The Lenses

Six investors. Six ways of seeing a business.

Each lens is a mental model — a way of interrogating a company that one of history's great investors actually used. Pick the lens that fits the question you're trying to answer.

Warren Buffett

Buy a wonderful company at a fair price.

Buffett looks for businesses with durable competitive advantages — what he calls economic moats. He wants companies that can compound capital for decades with minimal capital expenditure, run by honest and capable management, available at a price that gives a margin of safety.

He thinks in 10-year frames. Most stocks are in his “too hard” pile. The few that aren't, he holds forever.

In his words

“Our favorite holding period is forever.”

Asks: “Will this business be earning more in 10 years?”

Best for analyzing

Consumer brands with pricing power (KO, AAPL)
High-quality compounders with predictable cash flows
Insurance and financial businesses with long-tail liabilities

Charlie Munger

Invert, always invert.

Munger applies a latticework of mental models from psychology, biology, math, and engineering. He looks for businesses that are simple to understand, dominant in their niche, and run by managers who think like owners. He's brutally honest about what he doesn't understand.

His favorite move is to put a company in the “too hard pile” and walk away. The biggest investing mistakes, he says, come from analyzing things you don't understand.

In his words

“Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.”

Asks: “What can possibly go wrong here?”

Best for analyzing

Businesses that look complex on the surface (semiconductors, biotech)
Management quality assessment
Identifying psychological biases in your own thesis

Benjamin Graham

Margin of safety is everything.

Graham, the father of value investing, focused on quantifiable margin of safety. He bought companies trading below their tangible book value, with strong balance sheets, conservative debt, and consistent earnings — what he called “net-nets” and “defensive investments.”

He distrusted growth narratives and management storytelling. He wanted numbers he could verify on the balance sheet today.

In his words

“Mr. Market is there to serve you, not to instruct you.”

Asks: “What does the balance sheet protect?”

Best for analyzing

Deep value, asset-heavy businesses
Cyclical companies at the bottom of their cycle
Special situations and balance sheet plays

Peter Lynch

Invest in what you know.

Lynch built a 29% annual return at Magellan by buying companies he saw working in everyday life — restaurants he ate at, products his wife bought, factories near his hometown. He categorized stocks into six buckets: slow growers, stalwarts, fast growers, cyclicals, turnarounds, and asset plays — and analyzed each on its own terms.

He visited companies. He talked to managers. He believed the individual investor's edge over Wall Street was knowledge of products, services, and trends from the ground up.

In his words

“Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it's doing.”

Asks: “Is this a stalwart, fast grower, or something else?”

Best for analyzing

Consumer-facing companies (restaurants, retail, apps)
Fast growers in early-stage markets
Underfollowed mid-caps with long runways

Howard Marks

It's not what you buy. It's what you pay.

Marks thinks in cycles. Every market, every asset class, every sentiment swings between greed and fear. The investor's job is not to predict the cycle, but to know where you are in it — and to act accordingly. He calls this “second-level thinking”: going beyond the consensus view to ask what's already priced in.

He's deeply skeptical of certainty. He prefers asymmetric bets where the downside is limited and the upside is large.

In his words

“There are no bad assets, only bad prices.”

Asks: “Where are we in the cycle?”

Best for analyzing

Distressed debt and credit cycles
Sentiment-driven swings (tech bubble, real estate)
Risk/reward asymmetry in any asset

Li Lu

The third civilization — Eastern wisdom meets Western capital.

Li Lu, who runs Himalaya Capital and was endorsed by Charlie Munger as one of the great investors of his generation, looks for companies with permanent moats, reasonable prices, and management with deep integrity. He combines Buffett-Munger value investing with a long-term, civilizational view of how economies and societies evolve.

He focuses on a small number of high-conviction positions and holds them for decades. He thinks in terms of compounding knowledge, not just capital.

In his words

“The most important thing is to know yourself — your circle of competence, your temperament, and your time horizon.”

Asks: “Does this company have permanent value?”

Best for analyzing

High-quality compounders in emerging markets
Long-duration thesis stocks (10+ years)
Cross-border / multi-civilization plays

Educational framework only. The lenses are interpretations of each investor's publicly stated philosophy and do not represent their personal investment advice.