... but the important thing is that when you do find one where you really do know what you are doing, you must buy in quantity.... Charlie and I have made a dozen or so very big decisions relative to net worth, although not as big as they should have been. And in each of those, we've known that we were almost certain to be right going in.
There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do.
One observer commenting on security analysts over forty stated: "They know too many things that are no longer true." As long as I am "on stage", publishing a regular record and assuming responsibility for management of what amounts to virtually 100% of the net worth of many partners, I will never be able to put sustained effort into any non-BPL activity. If I am going to participate publicly. I can't help being competitive. I know I don't want to be totally occupied with out-pacing an investment rabbit all my life. The only way to slow down is to stop.
When a management with reputation for brilliance gets hooked up with a business with a reputation for bad economics, it's the reputation of the business that remains intact.
On his Giving Pledge philanthropy: The way I got the message out was to get a copy of FORBES, look down that 400 list and start making phone calls! Bill and Melinda [Gates] did the same thing. So keep publishing
the list so I can milk it.
I always say that in investing you want to buy stock in a company that has a business that's so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will. We have a country like that.
We have provided capital here with a couple of institutions recently. The Federal government did that in the '30s for the RFC and I think there could well be a proper role for government in that.
In my opinion, the entire field of investment management, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, would be more satisfactorily conducted if everyone had a good yardstick for measurement of ability and sensibly applied it.