The changes in solar technology over the past few decades have been truly impressive. The failures of solar businesses have been equally impressive. But parts of the industry are transitioning into a more mature business. The story is no longer all about growth. Now it’s also about stability and predictability. The startup phase is over…

From my perspective, if you assume that a company has no major operational or financial stability problems, this is the ideal capital allocation priority:

1. Invest in the company’s internal growth

2. Buy other businesses

3. Return capital to shareholders

Choosing the right mix of those three options is a major part of running a business, and evaluating that choice is a big part of fundamental style investing. But stock buybacks are the most controversial.

Looking for new investment ideas is such an intuitive part of an experienced investor’s research that it is often an afterthought. But it is a necessary part of the investment process. Even if you’ve been right every time, the curse of “yesterday’s winners” means that what was good in the past might not be appropriate for the future. Technology investors are painfully aware of this fact, but it’s common for “old economy” companies too. As an industry matures, or as a business becomes bigger, it will naturally slow down. These types of changes make it essential to continue looking for something new.

As investors, we can always hope to identify future antitrust targets—industry giants before they become giants—but we are most likely to find the companies that have already won. This is where regulatory risk becomes a real concern. What happens next? It may be similar to what has happened in the past.

A few months ago, while watching a video about the history of an obscure piece of old technology, I noticed a news blurb that sounds unbelievable. In a 1997 issue of Computer World magazine, this highlighted quote caught my attention: “Since Amelio took over as Apple’s chairman and CEO, the company has posted losses totaling more than $1.6 billion.” … No one could have predicted what would happen next, and certainly no one at that time could imagine that Apple would someday become the largest company in the world.

The future of retail is overwhelmingly considered to be “e-tail”, but it still needs to adjust to the fundamental desires of retail customers. Consumers are becoming more price-conscious, more socially aware, and more environmentally conscious.

These trends also exist in fashion, where a wave of recently-public companies has been capturing this part of the online clothing market. It’s a much earlier stage than where I normally look for new investments (I prefer to wait until after some of them go out of business or combine with each other), but there are attractive features to these businesses…

The unusual economic conditions over the past few years have changed market perceptions and short-term business performance (in both directions), but the big long-term themes driving the fintech sector will continue to move forward. From that perspective, it seems like a good time to review some of these trends. There are three big ideas in fintech that I’m currently thinking about:

• Cash or card

• Online and mobile

• Centralized or decentralized

What all three of them have in common is the increasing digitization of money and money transfer systems.

My research is qualitative and my focus is primarily on the big economic picture. I prefer to talk about industries more than individual companies, but this is a case where one company is so far ahead that it is the industry. And it’s my favorite type of industry—one that nobody ever thinks about. I found it, like most people, by accident.

The hardest question for investors is asking how much of their returns come from skill and how much comes from sitting on the right side of a lucky trend. The answer doesn’t always matter. The most important thing is the willingness to ask that question in the first place. Because asking that question helps improve the investment process. And this is how I introduce pieces of psychology into my investment models. It’s how I think about thinking.

There is wide agreement that consumers are generally hurt by high inflation, but does business really suffer from inflation? (Do rising prices hurt business?) This can be true if inflation is bad enough, but even this effect will be specific to an industry or an individual company. Some manufacturers will get squeezed if their costs go up faster than they can raise prices, but better businesses are able to raise their prices in line with rising costs. Good businesses should be able to raise their prices even faster than rising costs, while the best businesses are in a position to take a cut from transactions and benefit from inflation simply by the default of their existence. Moderate or high inflation is not a serious risk for a high quality company.