WB là tấm gương về việc giữ gìn đạo đức trong kinh doanh vừa tìm kiếm lợi nhuận. Trái ngược với Wall Street đầy rẫy các câu chuyện đánh đổi, chọn lựa. Người ta thần tượng WB về điều đó, và cũng có nhiều kẻ căm ghét vì điều đó.

Quyển sách sẽ hợp với những người có kiến thức nền về kinh doanh như các lý thuyết kinh doanh, trường phái đầu tư Graham, phương pháp đầu tư cổ phiếu và quen thuộc với các thương vụ mua bán trên thị trường,... Riêng mình, mình đã phải rất kiên trì mới theo được quyển này. Phần nào vì những những cái tên, lý thuyết còn xa lạ, thêm vào đó cũng bởi cách viết quá "thiên vị". Tuy biết đây là dạng viết tiểu sử nhưng cách miêu tả những sự việc hay giọng văn trở nên quá chủ quan, cái nhìn hơi một chiều. Nói chung, với những bạn học kinh doanh thì nên đọc quển này vì sách tóm lược các thương vụ của Buffett từ khi ông lập nghiệp, đây có thể trở thành những case study thú vị để các bạn nghiên cứu và phân tích.

I’ve read a biography of Warren Buffett quite a few years ago. It was probably with the idea that one could pick up a few tips and become wealthy like Buffett. But, Alas, it was not to be. I don’t think I had Buffett’s commercial acumen or drive....like making a profit from selling stocks at the age of eleven. One of the things that has impressed me with Buffett....and apparently many others.....is his subdued life style and lack of flashiness. One might even ask..”Why does he pursue wealth at all if he doesn’t spend it and enjoy it?” And, I guess that he has answered this in his own way by setting up philanthropic trusts to disburse his wealth and encouraging other wealthy people to do the same. Something that I missed in this book were the insights that I got in the other book that I’d read. For example, that he tended to buy a stock with innate value and hang on to it for years: Like Gillette and like Coca Cola. I guess, one should be watching carefully at the moment as Buffett is selling and acquiring cash. Does he know something about Donald Trump’s ascendency to the US presidency that the rest of the Americans , who voted him in, don’t know? I need to temper any criticism here because my review of the book is based solely on the Blinkist summary version. I’ve not yet read the full book. Though I must say that when I have had the chance to compare the Blinkist Summary with the full book, that I’ve been very impressed with the Blinkist version and what they have been able to condense into the summary.
Anyway, here are a few snippets that caught my attention:
Warren Edward Buffett was born to Howard and Leila Buffett on August 30, 1930,
when the Depression hit Warren’s hometown......His father lost his job as a securities salesman for a local bank. But his dad was resourceful and soon began his own company, selling safe and reliable stocks and bonds. [So Buffett was exposed to stock buying and selling from the time he was born]........These difficult times fuelled his desire for the kind of security and stability that money can buy. [I guess this answers my question , above].
When he was eleven, Warren made his first profit by buying and selling stocks along with his sister, Doris....At the age of 14, Warren was in charge of five separate paper routes, which had him getting up early every morning, delivering papers and collecting subscription fees.
By saving every cent he made, Warren purchased 40 acres of land for $1,200. He wasn’t yet fifteen. [that’s a pretty impressive record...but if he was also buying and selling stocks, presumably some of this came from the stocks].
He enrolled at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, in Pennsylvania, where his love of money would only grow. His professor at Columbia Business School (which later accepted him) would have a massive impact on his life. That professor was economist Benjamin Graham,.....The cornerstone of Graham’s philosophy was to avoid dealing with risky stocks altogether......He did this by determining a company’s intrinsic value and comparing it against the market value, which is the current price the stocks are being sold at.
One has to add up all of its assets, including its revenue streams and future prospects. But it’s worth the work. After earning his graduate degree, Buffett was eventually hired to work for Ben Graham’s Wall Street investment firm, Graham-Newman Corp.
Once he returned to his hometown, Buffett began forming his own investment partnership, Buffett Associates, Ltd.....In that first year, he was so successful that his initial $500,000 portfolio increased in value by 10 percent. By the end of the third year, that value had actually doubled!...[so he must have been earning a lot more than 10% each year or do they mean that he was earning 20%?.....It’s not clear].
Finally, in 1961, Buffett took the next big step and purchased controlling interest in a company.......By 1963, that price was at three times its initial value and it was time for Buffett to move on, so he sold the company and earned his partners a $2.3 million profit.......In 1964, Buffett purchased controlling interest in Berkshire Hathaway, a textile company....So even though textiles only earned Berkshire around $45,000 in profit per year, its holdings of National Indemnity stock earned it about $2.1 million. In the 1970s, Berkshire became the largest outside shareholder of the Washington Post, the very newspaper Buffett had dropped on people’s doorsteps as a child. During this time, Buffett continued to pay himself his standard yearly salary of $50,000.
In 1979, Buffett was still far outperforming the Dow-Jones Industrial Average; his own net worth was $140 million, and Berkshire was selling at $290 per share.
Rather than relying on a company’s financial assets to measure its intrinsic value, he now expanded his view to include its entire brand.
“You try to be greedy when others are fearful and you try to be very fearful when others are greedy”-Warren Buffett, on his investing philosophy
Even in the early 1960s, when segregation was still widespread, Buffett defied many of his peers when he boycotted the local Rotary Club over its refusal to accept non-white members.
Since his late 20s, Buffett has struggled to figure out what to do with his riches, since he doesn’t live a glamorous lifestyle with expensive cars, homes or clothing.
So, in 2006, after his wife Susan passed away, he finally decided that he would donate most of it to charity. One sixth of his fortune has been divided among different Buffett family foundations, and the rest will be allocated over time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fight disease in developing nations.
The key message in this book: With the help of his mentor, Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett learned the important difference between how much a company is really worth and how much it’s selling for. An aptitude for discerning this difference, combined with a steadfast refusal to succumb to trends and a keen understanding of numbers, is what allowed Buffett to accrue a fortune exceeding $66 billion.
What’s my overall take on the book. An easy read, fairly true to the Warren Buffet story that I know. Not much there about the secret of accruing wealth except the formula “You try to be greedy when others are fearful and you try to be very fearful when others are greedy”....which pretty much sums it up. Five stars from me.

