Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha provided a profound lesson in investment wisdom that has allowed Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to generate unprecedented value over time. We reflect on the recent discussion of technology stocks at the 2017 meeting.
Wise Investment Lessons from Omaha: Buffet and Munger on Alphabet and Amazon.
If we’d stayed with the classic Graham, the way Ben Graham did it, we would never have had the record we have. After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See’s Candy, [the first high quality business we ever bought,] we’ve made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. If See’s had asked $100,000 more, Warren and I would have walked — that’s how dumb we were. [My friend] Ira Marshall said you guys are crazy — there are some things you should pay up for, like quality businesses and people. You are underestimating quality. We listened to the criticism and changed our mind. This is a good lesson for anyone: the ability to take criticism constructively and learn from it. If you take the indirect lessons we learned from See’s, you could say Berkshire was built on constructive criticism.
Charlie Munger, ‘A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom’ USC Business School 1994
Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha provided a profound lesson in investment wisdom that has allowed Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to generate unprecedented value over time. Buffett told shareholders that he should have bought Alphabet shares years ago. Management at Geico, Berkshire’s car insurance company, told him that they were spending increasing amounts of their advertising budget with Google.
If we’d stayed with the classic Graham, the way Ben Graham did it, we would never have had the record we have. After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See’s Candy, [the first high quality business we ever bought,] we’ve made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. If See’s had asked $100,000 more, Warren and I would have walked — that’s how dumb we were. [My friend] Ira Marshall said you guys are crazy — there are some things you should pay up for, like quality businesses and people. You are underestimating quality. We listened to the criticism and changed our mind. This is a good lesson for anyone: the ability to take criticism constructively and learn from it. If you take the indirect lessons we learned from See’s, you could say Berkshire was built on constructive criticism.
Charlie Munger, ‘A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom’ USC Business School 1994
Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha provided a profound lesson in investment wisdom that has allowed Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to generate unprecedented value over time. Buffett told shareholders that he should have bought Alphabet shares years ago. Management at Geico, Berkshire’s car insurance company, told him that they were spending increasing amounts of their advertising budget with Google.
