Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- Best Selling in Books
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Kudos to Andrew Kilpatrick for putting this book together. You will learn a lot about Warren Buffett and his life, and not only investing decisions that he made throughout his career but his life principles, family, and business in general as well. You will learn about his first job delivering papers when he was 13 (he filed income tax and deducted the bike as business cost), and how he build his first business (pinball machine business), created Buffett partnership, break it up (liquidate), acquire berkshire mills, creating Berkshire Hathaway as investment vehicle, and many other great investment decision/story that he made (Geico, See's Candies, Dairy Queen, General Re, Coca Cola, Salomon, Washington Post, Gillette etc) Buffett concrete rules for investing are: 1. Never lose money 2. Never forget rule #1 I know it's easier said (what he say above about to never lose money) than done based on my 10 years of invesitng experience , but then again I'm no Warren Buffett. In my opinion, here are the 5 strategy/skills that Warren Buffett uses: 1. Intrinsic Value 2. Margin of Safety 3. Temperament (discipline and understanding Mr.Market) 4. Circle of Competence (knowing what your circle of competence) 5. Common Sense (which I think is the most important factor and encapsulate everything about Warren Buffett) You will learn that Warren is very good with numbers (calculating in his head) and memorizing so many facts and numbers. You will also learn that Warren is a man with a very good sense of humor. There are so many things/chapters that I like on this book. Let me try to mention two of my favorite sections. One is when Warren need to make a decision who would run Salomon. The chapter explain his thought process of this candidate selection in detail. Warren also said in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. and if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you. if you think about it, it's true, if you hire somebody without integrity, you want them to be dumb and lazy. And he conclude the topic with this statement which I think is very powerful: "Pick the kind of person to work for you that you want to marry your son or daughter. You won't go wrong". By the way, he picked Deryck Maughan by the way for his integrity. Another chapter that I really like is how Warren put the audience (of more than 2000 people) through Business School in an electrifying two minutes (The chapter about "Generics"). See how Warren answer the question of "Will developments in the generic brand area hurt coca-cola?" which is a very important questions. He explains how one can save $500 for smoking generic brand (vs Marlboro) which is a lot of money. While a man probably will only save $11 per year by not using Gilette Sensor and probably leave band-aids on his face and an uncomfotable experience for opting for generic blades. And for coca cola, the net profit margin is only 1 cents per serving while a lot of the ingredients cost (such as the aluminium close to 6 cents a can, sugar 1.3 ounce per can or 1.75 cents etc) are the same regardless for coke or other cola company and that's why it's somewhat immune to generics. Last but not least, if I have to sum this book up in a word or two, I would use the word "WISDOM" to describe this book, though I have a strong feeling that Warren will disagree with me and think that the more suitable phrase is "COMMON SENSE"Read full review