A summary of this week’s best articles. Follow us on Twitter (@intrinsicinv) for similar ongoing posts and shares.

Why crude oil prices keep taking us by surprise (Brad Plumer, Vox)

Referencing a recent paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Brad highlights four reasons oil prices continue to surprise investors. Similar to global macro forecasting, the inability to accurately forecast the impact of technology and political crises are two prominent causes.

Bruce Greenwald: From Graham to Buffett and on to Modern Value Investing (HurricaneCapital)

HurricaneCapital shares a video from Columbia Business School’s centennial celebration. They highlight a portion of the video that focuses on Bruce Greenwald’s thoughts on Warren Buffet’s approach and the development of modern value investing.

16 Favorite annual letters from an investor who’s read more than 1,000 (Jason Zweig)

Building upon an article Jason wrote earlier this month (It’s time for investors to re-learn the lost art of reading), he lists out the first half (sorted alphabetically) of noteworthy annual letters to shareholders. One shareholder letter that’s not included on the list, but we feel is worth reading, is Jeff Bezos’ letter in Amazon’s 2004 Annual Report. We referenced it in our recent posting about ROIC, which can be found here.

Billing by Millionths of Pennies, Cloud Computing’s Giants Take In Billions (Quentin Hardy, NYT)

Amazon Web Services has become a toll taker. Starting late last year, Amazon started charging customers a very small amount (millionths of a penny) for each computer cycle (or line of code) they run on Amazon’s servers. Other companies, such as Microsoft, are starting to follow suit.

 

For more information about positions owned by Ensemble Capital on behalf of clients as well as additional disclosure information related to this post, please CLICK HERE.

While we do not accept public comments on this blog for compliance reasons, we encourage readers to contact us with their thoughts.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. All investments in securities carry risks, including the risk of losing one’s entire investment. The opinions expressed within this blog post are as of the date of publication and are provided for informational purposes only. Content will not be updated after publication and should not be considered current after the publication date. All opinions are subject to change without notice and due to changes in the market or economic conditions may not necessarily come to pass. Nothing contained herein should be construed as a comprehensive statement of the matters discussed, considered investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any securities, and no investment decision should be made based solely on any information provided herein. Links to third party content are included for convenience only, we do not endorse, sponsor, or recommend any of the third parties or their websites and do not guarantee the adequacy of information contained within their websites. Please follow the link above for additional disclosure information.