Picking Bottoms shouldn’t be an Investor’s Game
Warren Buffett at the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: Stocks got much cheaper in 1974 than they are now [in May 2009]. But you were also facing a different interest rate scenario. So you could say they really weren’t that much cheaper. You could buy very good companies at four times earnings or thereabouts with […]
A Beautiful Spark
Scottish author and cleric Richard Holloway writes in Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (2004,) When the map of our life is complete, and we die in the richness of our own history, some among the living will miss us for a while, but the earth will go on without us. Its […]
Charlie Munger on the Problem Created by Index Funds
Charlie Munger at the 2019 Daily Journal Meeting, Another issue, of course, that’s happened in the world of stock picking, where all this money and effort goes into trying to be rational, is that we’ve had a really horrible thing happen to the investment counseling class. And that is, these index funds have come along […]
Warren Buffett on Being Careful How You Bet
At the 2020 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett speaks about (transcript) on the trouble with probabilities is that just because something should happen doesn’t mean it will. I don’t know, and perhaps with a bias, I don’t believe anybody knows what the market is going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. […]
Swami Vivekananda on Why Hindu Sects Don’t Quarrel & Proselytizing Missionaries
Jayakrishna from the Varnam blog on Indian history writes, Swami Vivekananda, using the concept of Ishta, explains why various sects never quarreled in India. In a speech given in Jaffna, following his address at the Parliament of Nations, Swamiji noted “The Shaivite does not say that every Vaishnavite is going to be damned, nor the […]
What Do Buddhists Seek?
Pico Iyer writes in Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008): Buddhists do not (or need not) seek solutions from outside themselves, but merely awakening within; the minute we come to see that our destinies or well-being are all mutually dependent, they say, the rest naturally follows (meditation sometimes seems the […]
Nobody Never Messes Up
Sereno Sky writes in Lonely Traveller (2014,) Let’s face it: apologies mainly help yourself. A hurt is a hurt. It’s up to the person who has been hurt to get over it. Our apology may help and we need to do it, but it just doesn’t automatically set everything straight. That’s the bad news. The […]
The Contradictory Advicein Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’
Amanda Hess at Slate opines that Sheryl Sandberg’s advice in Lean In (2013) is totally confusing. Reading Sandberg’s book, it’s clear that women don’t just need to lean in. They need to carefully calibrate the angle of their approach to suit every possible scenario. When Sandberg is in “feminist manifesto” mode, she is honest about […]
The Berkshire Hathaway Financial Fortress
Warren Buffett wrote in the 2018 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Berkshire will forever remain a financial fortress. In managing, I will make expensive mistakes of commission and will also miss many opportunities, some of which should have been obvious to me. At times, our stock will tumble as investors flee from equities. But […]
What You Can Do About Sleep Deprivation
Rachel Cooke summarizes neuroscientist Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (2017): A hot bath aids sleep not because it makes you warm, but because your dilated blood vessels radiate inner heat, and your core body temperature drops. To successfully initiate sleep, your core temperature needs to drop about 1C. […]