The Warren Buffett Story
September 10th, 2009
Warren Buffett was born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA and has become probably the world’s most successful investor. He is the son of a stockbroker and Congressman, and of course everyone wants to learn about his investment secrets.
I don’t think that Warren Buffett has actually written a book about his investment principals himself, in that sense there is no Warren Buffett book, but he has from time to time given hints in his annual letters to share holders of Berkshire Hathaway, and in other short notes and reports to the media.
However there have been a lot of books written about Buffett by others who have tried to put together the story and ideas behind the man and his fortune.
In fact if you go to Amazon and do a search for “Warren Buffett” will find 2,576 books being listed, compare that to “Bill Gates”, who for a long time was also considered to be the riches man in the world, and you only find 11 listings, that should give you some idea about the public obsession with the man.
I have only read one of his books called “The Warren Buffett Way”, it was hard work and somewhat of a boring read. Much of the content of all these books on Warren Buffett seems to be the same basic information about value investing and being patient with your investments. I don’t think there is much to be gained by reading more than one of them.
Here is a very small selection of some of the better known ones:
The Warren Buffett Way, Second Edition by Robert G. Hagstrom, Ken Fisher and Bill
The Snowball – Warren Buffett and The Business of Life
The essential Buffett library
Investing – the Last Liberal Art – by Robert Hagstrom
Buffett: by Roger Lowenstein
The New Buffettology, written by Mary Buffet and David Clark
The Interpretation of Financial Statements: by Benjamin Graham
Value Investing: by Janet Lowe
Robert Hagstrom, The Warren Buffett Way
Buffettology by Mary Buffett and David Clark
Janet Lowe, Warren Buffett Speaks: Wit and Wisdom from the Word’s Greatest Investor
John Train, The Midas Touch – The Strategies That Have Made Warren Buffett ‘America’s Preeminent Investor’.
Andrew Kilpatrick, Of Permanent Value, The Story of Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett, Lawrence Cunningham (editor), The Essays of Warren Buffett
Ms Janet M. Tavakoli, Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street
Many of these books are quite large, with many pages that would take a long time to read, and even longer to understand and make any sense of. A better way of understanding Buffett maybe to find investment articles which have summarised the Buffett principals into short concise lessons that can be quickly learnt and applied.
One point of caution however, and this is not investment advice, Buffett has made most of his fortune during the years of the great USA bull markets, times have changed and it is possible these principals are no longer as effective as they used to be.