apart.
- Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn, 2005Competition DemystifiedThe clearest thinking on moats ever put between two covers, and the source of my own version of it.
- Martin Whitman and Fernando Diz, 2009Distress InvestingWhat a balance sheet actually means when the company stops paying, written by somebody who did it for a living.
- Kate Welling and Mario Gabelli, 2018Merger MastersThirty arbitrageurs explaining what they actually do, in their own words, with the bad deals left in.
- Mark Stevens, 1993King IcahnThe structuring playbook, written by somebody Icahn was not cooperating with.
- Jeff Gramm, 2016Dear ChairmanEight fights between shareholders and boards, told through the actual letters.
- Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, 1989Barbarians at the GateThe best book on how a deal actually gets done, disguised as a story about a cigarette company.
- Walker Deibel, 2018Buy Then BuildThe case for buying a business with cash flow instead of starting one without any.
- Alexandra Reed Lajoux and Stanley Foster Reed, 1989The Art of M&AThe reference nobody reads cover to cover, and the one I open the most.
- Eugene Schwartz, 1966Breakthrough AdvertisingThe best book on persuasion ever written, and the one that taught me you cannot create demand.
- Claude Hopkins, 1923Scientific AdvertisingA hundred years old, free online, and still more useful than most of what got published last year.
- Gary Halbert, 1984The Boron LettersLetters from a copywriter to his son, written from federal prison, and better than that sounds.
- Jordan Belfort, 2017Way of the WolfThe straight line system, which is the method every closer in my business is trained on.
- David Ogilvy, 1983Ogilvy on AdvertisingBetter than his famous one, because this is the one where he shows his work.
- Thomas Nagle and Georg Müller, 1987The Strategy and Tactics of PricingPrice is not a number you land on at the end. It is the decision everything else has to agree with.
- Danny Meyer, 2006Setting the TableHow a premium experience actually gets delivered, by somebody who had to do it every night.
- Christopher Mayer, 2015100 BaggersWhat lets something go up a hundred times, studied case by case, and the same move I run on physical assets.
- Benjamin Graham, 1944World Commodities and World CurrencyThe Graham nobody knows exists, and he is not talking about stocks at all.
- Benjamin Graham, 1937Storage and StabilityWritten in the Depression, about surpluses nobody wanted, by the man who later wrote the book on buying what nobody wants.
- Harry Eisenberg, editor, the 2000 editionWalker's Manual of Unlisted StocksA phone book of companies nobody could find, and the most on-thesis thing on this shelf.
- John Brooks, 1987The Takeover GameThe Brooks book nobody brings up, about the decade that invented the modern hostile deal.
- Ben Branch and Hugh RayBankruptcy Investing: How to Profit from Distressed CompaniesThe procedure manual that sits next to Whitman's argument.
- Barrie Wigmore, 1985The Crash and Its Aftermath: Securities Markets 1929 to 1933Everybody has read a story about 1929. This is the price data.
- Richard C. Sauer, 2010Selling America ShortAn SEC lawyer explaining why the frauds he could see were the hardest ones to stop.
- Lawrence A. Cunningham, 2002Outsmarting the Smart MoneyThe Cunningham that is his own rather than an edit of Buffett's.
- Robert A. HaugenThe Inefficient Stock Market and The New FinanceA man who spent thirty years telling finance academia it was wrong, and was.
- George A. Roberts, 2007Distant ForceThe best book about capital allocation ever written, and it was never really published.
- Dave Greber, 1987Rising To Power: Paul Desmarais and Power CorporationA holding company almost nobody outside Canada can name, built by a man who started with a bus line.
- R.M. LalaThe Joy of Achievement: Conversations with J.R.D. TataFifty years running a group whose owner is a charity, which changes every incentive in it.
- David L. SokolPleased But Not SatisfiedAn operator's book, by the man who was going to run Berkshire and then was not.
- Marquis James and Bessie Rowland James, 1954The Story of Bank of America: Biography of a BankA bank built on the customers every other bank had already turned down.
- Peter Starr, 2002Citibank: A Century in AsiaA commissioned history, which is a real limitation and still worth the shelf space.
- Margaret Moos Pick, 2005See's Famous Old Time Candies: A Sweet StoryThe company Buffett calls his best purchase, written as the kind of book nobody reads.
- Karl Schriftgiesser, 1955The Farmer From MernaHow State Farm got built by insuring the customers every other insurer had already priced as bad.
- Randall L. Patton, 2002Shaw Industries: A HistoryCarpet. A commodity nobody can tell apart, and somebody built a moat in it anyway.
- Robert L. Bacon, 1956Secrets of Professional Turf BettingHorse racing, 1956, and a cult book among people who have never placed a bet.
- Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson, 2011Iron Will: Cleveland-Cliffs and the Mining of Iron OreA hundred and fifty years of one company surviving an industry that killed almost everybody in it.
- Colin Cameron, 2009You Bet: The Betfair StorySomebody built a market where there had only ever been a middleman, and the middlemen have still not forgiven it.
- Joel Greenblatt, 2005The Little Book That Beats the MarketA fine book, and that is the problem.
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The rest of it arrives when I write it.
One decision, the number it cost, and the rule I kept. Nothing else in between.
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