Kyle Harrison
concept

Trends

Trends

Across the corpus, “trends” carries a deliberately ambivalent charge — sometimes the thing to ride, sometimes the thing to ignore. Kyle’s own note on Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters reframes investing as the work of tracking “massive Trends and the companies riding them,” and a related note observes that rapid environmental changes (recession, COVID) “can expose trends that were likely already happening but that may have been accelerated.” Yet Warren Buffett’s letters cut the other way too: Berkshire has “no master strategy, no corporate planners delivering us insights about socioeconomic trends,” and Buffett warns against becoming “mesmerized by prospective near-term earnings or recent trends in earnings.”

How To Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital gives the operating playbook: don’t chase the trend itself, sell pickaxes to gold miners — “the gold mine is the hot trend… the pickax is the part of the iceberg below the water… that the hot trend relies on to function.” This connects to Forecasting, where the wiki notes most financiers “extrapolate trends from the past, disregarding the risk of extreme ‘tail’ events,” while venture capitalists look instead for radical departures. The technology-specific case lives at Internet Trends. On the people side, Matt Curwood flags water transportation and big-city commuter services as the key mobility trends to watch.

Where this appears

  • Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters — Buffett’s caution against being “mesmerized” by recent earnings trends; Kyle’s note on tracking massive trends and the companies riding them.
  • How To Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital — “selling pickaxes to gold miners”: profit off the infrastructure behind a hot trend, not the trend itself.
  • Forecasting — financiers extrapolate past trends and miss tail events; VCs look for radical departures.
  • Internet Trends — the tech-specific bucket (YC Demo Day “next big trends in tech,” etc.).
  • Matt Curwood — flags water transportation and commuter services as key mobility trends.

Quick Capture links — June 18, 2026

Links Kyle saved to this topic on June 18, 2026 (manual capture batch).

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