Profitable Companies and Where to Look

I am not sure what industries I want to concentrate on fishing as I am a generalist and still learning. The top profitable companies shown above are energy, technology, finance, healthcare, auto, retail, telecoms, and household products. The map is not the territory. That is just one year and gives no thought to the capital employed to achieve those profits and like Malone says:

“It’s not about earnings, it’s about wealth creation and levered cash-flow growth. Tell them you don’t care about earnings..” “The first thing you do is make sure you have enough juice to survive and you don’t have any credit issues that are going to bite you in the near term, and that you’ve thought about how you manage your way through those issues.” “I used to go to shareholder meetings and someone would ask about earnings, and I’d say, ‘I think you’re in the wrong meeting.’ That’s the wrong metric. In fact, in the cable industry, if you start generating earnings that means you’ve stopped growing and the government is now participating in what otherwise should be your growth metric.”

Like Malone, the masters that have influenced me most are Buffett and Munger, Lynch, Greenblatt, Pabrai, Berkowitz, Schloss, Bill Miller, Einhorn, Ackman, Klarman, Burry, Prem Watsa, Francis Chou, Li Liu, Zell, Howard Marks, Rochon, Chuck Akre, Tom Gayner, Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria, Spier, Terry Smith. I will do well to reread and contemplate their ideas. And always there are many more beyond what I know and want to know. The things I don't know that I don't know.