I previously knew many small details about Warren Buffett and had a vague sense of his personality and investment strategies. From the first chapter, this book was captivating as it details key events throughout Buffett's entire life. From his first "businesses" delivering newspapers and arcade games, starting a family and trying to instill his values in his children and in more modern day times, having to take a more direct role in companies he invested in. Buffett's determination from a very young age to some day (soon) be very rich as well as his innate ability to comprehend and retain numbers meant that he was able to do just that. I hear this is not the best book to learn about his life thus far, but it was a very enjoyable one.

A brilliant book chronicling the life of greatest investor, and one of my few personal idols, the world has seen!!
Contains several pearls of gem about his personality, temperament and his genius that led to a follower-ship bordering on idolatry. From several stories covering his impeccable value-investing style and principles, to instances showing his less-than-perfect personal relationships, this book is a must-read for people wanting to know more about the Oracle of Omaha.

An excellent overview of Buffet’s whole life. He was an amazing businessman and built an empire of wealth by buying companies who he analyzed as good deals. That he was able to do it to such levels of success is quite amazing. The book give some personal insight but most of it is dedicated to showing his business ventures. The book gave quite a bit of business context, and Buffet’s love of GEICO as a company whose insurance dollars could be used for a float for him buying other companies was fascinating.

My only quibble with the book and it is a small one is how very long this book was.

If you need some investing advice, gripping story, esoteric financial parlance, and Buffett background pick this one up!

"Buffett’s uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street—a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American."

I am kicking myself why did it take me so long to pick up Roger Lowenstein's Buffet. It was lying on my bookshelf for such a long time. I think it is the best Warren Buffett book that I've read. I found it better than Alice Schroeder’s Snowball which I read last month.

Lowenstein's book is more objective in highlighting how Buffet made his investment decisions, though Schroeder’s is more detailed and focused on his personal life. He describes all of his major investing decisions in different chapters and shows us how his investment philosophy keeps evolving.

It is pretty clear that there is no single way in which Buffett invests. He has different parameters for different types of companies and situations. He also makes decisions based on personal considerations.

There will only be one Buffett and I don’t think his investment style can be copied. However, the best thing that we can learn from him is to develop our own investing strategy and think independently.

Reading this work in the bull market of early 2021, with valuations at unimaginable highs and "fashion" stocks (as referred to therein, but now popularly known as "meme" stocks) rising and falling like the pucks of amusement park hammer games -- one finds prophetic notes of admonishment from strikingly similar times. Each bull run, Lowenstein points out, is characterized by some self-serving rationalization. Yet the reader nevertheless wonders, if he has read this biography in his own path of development as an investor as I have, whether Buffett's strikingly simple dicta and his down-home ethos might yield some fraction of its fabled returns today for the man himself, let alone in the hands of the yeoman retail investor. One grimaces to read, for example, that the price-to-earnings ratio in the low 20s at the end of the 1980s was unsustainable and augured ruin, when PE ratio has been even higher that that for much of the period since the book's publication. This question of generizability relevant not just because it's what readers will wonder in their self-interest, but because Buffett saw as a matter of honor the defense of his investment philosophy.

