Over the past decade, roughly 90% of active equity fund managers failed to beat their benchmarks.

The figure should unsettle anyone who invests in individual stocks. After all, these were not novice retail traders chasing headlines. They were seasoned, highly compensated professionals operating with nearly every advantage most investors lack: research, data, tools, institutional access, and so on.

Or, as Charlie Munger once put it, with his usual subtlety: “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who thinks it’s easy is stupid.” Still, the task may not be quite as intractable as the headline suggests.

In my view, the industry’s underperformance is largely explained by three structural forces. Two receive most of the attention; the third, though rarely discussed, is especially important to Aquitaine’s approach.

First, shrinking time horizons. When Warren Buffett began his career in the 1950s, the average holding period for stocks was approximately seven years. Today, it is less than a year for mutual funds and a mere three to six months for hedge funds. As Bill Ackman observed:

Second, behavioral biases. This subject hardly needs lengthy treatment; it is enough to say that these biases are only amplified by the diminishing tolerance for even short stretches of underperformance.

Finally, and most saliently for our purposes, there is the avoidance of complexity. One of the great misconceptions in modern finance is that superior long-term returns can be achieved while avoiding complexity—or even that avoiding complexity is the most reliable way to achieve them.

Ironically, no one has done more to reinforce this idea than Buffett himself, albeit unintentionally. He famously keeps a “too-hard” pile on his desk and says things like: “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars; I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over,” and, “Overall, we’ve done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them.”

The lesson is astute. The popular interpretation is not.

What is easy to overlook here is that what qualifies as a “1-foot bar” for Buffett is not a 1-foot bar for the rest of us. It is probably closer to a 7-foot bar for most investors (if we are being honest) and still a 2- or 3-foot bar even for the very best.

More importantly, a preference for 1-foot bars does not mean avoiding 2-, 3-, or 4-foot bars when the opportunity justifies the work. That point matters because the metaphor—combined with Buffett’s extraordinary intellect—can create a false impression of ease, even effortlessness. But he has suggested the opposite:

The goal, then, is not to avoid confusion—the most fertile source of mispricings—but to embrace it selectively, rigorously, and with a clear sense of what can actually be understood.

Few investors have exemplified this better than Joel Greenblatt, who once described reading a several-hundred-page corporate filing partly because he assumed nobody else would bother. That, in a sentence, is the name of the game.

Why Aquitaine?

Hi, I’m Luke. I’m a former buyside analyst and CFA charterholder who has spent the better part of a decade making sense of nuanced equity situations. Over time, I’ve realized that if a business’s trajectory is easy to forecast, it rarely holds my attention for long—and it usually is not meaningfully mispriced, either.

Aquitaine’s objective is to identify situations where confusion prevails, but where clarity can be found through rigorous work. Then comes the harder part: transforming that complexity into actionable insight.

That means providing enough context, nuance, and analytical scaffolding to move from a merely plausible thesis to real conviction—without forcing readers to suffer through the entire swamp themselves.

Above all, this requires understanding why reasonable investors might disagree. That may sound obvious. But too many investment writeups either demonstrate a poor understanding of the opposing view, or politely escort it to the weakest possible version of itself before declaring victory.

Aquitaine tries to do the opposite—because you can’t invest intelligently without knowing exactly what you’re betting against.

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What is “Aquitaine”?

Aquitaine (pronounced Ack-wit-tain) is a historical region in southwestern France famed for its wine. Its first vineyards were planted by the Romans two thousand years ago. Today, it is widely considered one of the world’s most prestigious and valuable wine-producing areas.

The name serves as a dual reminder of Aquitaine’s investment philosophy.

First, never lose sight of the big picture. As discussed above, it has never been more important—or more rewarding—to invest with a genuinely long-term view.

Second, learn from history. “It’s good to learn from your mistakes,” Charlie Munger once quipped. “It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

At Aquitaine, I try to do both—while limiting opportunities for the former, naturally.