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Cunningham & Cuba, The Warren Buffett Shareholder -Book Review
I have often marveled at the number of books written about all things Buffett and Berkshire. Reading The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Harriman House, 2018), I learned one reason for this profusion: they sell. In 2005 The Bookworm, an Omaha bookstore that is the only non-Berkshire affiliated booth at the annual meetings, sold 3,500 copies, or 8.5 tons!, of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. The bookstore at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, which offers books that Buffett and Munger recommend at each annual meeting, on at least one occasion needed the police to control the crowd. And book signings regularly take place during these meetings in an Omaha Dairy Queen. This is, I guess, what happens when Warren Buffett says, in response to a question about what a young person should do to become a great investor, “Read everything you can.” And when he claims to have read every book in the Omaha Public Library with the word finance in the title by the age of ten, some twice.
The latest addition to the Buffett/Berkshire corpus is a collection of 40 reminiscences about Berkshire annual meetings. One theme running throughout is the people who attend, the relationships that are formed and cemented, the “faith” that is deepened. Yes, attendees hear Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger answer questions, but many of the shareholders are familiar with what they’re likely to say. After all, Berkshire has made only small tweaks to its investing principles over the years. Moreover, they could sit at home and watch streaming video of the meeting. The draw is not so much the words as the ethos and the people. Attendees describe the experience in religious terms as a pilgrimage or a revival meeting, in mundane terms as an oil change (admittedly, for the soul).
Berkshire has a relationship with its shareholders that no other company does. And thus its shareholder meetings are unique. The Warren Buffett Shareholder demonstrates just why that is and why people keep going back, year after year. It’s hard not to feel better having read it.
Challenges/Rewards
CHALLENGE
Getting attention.
REWARD
Barrier to entry nonexistent.
CHALLENGE
Getting publicity.
REWARD
Publicity is nearly irrelevant and the means of spreading the word are at your fingertips.
CHALLENGE
Making money.
REWARD
Successful artists are making more money in adjusted dollars than they ever were, just not as much as bankers or techies. Furthermore, there are many avenues of revenue. Endorsements, merch, privates…and live pays better than ever before.
CHALLENGE
Only Top Forty counts/can make you go nuclear. (more…)
Think the Fed Destroyed the Dollar?
JPMorgan Chase :Markets are overbought
“Although the SEC fraud case does not have direct implications outside Financials, the rise in uncertainty is negative for equities at a time when equity markets are overbought. Technicals have been pointing to overbought equity markets for some time now and Friday’s correction has the potential to drag the S&P 500 down toward 1175 in the near term. But our technical strategists see very little chance of the S&P 500 falling below 1150, i.e., the January high, over the coming weeks.”
Source: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Public, NYSE:JPM)
Please note that JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Public, NYSE:JPM) has been dead right on their market calls, as the Pragmatic Capitalist points out in his website, “few of the big banks have traded the recovery as well as JP Morgan. They nailed the reflation trade and they have subsequently been dead right about the reflation trade transforming into the recovery trade. They’ve recommended that investors pile into the highest risk names in the market and its been a winning trade since.”
Trade To Win, Not To Lose!
When athletes are consumed by not losing rather than by winning, the game is over, often before it has even started. The same precept applies to trading. As crazy as it sounds, most traders aren’t making the money they could be — and the reason, I’d argue, is the fear of losing it. Traders are far too worried about giving money back. This paralyzing phobia can transform talented, elite professionals into disappointing underperformers.
How many times have you been up in a trade and started to think about the money? Your head tells you to bank it quickly and then play it safe. After all, you made your mark for the day, or even the week, so your job is complete. That’s not the mark of a trader; that’s the mark of an accountant.
Trading is an occupation based on fleeting moments of opportunity. (more…)
This is Not For Traders ,This For Life
Focus in Trading
Self-Discipline in Trading
Having self-discipline is having the ability to follow through on your plans and goals. Often times we get tugged in various directions and enticed by making choices that don’t help us along our path to our goals and fulfillment.
“The path of least resistance is what makes all rivers and some men crooked.”
– Napoleon Hill
Self-discipline is the ability to make the conscious choice (ultimately it becomes a habit) of doing the thing that will move you towards your goal – and sometimes it’s the hard or unnatural or unpopular thing to do. It’s foregoing instant gratification for the longer term objective. Typically, however, people operate on autopilot and this is dangerous when you have not yet developed the right ‘habits’ for success.
In the trading game, you must have self-discipline. You must look at the entire forest and not focus on one tree. If you get too caught up in each and every trade, you will lose sight of the larger goal.
The key is to care a lot about your overall trading progress, but not care too much about any individual trade.
Your Identity also plays a huge role in this because if you see yourself as someone who lacks self-discipline, then all the will power in the world will not overpower this. You are someone, in your mind, who lacks self-discipline.
So the key components to have self-discipline in Trading are: (more…)