This book bolstered my passion for investing and cemented my desire to make it my vocation, rather than the many other prestigious paths to "money-shuffling" Buffett is notoriously critical of. I was surprised by some of the lessons I learned from Buffett. Two that immediately come to mind are 1) the malleability of Wall Street's most sacred metrics (net income, EPS to name a few), and 2) how important ethics in business are for both businesses' long-term economic health and individuals' personal health.

I didn't realise going into this how much of the book was focused on educating and sharing information with Berkshire shareholders, so the constant reinforcement of this to me was a bit offputting. There is certainly lots of interesting information and solid anecdotes, but from a reader perspective, I didn't enjoy this as much as some of the other investment/finance theory books.

This is a collection of essays penned by Warren Buffett over the decades of his running of Berkshire Hathaway. They are collected and organized by theme.

To me there is a relatively small group of people that this book is very good for. One group would certainly be a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder or prospective shareholder. Buffett certainly does a great job making you want to own their stock. But much of the book is very specific to CEOs or CFOs of public companies. Certainly not all of it, and I did glean some insight particularly along the M&A front, but a lot of the accounting particulars are good as advice if you're in a position to make those decisions at your public company. I found just small sections to be useful to me, though it is a thoughtful book to look back on for specific circumstances as they may arise in your business life.

Отличная книга про долгосрочные инвестиции.

Glad I read it. Glad I finished it.

This book was an absolutely fantastic read. Anyone familiar with Warren Buffett and his annual stockholder letters already know that they are a wealth of investing wisdom. This book takes the content of those letters to the next level.

These essays take all of the annual letters that Warren has written during his time with Berkshire, separates portions of those letters by content, and then groups those portions together as topical essays. Because you are presented with a categorized summary of investing subjects in Buffett's own words, you end up getting incredibly potent, understandable teaching on a large number of investing subjects from one of the best sources of knowledge available today.

This will probably end up being one of the books I recommend to anyone seriously interested in investment.

Another masterpiece. There are some books of 200 pages that take me more time to read than books of 400 pages. I read and then re-read every line to ensure that I don't miss one single insight. The book more than lived up to its promise. I recommend any investor, analyst and particularly accounting professionals to read it.

An absolute ripper. Whilst a little bit of the material was irrelevant for my personal situation, I found the compilation to be highly educational and an excellent glimpse into the business and investment philosophy of Buffet. Highly recommend to anyone considering any form of financial investment.

Lessons for Corporate America: Warren Buffet

Extremely interesting book. The author summarizes Berkshire's and Buffet way of thinking on multiple themes around investing, accountability, governance and valuation based on the annual shareholders letters and Buffets essays. The book is very well organized for that objective.

Main subjects:
- Corporate Governance
- Full and Fair Disclosure
- Boards and Managers
- The Anxieties of Business Change
- Social compacts
- Owner based approach to Corporate charity
- Principled approach to executive pay
- Risk, Reputation and oversight
- Corporate culture
- Finance and investing
- Farms, Real Estate and Stocks
- Mr Market
- Arbitrage
- Debunking standard dogma (EBITDA, multiples)
- Value investing (redundancy)
- Intelligent investing
- Cigar butts and the institutional imperative
- Life and Debt
- Investment Alternatives
- Surveying the field
- Junk bonds and the dagger thesis
- Zero-coupon bonds
- Preferred stocks
- Derivatives
- Foreign currencies and equities
- Home ownership
- Common Stock
- Cost of trading
- Attracting the right sort of shareholders
- Dividend policy and share repurchase
- Stock splits and invisible foot
- Shareholder strategies
- Berkshire recapitalization
- Berkshire dividend policy
- M&A
- Bad motives and high prices
- Sensible share repurchases
- LBO
- Sound acquisition policies
- On selling one's business
- The buyer of choice
- Valuation and accounting
- Aesop and inefficient bush theory
- Intrinsic value, book value, market price
- Look through earnings
- Economic versus accounting goodwill
- Owner earnings and the cash flow fallacy
- Option Value
- Accounting Shenanigans
- Standard setting
- Stock options
- Restructuring charges
- Pension estimates and retirement plans
- Realization events
- Taxation
- Distribution of the corporate tax burden
- Taxation and investment philosophy
- Conglomerates

If, when I bring up that this is a "greatest hits" of excerpts from Berkshire Hathaway annual reports written by Warren Buffet, you are already wishing you clicked away from this to anywhere else on the Internet -- ANYWHERE, PLEASE -- then mentioning that Buffet is actually not too hard to read won't help much. Nevertheless, Buffet states and re-states his principles clearly and succinctly and often provides amusing anecdotes or related jokes, and if you're at all interested in how businesses should be run and investments should be made this book will be valuable.

First, however, you'll have to get through a fantastic counterexample of good business writing: the editor's preface, which comprises the first 10% of the book. Seriously, you can just skip it. It's a summary of what Buffet says, rephrased in abstract and bland terms, and adds nothing. It does do a good job of making Buffet's writing look better, though. Thankfully the editor's conclusion is not as bad, chiefly because it has the virtue of being two pages long.

Some main points from Buffet's writing:
- Know your limitations and work within them. Buffet knows his grasp on technology-related business is tenuous so he doesn't try to get involved in tech.

- Focus on the business, not the stock: you are buying ownership in a company you will hold for a long time because it has good long term prospects and is well run, and if you are not buying for this reason you should be. After that, don't buy the stock unless its price is well below the intrinsic value of the company.

- Company managements should be retaining their earnings if and only if they can turn each dollar of retained earnings into more than one dollar of business value for the shareholders, and if they can't do that they shouldn't be retaining it.

Wonderful and insightful read, full of Buffett’s wit and wisdoms. The latest edition includes the most recent letters.

Brilliant book. Lots of great fundamentals, challenging the status quo, and hilarious analogies. Recommended read, one I plan to re-read at some point