Checklist, Temperament + Capstone

Learning objectives

By the end you can:

1. Make the intellectual case for a written checklist: explain Gawande's distinction between errors of ignorance and errors of ineptitude, why checklists attack the second, why they catch "the dumb, avoidable, recurring stuff" rather than the exotic, and cite the surgical, aviation, and ICU evidence that a five-to-nine-item list changes outcomes even for world-class experts.
2. Run the personal mistake-to-checklist loop: take a real investing mistake (yours or a documented one), find its root cause rather than its surface symptom, and write a single pointed checklist question that would have caught it before the decision, in the manner of Pabrai's and Spier's mistake-derived lists.
3. Distinguish a killer checklist from a dead one: build a list that is short, specific, veto-shaped, and run as a pause at the end of your analysis (do-confirm), not a hundred-item scoring sheet or a mechanical buy-signal.
4. Operate a decision journal as the core instrument of a process: record thesis, disconfirming evidence, the base rate, a numeric confidence, and your "what would change my mind" before the outcome is known, never edit it after, and explain why this single discipline is the engine of calibration (the bridge to M9.04).
5. Compute and interpret calibration: bucket your probabilistic predictions, judge whether you are over- or under-confident, compute a Brier score, and state why scoring reasoning over outcome is the only honest scoreboard.
6. Design your environment (Spier): specify the information diet, the peer group, the physical and structural rules (the checking-the-price cure, the "don't sell for a set number of days" rule, starting from least-biased sources) that make discipline structural rather than a daily act of will.
7. Argue temperament over intellect: explain Buffett's claim that above ordinary intelligence the binding constraint is temperament, name the components (patience, decisiveness, equanimity in drawdowns, independence, intellectual honesty), quantify why avoiding large permanent losses matters (the drawdown-recovery asymmetry and the behavior gap), and say honestly how much of temperament is trainable versus innate.
8. Complete a behavioral self-audit and assemble Checklist v1: work a structured questionnaire that identifies your own dominant biases from the M6.04 catalog, convert each into a specific checklist item or environment fix, and assemble your personal investment checklist v1 from the program's master template plus your own logged items. Then run the finalized Mental-Model & Moat Checklist end to end on one real company.

Prerequisites & connections

Builds on. M6.04: the bias catalog is the raw material of the self-audit; every checklist item and environment rule here exists to disarm a specific tendency you met there (anchoring → stale price targets; confirmation → one-sided research; loss aversion → riding losers and panic-selling; overconfidence → oversizing; herding → buying at the top). M6.03: process-over-outcome, base rates and the outside view, expected value, and ruin-avoidance are the decision-quality standards the journal records and the calibration score measures; "what would change my mind" is Bayesian updating made operational. M6.01–M6.02: the schools you resonated with become lines in your checklist, and their masters (Graham's "the investor's chief problem is likely himself," Klarman's margin of safety, Marks's second-level thinking, Pabrai's asymmetry) are quoted here as temperament, not just technique. M0.04: the knowledge system installed in week 3 (atomic notes, company files, the checklist, the decision journal): this is where the checklist and journal components graduate from templates into instruments you have populated with your own mistakes. M2 and M3 supply the analytical content the checklist gates. You cannot check "have I run the quality-of-earnings screen" or "is ROIC durably above WACC" until you can do those things by hand.

Feeds forward. M7 milestone (the gate, week 52, ~1 year in): checklist v1 filed and behavioral self-audit written. Phase 7 (Macro): the checklist's macro-overlay line and the "what's priced in" discipline carry straight into the dashboard you build; temperament in drawdowns is the behavioral counterpart to Marks's cycles. M8.04: the deep dive's Day 3 runs your checklist and your pre-mortem; the Mental-Model & Moat Checklist finalized here is the spine of the deep-dive workbook. M9.04: the process capstone completes the loop opened here: checklist → journal → quarterly review → calibration, run as one repeatable machine over ≥10 journaled decisions and a full simulator season; the calibration data you begin logging now is what M9.04 grades. M9.01–M9.03: position sizing, when to sell, and your mistake taxonomy all draw on the journal you start populating here. Competency C9 ("investor's temperament and process") is largely built and certified across this module and M9.04. This is where the behavioral edge stops being a topic and becomes your operating system.