If you want to understand the history of Berkshire Hathaway there are two good books to choose from. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, which I summarized six months ago, or The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, summarized below. The main difference between the two tellings is that Lowenstein focuses more on the Buffett Partnership and then Berkshire Hathaway as a...
Why did New York need another stock exchange in 1968? Why was the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and Pacific Stock Exchange insufficient? An unprecedented bull market coupled with paper-based systems. I’m in my 50’s and don’t remember “Wall Street” not having both the NYSE and NASDAQ as the two main exchanges. I am old enough to remember the AMEX...
I always through the company name Intel was a just the first five letter of “intellegent” or “intellegence”. Wrong. It’s a portmanteau of INTegrated ELectronics. This was one of the many tidbits of knowledge that have shown up in The Snowball, the “other” biography of Warren Buffett. Turns out Warren had the opportunity to invest $100,000 into the initial...
The more I dig into Berkshire Hathaway, the odder it gets. Did you know the company wasn’t listed on the New York Stock Exchange until November 1988? In 1929, Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates was created through the merger of the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company (founded in 1889) with Oliver Chace’s textile companies (founded in 1839). In 1955, Hathaway Manufacturing Company...
The more I dig into the history of Berkshire Hathaway, the more it looks like Warren Buffett’s strategy is opportunism vs. innovation. For example, the reason Buffett operates one holding company instead of three was a run in with the SEC, as I explained in an earlier post. The reason he runs Berkshire Hathway instead of just owning it through Buffett Partnerships LLC is an even earlier...
After finishing Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, I’m confident that Warren would be quite pleased that I managed to pick up a used copy for just 75¢ at my local library. Warren may be one of the 10 richest people on the planet, but Warren Buffett loves a bargain. Like most owners in Berkshire Hathaway, before reading this book I knew a little about Buffett...
The backstory of Warren Buffett’s career and the creation of Berkshire Hathaway is a lot more fascinating and interesting than I thought possible. Last we left this story, Buffett had retired in 1969 but was still not yet working full-time with Charlie Munger at his side by 1974. Roger Lowentein’s biography Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, isn’t told chronologically...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, and he was still telling people he was retired in 1974. If you missed my first blog post about Buffett’s retirement, best to start with that one, which left off at the cliffhanger asking how he got from there to Berkshire Hathaway. Halfway...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, never to be heard from again. The first half is completely true. The second, true as of the end of 1969. Learning about both of those facts has dropped me down a fascinating rabbit hole of corporate history and Buffett lore that I’ll...
A few weeks ago I asked the internet why there are no copycats of Berkshire Hathaway, despite Warren Buffett telling the world exactly how he and Charlie do what they do. This week, Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders was published, and now that Africa Eats is copying parts of Berkshire Hathaway’s model, I found it more fascinating than usual to both learn as well as compare and...
