Warren Buffett says that one of the luckiest days of his life was when he was 19-years-old and happened to have picked up Benjamin Graham’s book, The Intelligent Investor.
That book changed his investment philosophy and his whole life.
He says that had it not been for the book, he would’ve been a different person at a different place.
Warren Buffett released his annual letter (PDF file, Adobe Acrobat required) to Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B ) on Saturday. If you have the time, it’s worth reading the whole thing. If not, here are 25 important quotes.
On value: “The logic is simple: If you are going to be a netbuyer of stocks in the future, either directly with your own money or indirectly (through your ownership of a company that is repurchasing shares), you are hurt when stocks rise. You benefit when stocks swoon. Emotions, however, too often complicate the matter: Most people, including those who will be net buyers in the future, take comfort in seeing stock prices advance. These shareholders resemble a commuter who rejoices after the price of gas increases, simply because his tank contains a day’s supply.”
On market moves: “Here a confession is in order: In my early days I, too, rejoiced when the market rose. Then I read Chapter Eight of Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the chapter dealing with how investors should view fluctuations in stock prices. Immediately the scales fell from my eyes, and low prices became my friend. Picking up that book was one of the luckiest moments in my life.”
On foreclosures: “A largely unnoted fact: Large numbers of people who have ‘lost’ their house through foreclosure have actually realized a profit because they carried out refinancings earlier that gave them cash in excess of their cost. In these cases, the evicted homeowner was the winner, and the victim was the lender.”
On share buybacks: “The first law of capital allocation — whether the money is slated for acquisitions or share repurchases — is that what is smart at one price is dumb at another.”
On predicting turnarounds: “Last year, I told you that ‘a housing recovery will probably begin within a year or so.’ I was dead wrong.” (more…)
Graham and Dodd’s Definition of SpeculationIn their 1934 classic text, Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd provided a general definition of speculation: “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”
By this definition, most people who buy stocks are speculators. We can attempt to sharpen Graham and Dodd’s definition by including time-scale. Speculators are not interested in putting their money into a stock or commodity for a long time. They want to see a good profit quickly – on a time scale of minutes to months. If their money does not quickly perform well in a situation, they move it into another situation.
In pursuit of greater gain, speculators take greater risks with their capital than people who put their money into Savings & CD Accounts.
Jesse Livermore, the 20th century’s most (in)famous speculator provided his own definition of speculation – preceding Graham and Dodd’s by several years. In Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, under his pseudonym of Lawrence Livingston, he said: “The speculator is not an investor. His object is not to secure a steady return on his money at a good rate of interest, but to profit by either a rise or a fall in the price of whatever he may be speculating in.” (more…)
Last weekend’s Intelligent Investor column looked at the extreme difficulties of disentangling skill from luck when you are evaluating investment performance. It’s the topic of an excellent new book by Michael Mauboussin and a subject of endless fascination – and frustration – to investors.
We tend to think of the greatest investors – say, Peter Lynch, George Soros, John Templeton, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham – as being mostly or entirely skillful.
Graham, of course, was the founder of security analysis as a profession, Buffett’s professor and first boss, and the author of the classic book The Intelligent Investor. He is universally regarded as one of the best investors of the 20th century.
But Graham, who outperformed the stock market by an annual average of at least 2.5 percentage points for more than two decades, coyly admitted that much of his remarkable track record may have been due to luck.
In the Postscript chapter of The Intelligent Investor, Graham described “two partners” of an investment firm who put roughly 20% of the assets they managed into a single stock – a highly unusual departure for the conservative managers, who normally diversified widely and seldom invested more than 5% or so in any one holding. (more…)
No, I’m not talking about Security Analysis or Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham or even Greenblatt’s You Can Be a Stock Market Genius. I’m talking about Doyle Brunson’s Super System: A Course in Power Poker.
OK, so the title of this post is a bit of an exaggeration and yes, there are probably tons of better poker books out there now post-extended-poker-boom. The first edition of this book was published in 1978. The connection between poker and trading is nothing new. Just google “poker and trading” and there’s a lot of stuff out there; how poker guys started hedge funds, how a hedge fund guy became a poker guy, how they are similar/different, what can be learned from one or the other etc. And the connection between gambling and trading was well documented in Fortune’s Formula.
But I just wanted to make a post about this book because I’m starting to reread it again (don’t ask). I am not a poker player, but I remember reading this book a few years ago having borrowed it from a poker-playing friend. Knowing that many traders and investors are very good poker players, I wanted to see what I can learn from reading about poker.
I remember falling out of my chair at the similiarites between poker and investing. I come from more of a trading background than an investing one and what was written in this book, particularly the early chapter “General Poker Strategy”, has great advice that applies to traders and investors too. I would make that chapter required reading along with the other investment “must reads”.
Anyway, here are some comments about what Brunson talks about in this chapter by sections. I only comment on some of the stuff so this isn’t a summary of the chapter by any means. (more…)
