I’ve been working on a blog post called the Epistemology of Investing for about the past year. Now, epistemology is a ten-dollar word that those — like me — with five dollar brains rarely sling around, but sometimes I think investing could be called applied epistemology.

As investors — specifically, investors in opaque, illiquid markets — we spend our days asking the epistemological questions: What do we know about our investments, companies, markets, people? How do we come to know what we know? What are the sources and limits of our knowledge? How are our beliefs different from The Truth? 

Said another way: What investing hypotheses do we form? How do we form them? And how do we seek out, analyze, and integrate the data we use to test th...

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Since the Great Equity Meltdown, Landmark Partners has noticed an increasing focus on liquidity among leading institutional investors. In the past, most investors used a variety of asset allocation models to optimize their risk-adjusted returns. For some investors with successful alternative investment programs, this led to substantial commitments to illiquid assets.

Although the asset allocations were viewed as a fraction of the overall portfolio, the commitments were made in absolute dollars. When the markets fell in late 2008 and early 2009, these commitments came to represent an unexpectedly large fraction of the overall portfolio value. In some cases, investors faced a real risk that they would not have sufficient liquidity to pay their capital calls and still generate portf...

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The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill (Colorado Bill HB 10-1193) that basically seeks to improve the state’s ability to collect use tax on internet sales. This is a tax that most buyers of the covered products technically should be paying anyway but are rarely collected. Most people think those things they buy online are tax-free when really they were supposed to have paid the tax on their own rather than having it collected by the retailer. As we all know, people rarely do.

Colorado and other states have tried to fix this for a couple primary reasons. The first is simply money. They’d like to collect more revenue. The second is to level the playing field for in-state companies. It’s not fair competition if local companies effectively have to charge buyers more fo...

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