That philosophy, derived from Buffett's mentor Benjamin Graham (and Dodd, a character given short shrift in this book) is as follows:

"By focusing on the earnings, assets, future prospects, and so forth, one could arrive at a notion of a company’s “intrinsic value” that was independent of its market price. The market, they argued, was not a “weighing machine” that determined value precisely. Rather, it was a “voting machine,” in which countless people registered choices that were the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.18 At times, these choices would be out of line with rational valuations. The trick was to invest when prices were far below intrinsic value, and to trust in the market’s tendency to correct."

There are important, implicit arguments contained in the logic here, and Lowenstein (and Buffett) subscribe to those corollaries much as the economists endorsing the Efficient Market Theory spun down their dizzying path regarding beta and returns. The biggest is that there is a distinction between speculating and investing. As Graham distinguishes the two in The Intelligent Investor,

"An investment operation is one which, on thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."

This distinction at first blush seems reasonable, and would have seemed even more reasonable when 1/3rd of the equities market was trading below its liquidation value. 80 years later, investors are savvier, richer, and those opportunities don't exist anymore, as Graham would note in his older years. Moreover, the distinction is far flimsier than it might first seem. Compare the two quotations above. If considering "future prospects" is within the purview of value investing, and forecasting is at best a game of loose probabilities (Buffett goes as far as to say forecasts may tell you something about the forecaster, but nothing about the future), one wonders whether there's any meaning whatsoever left to the distinction. If a company trades for 30x earnings but has all propitious signs of future market dominance, it could be considered a "value investment" in some not unreasonable framing. What is "cheap" and what is "dear" when companies hemorrhage money year after year to gain marketshare and their paper trades with the optimism of untold future returns?

Still, in major ways the Buffett dogma rings clearer in our benighted "speculative" times than perhaps at the time of publication. If I were a disciple, these would be the verses I hold dearest:

- Invest in companies and industries you understand. You have greater odds of picking winners in your domain of expertise than in the growth sector of vogue. Likewise you should understand what the company makes and how it will derive a profit and resist competition in the future. You should have at least a theory about why the market may be undervaluing the company.
- Buy stocks 'like you shop for groceries' and buy intending to hold for a long time. Wait for what seems like good value on stocks you want to hold. Buffett, ever the fan of parables, would say you should be happy to hold the stock even if you were unable to see the price for years, the way you don't lose sleep over the value of your home even though you don't see a daily ticker.
- When the market is greedy, you should be afraid, and when the market is afraid, you should be greedy. When everyone else is hesitant and the market is low, that's your time to strike -- not when everyone is shouting and pointing at the hot stock.
- Diversification is not a panacea. If you have done your homework and understand the company and the price is ripe, put your weight behind it. Spreading your investment decorrelates your risks, but also your returns, and merely dilutes the earnings of having picked well.
- The market is not perfectly efficient. I came into this book largely subscribing to the EMT, and I still believe it is the most rigorous starting point for any reasoning about alpha in the market. Yet the market is not (yet) the product of perfectly rational and comprehensive algorithms. The volatility of stocks and the booms and busts belie the idea that everything is priced in perfectly all the time. If the price is a perfect reflection of the value of a company, which price do you trust more, the price this morning or the price 6 hours later, after the release of no new public information for the market to impound. Humans are in the present day still the largest elements behind capital allocation in the equity markets, and humans are not infallible rational actors.

Finally, I'll say that while Buffett makes a rather dull subject for a biography in some of the areas storytellers often like to shine their spotlights -- Lowenstein does a good job of extracting what's interesting and telling from these areas, e.g. upbringing and family relationships. The broad takeaway of these element is that Buffett has always been a man of decidedly forceful conviction around his ideas, some of them idiosyncratic, some defined by an almost naive idealism, but almost all of them from a deeply honest and moral place. I don't generally admire rich men for being rich, but in many ways I find Buffett's sincerity and his brand of generosity to be endearing. He has one more fan to add to his ever-growing throngs.

This is a great read as much because it gives you fantastic insight into the character of a fairly important and well regarded man as it gives you a sense of history over such a large period of time in finance. Lowenstein again has offered such an honest and insightful portrayl within the complicated world of finance. Kudos.

When you hear a hedge fund manager (Guy Spier, Mohnish Pabrai, etc) say they were inspired to get into the business of money management by Buffett's example, in almost every case it was reading this specific book that initially got them interested. I had previously started reading the more recent Buffett biography "Snowball" and had a harder time with that, I didn't find it quite as engaging. As far as I'm concerned this earlier book, Lowenstein's, is the definitive biography of Warren Buffet. Brilliantly done.