Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger
Charles Thomas Mungeris an American businessman, lawyer, investor, and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; in this capacity, Buffett describes Charlie Munger as “my partner." Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also the chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth1 January 1924
CountryUnited States of America
I have concluded that most PhD economists under appraise the power of the common-stock-based "wealth effect", under current extreme conditions.. "wealth effects" involve mathematical puzzles that are not nearly so well worked out as physics theories and never can be. ...what has happened inJapan ... has shaken up academic economics, as it obviously should, creating strong worries about recession from "wealth effects" in reverse.
Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better.
Our approach has worked for us. Look at the fun we, our managers, and our shareholders are having. More people should copy us. It's not difficult, but it looks difficult because it's unconventional - it isn't the way things are normally done. We have low overhead, don't have quarterly goals and budgets or a standard personnel system, and our investing is much more concentrated than average. It's simple and common sense.
You don't have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich - just a bit better than average over a long period of time.
The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.
If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.
It's simplicity itself that its future will be way worse than its past.
Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well, two or three times, will make your family rich for life?
I think there's something to be said for developing the disposition to own stocks without fretting.
If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation.
If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we'd have a pretty average record. It wasn't hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.
If you don't allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.
Fixable but unfixed bad performance is bad character and tends to create more of itself, causing more damage to the excuse giver with each tolerated instance.
If we've been a little more successful than other people, is because we always realised that the school of life was always open, and if you were not learning more you are falling behind.