Top Highlights

• Charlie is no good at forecasting the future, be it the weather, elections, the economy, or the stock market—especially the stock market. All that banter in the financial press about what is going to happen in the stock market is mindless noise to him. He’s just a man looking for a good business he can buy at a fair price. However, the one thing he...
• He knows that cyclical financial crises are just in the nature of capitalism. That a heavily leveraged banking system, when mixed with speculative frenzy, can create massively unstable investment bubbles, which inevitably burst and bring the entire economy down.
• The finance professors, having never studied population biology as Charlie has, have a difficult time understanding that multiple strategies of exploitation can interact with one another to the point that efficiency in one can create an inefficiency in another.
• One is actually better off reading a hundred business biographies than a hundred books on investing. Why? Because if we learn the history of a hundred different business models, we learn when the businesses had tough times and how they got through them; we also learn what made them great, or not so great. Which allows us to get a feel for whether o...
• Just reading books on business isn’t enough; one should also add in a couple of semesters of accounting (which is the language of business), a couple of semesters of economics, and a good course on central banking so one understands the power of the Federal Reserve Bank to come to the market’s rescue (most MBA courses are sorely lacking in this). T...