For a long time, I believed the most exciting place to invest was wherever the growth charts looked like a rocket launch. You know the kind of stocks I’m talking about. The companies with revenue curves that look like someone accidentally turned the vertical axis to “moon.” The CEOs talk about “total addressable markets” the size of continents. Every quarterly report promises that the future will be bigger, faster, and infinitely more disruptive. And for a while, I chased those stories. I watched markets crown new darlings every year—electric vehicles, cloud software, AI tools, biotech miracles, crypto platforms, space companies, food tech, fintech, and whatever other buzzword Wall Street stapled onto a PowerPoint deck. The rule seemed simple: Find the fastest growers. Buy the future. Ride the hype. But over time I noticed something strange. The longer I stayed in markets, the more the best opportunities seemed to appear somewhere completely different. Not in the flashy startu...
Why I Care More About Cash Flow Than Almost Anything Else If there’s one lesson the market has drilled into my head over the years, it’s this: Cash flow tells the truth. Everything else in finance can be dressed up. Earnings can be massaged. Narratives can be spun. Analysts can debate “adjusted” numbers until the conversation resembles a philosophical seminar about accounting metaphysics. But cash flow? Cash flow is brutally honest. Either money is coming in… or it isn’t. And when I think about cash flow resilience and sustainable distribution growth , I’m really thinking about the core question that drives almost every investment decision I make: Can this business keep paying me — and keep increasing those payments — no matter what the economy decides to throw at it? Because if the answer is yes, I’m interested. If the answer is maybe, I’m cautious. And if the answer is no, I’m gone faster than a dividend right before a cut. My Obsession With Durable Cash I didn’t always...