“The Warren Buffett Way” by Robert Hagstorm has become a classic investment book and it is considered by many to be on par with the famous Ben Graham text, “The Intelligent Investor.” I was personally fortunate enough to have picked up “The Warren Buffett Way” roughly five years ago, prior to the occurrence of the financial crisis and the resulting fallout. In fact, I was extremely fortunate, in that this book was the first book I had ever read on the subject of investing. I took it to the beach with me for a week long vacation, by the week’s end I had read, annotated, highlighted, and studied the text from cover to cover. I would personally recommend the book to anybody who is serious

about the stock market, or retirement, or to anyone who generally works too hard to have their money be lazy. The following posts are summaries of each of the chapters of “The Warren Buffett Way.”

There are two forwards, one preface, and one introduction, before the first chapter of the book even begins. They are all written by authors who are accomplished investors in their own right and who know Buffett on a personal level. The first forward is written by the famous mutual fund manager and author Peter Lynch. (I would also recommend reading Lynch’s books if you are new to investing.) All of the writings are fantastic and well worth a read, however the real meat of the book begins, as expected, with the first chapter.

(to skip to chapter two click here)

Continue reading this post »

I am currently reading and summarizing Warren Buffett’s partnership letters to his partners from his early partnership. What is interesting about his letters to his partners is that these letters were written before Buffett was known in the investment world as a great investor. He was 25 years old when he started the partnership and he was managing the equivalent of less then 1 million dollars in 2010 dollars. At the time he started the partnership he had just finished spending 2 years in NYC working for his famous Columbia Business School teacher, Ben Graham.

There are a lot of myths about how Buffett invested in his early days. His partnership letters help shed some light on what sort of investments he was making at the time.  His early and relatively unknown partnership letters are especially important for many at home, do it yourself, investors. Because let’s face it, most of us are investing less than 1 million dollars, just like Buffett when he first started, but he eventually because the richest man in the world. To many “home gamers” these letters are important because unlike the berkshire Berkshire Hathaway letters of today, Buffett wasn’t managing billions of dollars. And he wasn’t causing the prices of stock to move up or day simply because he was buying or selling stock. Simply put, when these letters were written Buffett was just like most of us, but then he began growing his money… Continue reading this post »