Thinking Citizen Blog — Warren Buffett Re-visited: Watch the HBO Documentary!
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Thinking Citizen Blog — Tuesday is Economics, Finance, and Business Day
Today’s Topic: Warren Buffett Re-visited: Watch the HBO Documentary!
Thank you to Michael Danto for getting me to watch the HBO documentary on Warren Buffett. I have written about the world’s greatest investor more than once but I can’t help doing it again. The story is so improbable it is worth re-visiting periodically. Three improbabilities in one sentence: one of the richest men in human history still lives in the same house he bought in 1959 in Omaha, Nebraska and stops to pick up breakfast at a drive-through McDonalds every morning. Today, a few random quotes from the Omaha sage. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
BRIDGE: the obsession and two analogies
1. “Bridge is such a sensational game that I wouldn’t mind being in jail if I had three cellmates who were decent players and who were willing to keep the game going twenty-four hours a day.”
2. “The best intellectual exercise out there. You’re seeing through new situations every ten minutes…In the stock market you don’t based your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational…Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You’re doing calculations all the time.”
3. “The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge you have at the time, but you are always willing to modify your behavior or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees.”
NB: “By some miracle my sister and her husband beat me and Sharon (his bridge teacher). My sister reached for the score pad, so I tore the sheet off and ate it. Not that it is a competitive game or something,”
HONESTY, PRICE VERSUS VALUE, LONG TERM INVESTING ANALOGY
1. “Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don’t expect it from cheap people.”
2. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
3. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
THREE QUALITIES FOR HIRING PEOPLE — remember which comes first
1. “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
2. “You think about it; it’s true.”
3. “If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”
THE KIND OF LIFE HE LOVES
1. “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think.”
2. “That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. “
3. “So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.”
NB: “I do it because I like this kind of life.”
FOOTNOTES
1. “The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”
2. Don’t miss the parts of the documentary on his first wife Susie.
3. And don’t miss the Martin Luther King quote.
NB: And, finally, don’t miss him playing the ukulele and singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Warren Buffett — HBO Documentary HD
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-warren-buffett-hates-to-lose-at-bridge-2017-07-29
Warren Buffett Quotes (Author of The Essays of Warren Buffett)
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