Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders by Warren Buffett (Author), Max Olson (Editor)
Berkshire Hathaway Letters To Shareholders - Description
Warren Buffett first took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a small textile company, in April of 1965. A share changed hands for around $18 at the time. Fifty letters to shareholders later, the same share traded for $226,000, compounding investor capital at just under 21% per year-a multiplier of 12,556 times.
Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders' limited "50th Anniversary" hardcover edition is a dust-jacket-less midnight black with gold embossing. Like the paperback version, it compiles the full, un-edited versions of every one of Warren Buffett's letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.
There are hundreds of books about Buffett's life, advice, and methods. These are his actual letters -- word for word -- a "lesson plan" of his views on business and investing. You can find most of the letters for free on Berkshire's website, but this compiles them into a well-designed, easily readable format.
Features of the book:
- 50 years of Warren Buffett's letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (769 pages)
- Tabulated letter years so you can easily flip to the desired letter
- Topics index
- Company index
- Person index
- Charts of: Growth in Berkshire's book value and market price relative to benchmarks, Insurance float and performance, the operating businesses of Berkshire
Berkshire Hathaway Letters To Shareholders - Review
1. Nice to have WB's letters in one place. Berkshire used to publish this itself but stopped printing once they put them all on the internet for free.
2. No changes to WB's letters or additions or subtractions. Cunningham's book does that kind of selective tailoring, which is a real value.
3. Value added here is mostly in the index. Typical book index lists people and topics. Problem is the index has many errors in it. For example, it says Munger, Charlie appears on 4 pages. That's wildly off, as he appears in scores and scores of places.
4. Repetitious.. By putting all letters in in order without editing, there is a huge amount of redundancy, as WB repeats many things year after year or every few years. Cunningham's Essays corrects for that problem.
Overall, the BRK collection is okay. Id give it 2.5 stars, rounded up to three. - Martha Swaine
Berkshire Hathaway Average Float
Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders by Warren Buffett
