Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays by Joon Yun, MD, Third Edition
Collection of essays on investing, healthcare, and life from the unique perspective of Dr. Joon Yun, a renown investor and thinker. Dr. Yun is President of Palo Alto Investors, LLC, a hedge fund founded in 1989 with over $1 billion in assets under management. Dr. Yun has been a healthcare specialist at the firm for 15 years and has been an early investor in companies that develop drugs and devices for unmet medical needs. Dr. Yun is board certified in Radiology and served on the clinical staff at Stanford Hospital from 2000-2006. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1990 and his M.D. from Duke Medical School in 1994. He has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and is a founder of Palo Alto Institute, a nonprofit foundation and think tank. Dr. Yun has published numerous patents as well as medical and business articles. His writing covers several topics, including evolution, investing, and the future of healthcare. Dr. Yun is a contributor to Forbes and Evolution: This View of Life.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays by Joon Yun, MD, Second Edition
Collection of essays on investing, healthcare, and life from the unique perspective of Dr. Joon Yun, a renown investor and thinker. Dr. Yun is President of Palo Alto Investors, LLC, a hedge fund founded in 1989 with over $1 billion in assets under management. Dr. Yun has been a healthcare specialist at the firm for 15 years and has been an early investor in companies that develop drugs and devices for unmet medical needs. Dr. Yun is board certified in Radiology and served on the clinical staff at Stanford Hospital from 2000-2006. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1990 and his M.D. from Duke Medical School in 1994. He has served on corporate and nonprofit boards and is a founder of Palo Alto Institute, a nonprofit foundation and think tank. Dr. Yun has published numerous patents as well as medical and business articles. His writing covers several topics, including evolution, investing, and the future of healthcare. Dr. Yun is a contributor to Forbes and Evolution: This View of Life.
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Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays by Joon Yun, MD
Hiding In Plain Sight is a collection of essays that I have written on investing, healthcare, and life.
A Little Experiment
For the sake of experiment, read the next sentence once, while counting the number of “f”s that you see.
“Five-winged flies are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years.”
Most likely, you counted an “f” in each of the more vibrant words of the sentence: “five,” “flies” and “scientific.” Most people only see these three “f”s, when in fact there are six. The other “f”s are hidden in the unassuming preposition “of”. Your mind probably skipped over each “of” because it processed these words without absorbing the raw information of the letters that composed them.
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Day 222: Joon Yun
(From The Get Inspired! Project)
“I go about my day really not thinking about ‘Do I know what I want?’ It’s more about ‘Am I available to what’s going on in the moment?’ And it’s a very nonlinear path, but it is much more … because I’m vulnerable and I don’t know where we’re going, I’m much more aware, and I find solutions to questions I wasn’t even asking.”
Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Joon, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Joon Yun: Yes, my name is Joon Yun. I am President of Palo Alto Investors, an investment management firm located in California, and I’m a physician by background. I ran healthcare investing at a firm for about 10 years, and I’ve been overseeing the firm for the last 2 years.
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The Next Black Swan: Global Depopulation
We’ve all heard the thesis on real estate investing: “They’re not making any more land.” It turns out that before too long we may not be making enough people either.
Global population has been expanding since antiquity, interrupted by wars, disasters, pandemics, and famine. Malthusian predictions of overpopulation, unsustainability, and resource depletion have also been a part of conventional wisdom since antiquity and remain popular today (see Paul Gilding’s “The Earth is Full” TED talk). It is, after all, a common trait of the human mind to assume that the past is an accurate predictor of the future.
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Value Investing Getting Too Crowded? Another Golden Age of Growth Investing Is On The Way
One of the landmark events on the calendar of investors took place last month—the Value Investing Congress in New York. But it behooves us to remember that an alternative approach also exists—that of growth investing.
While the two styles share many common principles, growth investing focuses on identifying companies with above-average growth rates, whose share prices today are considered inexpensive relative to their intrinsic value over the long term.
The dearth of investors who publicly tout the principles of growth investing is one sign that its golden age may now be upon us. The Wikipedia entry on “Value investing” lists more than a dozen current well-known value investors including Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett. Value investing is a sensible discipline, and its success has attracted many acolytes. When too many people are performing the same analysis and arrive at the same conclusion, however, it becomes the crowded trade.
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Another Golden Age of Growth Investing
One of the landmark events on the calendar of investors takes place this week — the Value Investing Congress in New York. But it behooves us to remember that an alternative yet equally tenable approach also exists — that of growth investing. While the two styles share many common principles, growth investing focuses on identifying companies with above-average growth rates, whose share prices today are considered inexpensive relative to their intrinsic value over the long term.
The dearth of investors who publicly tout the principles of growth investing is one sign that its golden age may now be upon us. The Wikipedia entry on “Value investing” lists more than a dozen current well-known value investors including Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett. Value investing is a sensible discipline, and its success has attracted many acolytes. When too many people are performing the same analysis and arrive at the same conclusion, however, it becomes the crowded trade. By contrast, the only investor listed in the Wikipedia entry for “Growth investing” is Thomas Rowe Price, Jr., who died many years ago. Philip Fisher, another legend whose Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits is generally considered to be the reference work on growth investing, goes entirely unmentioned.
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Barron’s: What the Doctor Ordered
A doctor-turned-stockpicker says he’s bearish on stents.
By MARK VEVERKA
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A MEDICAL DOCTOR to pick healthcare and biotech stocks, but it doesn’t hurt.
Joon Yun has been managing money for only nine years, but his 12 years as a radiologist — mostly at Stanford University Medical Center — have served him well in his second career as a partner of Palo Alto Investors in Palo Alto, Calif., an 18-year-old hedge fund with about $1.5 billion under management, focused mostly on small-cap growth. “Radiology is sort of similar to investing,” he says. “You’re making decisions based on limited information and looking for patterns.”
The graduate of Harvard and of Duke Medical School hadn’t been looking to leave his day job. But when a colleague had to bail on an interview with Palo Alto, which was seeking a doctor to oversee healthcare investing, Yun filled in on a whim. The rest is history.
Since joining PAI, Yun has never had a down year. The three-year return of Palo Alto’s $250 million micro-cap fund, heavily weighted toward healthcare and biotech, is nearly 23%. Over five years, the return is close to 30%.
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