·
Warren Buffett released his “ground rules” for the Buffett Partnership in the 1962 Annual Letter. Between his rules and the rest of the letter, you get an idea of how and why he builds a conservative portfolio.
Throughout the earlier letters, Buffett repeats several themes, which he wraps up into seven rules: Continue Reading…
·
Michael Mauboussin published a great piece late last week titled Reflections on the Ten Attributes of Great Investors.
I pulled a couple of the attributes below but it doesn’t do the piece justice. Mauboussin expands on each one further. You really should box out some time this weekend to read it in full. Continue Reading…
·
I wanted to continue a series I started a couple weeks ago on the Intelligent Investor. The last post covered some of Ben Graham’s wisdom from the first four chapters of the book.
The next four chapters cover the two types of investors – defensive or enterprising – according to Graham, where to find bargains or value, and how you should look at market fluctuations (one of the most important chapters according to Buffett). Like the first few chapters, this section is light on filler and heavy on timeless wisdom. Below, you’ll find some random bits of wisdom from chapters five through eight. Continue Reading…
·
Everyone has heard the Buffett quote: “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
It’s one of those quotes that gets repeated so often the real message gets mistaken for “if you just do this easy thing, you’ll make a lot of money.” The problem isn’t that it’s hard to buy great companies. It really is easy. You can do it anytime. The hard part is buying them at a fair price. Here’s Graham: Continue Reading…
·
I dug up a 1963 lecture by Ben Graham – titled Securities in an Insecure World (linked below) – that popped up online several years ago and thought I’d share a few notes.
In the lecture, Graham discusses three big dangers investors face – nuclear war, inflation, and severe market volatility (specifically drawdowns) – which are the same today. Then he branches off into behavior, market valuation, and asset allocation.
He points out a recurring theme that resurfaces every few years: Continue Reading…
·
Long before search engines there was Yahoo!. It was the directory – started as a list of Jerry Yang’s and David Filo’s favorite sites – for the internet before Google took over the world. There was competition – AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, and a long list of others – but Yahoo! was it. Anyone who grew up during the internet boom knew about it and used it and, I bet, many secretly still use it today.
But what really made Yahoo! stand out at that time, was something few internet companies ever attained. Profits! It was profitable by the end of 1996. A truly rare feat. It was a dot-com darling at the time, peaking around a $125 billion market cap. This 1999 Fortune article sums up the period well. Continue Reading…