Nick and Zak's Adventures in Capitalism: Words of Wisdom from the Nomad Partnership Letters

by The Rational Cloner

Using the letters Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria wrote to their partners between 2001 and 2013, Nick and Zak's Adventures in Capitalism provides a unique perspective on the ideas that helped the Nomad Partnership turn $1 into $10 over a span of 13 years (a 20.8% annualized return vs. a 6.5% for the MSCI World Index).

The letters spotlight their approach, which focuses on contrarian stock picking, uncovering high-quality business models and super high-quality thinkers, avoiding psychological causes of investor misjudgement, and thinking like Richard Zeckhauser.

Similar to Jeremy Miller’s Warren Buffett’s Ground Rules, each chapter in this book centers around a single idea or theme from the letters and starts out with some summary points and brief commentary by the author, followed by excerpts from the letters themselves.

Part I consists of 40 chapters (or topics) ranging from incentives to scale economies shared to how to think about mistakes.Part II consists of 18 case studies extracted from the letters discussing specific investment ideas, including Costco, Amazon, and AirAsia.
Happy cloning.

325 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 16, 2022

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have preferred this been a chronological reprint of the letters. The thematic approach had lots of parts that overlapped and did not allow me to see Sleep's thought process evolve over time.

I felt underwhelmed having heard how good these letters are. The only novel takeaway here is scale economies shared, which is relatively simple to pick up. The rest feels like Munger-style platitudes.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an enjoyable read of you want to dive deeply into some of Nomad’s primary concepts. While it attempts to be similarly written to The Warren Buffett Ground Rules it doesn’t do the job quite as well. There is too much repeated content. I still think it’s a good book that gets to the essence of what Nick and Zak were trying to do in a more concentrated approach compared to reading the letters as is.

[Jørgen Astrup · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable read! A lot of insights and sound advice. Finding uniqe scalable busniesses and long-term thinking is fantastic described in the letters.
Cool advice on how to set up a partnership in a sound way, a lot of good stuff in the letters. I enjoyed how the writer had put everything in chapters and good structure.
Enjoyed the case section a lot.
Some repetition here and there, but still gets 5 out of 5 stars.

[Brendan Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for investors. A lot can be learned from reading through Nick and Zak's letters over the years, along with the summaries provided in this book.

[Tyler Pellom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I figure you need this wisdom and not much else to be a successful investor.