http://www.fool.com/boringport/2000/boringport000501a.htm
Annual Meetings:
A lot of [corporations’ annual] meetings are set up to avoid groups like you – they’re in inconvenient locations and at inconvenient times – and they hope people like you won’t come. http://www.tilsonfunds.com/wscmtg04notes.doc
Auctions:
“Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you’ve got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away… I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior. http://www.loschmanagement.com/Berkshire%20Hathaway/Charlie%20munger/The%20Psychology%20of%20Human%20Misjudgement.htm
“The problem with closed bid auctions is that they are frequently won by people making a technical mistake, as in the case with Shell paying double for Belridge Oil. You can’t pay double the losing bid in an open outcry auction..” http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578643031/104-7644521-2497538?v=glance&n=283155
Banks:
“banking has turned out to be better than we thought. We made a few billion [dollars] from Amex while we misappraisal it. My only prediction is that we will continue to make mistakes like that.” http://www.tilsonfunds.com/
“Financial institutions make us nervous when they’re trying to do well.” http://www.tilsonfunds.com/
“What’s fascinating . . .is that you could now have a business that might have been selling for $10 billion where the business itself could probably not have borrowed even $100 million. But the owners of that business, because its public, could borrow many billions of dollars on their little pieces of paper- because they had these market valuations. But as a private business, the company itself couldn’t borrow even 1/20th of what the individuals could borrow.” http://fundooprofessor.blogspot.com/2005/11/one-valuation-rule-two-paradoxes.html
Bankruptcy:
“I think much of [how bankruptcy is handled] is pretty horrible. It’s a situation were courts themselves have gone into the business of bidding to attract bankruptcy proceedings….”http://www.designs.valueinvestorinsight.com/bonus/bonuscontent/docs/Tilson_2006_BRK_Meeting_Notes.pdf#search=%22Charlie%20munger%20and%20foundation%20and%20croupier%22
Behavior:
“How you behave in one place, will help in surprising ways later.” http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/32/04712447/0471244732-1.pdf#search=%22munger%20you%20know%20the%20cliche%20that%20opposites%20attract%22
“If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you’re a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you’re the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn’t go.” http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2003/commentary030509wt.htm
Behavioral Economics:
“How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it?” http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.html
“How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist’s mind?… I think that these behavioral economics…or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology.” http://www.loschmanagement.com/Berkshire%20Hathaway/Charlie%20munger/The%20Psychology%20of%20Human%20Misjudgement.htm
Ben Franklin:
“There is the sheer amount of Franklin’s wisdom. “And the talent. Franklinplayed four instruments. He was the nation’s leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.” http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/29/8378052/index.htm
Ben Graham:
“The idea of a margin of safety, a Graham precept, will never be obsolete. The idea of making the market your servant will never be obsolete. The idea of being objective and dispassionate will never be obsolete. So Graham had a lot of wonderful ideas.” http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2003/commentary030509wt.htm
“Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share and so on…. But he was, by and large, operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about 600 years. Wheat in Liverpool, I believe, got down to something like a 600-year low, adjusted for inflation. the classic Ben Graham concept is that gradually the world wised up and those real obvious bargains disappeared. You could run your Geiger counter over the rubble and it wouldn’t click. … Ben Graham followers responded by changing the calibration on their Geiger counters. In effect, they started defining a bargain in a different way. And they kept changing the definition so that they could keep doing what they’d always done. And it still worked pretty well.” http://ycombinator.com/munger.html
Berkshire:
“I’m a bull on Berkshire Hathaway. There may be some considerable waiting, but I think there are some good days ahead.” http://www.tilsonfunds.com/wscmtg05notes.pdf
“Personally, I think Berkshirewill be a lot bigger and stronger than it is. Whether the stock will be a good investment from today’s price is another question. The one thing we’ve always guaranteed is that the future will be a lot worse than the past.” http://www.fool.com/news/foth/2002/foth020515.htm
“We stumbled into this two-person format. It would not work if it was just one person. You could have the wittiest, wisest person on earth up there, and people would find it very tiresome. It takes a little interplay of personalities to handle the extreme length of the festival.” http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/29/8378052/index.htm
“I don’t think it would work well to have a half-and-half management. We don’t need an operating guy; we have people running the businesses, and the main thing is not to destroy or damage the spirit they have.” http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06053101.htm
“Berkshire has the lowest turnover of any major company in the U.S.The Walton family owns more of Wal-Mart than Buffett owns ofBerkshire, so it isn’t because of large holdings. It’s because we have a really unusual shareholder body that thinks of itself as owners and not holders of little pieces of paper. ” http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06053004.htm
“The future returns ofBerkshireand Wesco won’t be as good in the future as they have been in the past. The only difference is that we’ll tell you. Today, it seems to be regarded as the duty of CEOs to make the stock go up. This leads to all sorts of foolish behavior. We want to tell it like it is. I’m happy having 90% of my net worth inBerkshirestock. We’re going to try to compound it at a reasonable rate without taking unreasonable risk or using leverage. If we can’t do this, then that’s just too damn bad. The businesses
