Want a good money tip? Listen to a guy worth north of $87 billion.
Which you can now do whenever you please, thanks to CNBC’s Warren Buffett Archive, a compendium of 25 full Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, 130 hours of searchable video, 2,600 pages of transcripts and hundreds of video clips, interviews and more.
The yearly Berkshire shareholder get-togethers were not previously available to anyone outside of those in attendance; within those Omaha meeting rooms, Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger would hold five-hour Q&As with just a few thousand people. That changed in 2016, and CNBC has now synchronized transcripts and put together video highlights from the sessions, along with an archive of interviews Buffett has given the network.
A few lessons old and new we extracted:
- If you put $10,000 in a safe index fund back in 1942, it would have been worth $51 million today.
- From the first BH meeting: “We prefer to buy entire businesses … partly for the tax reasons and we like it better. [The] kind of business we’d like to build.”
- You don’t need to hire a consulting firm to determine how much to pay your CEO. “We have simple systems on comp,” Buffett says. “It’s not rocket science. We could spend a million bucks a year on a consultant for an answer we could get in five minutes.”
- You should read chapters 8 and 20 of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. “All the important ideas on investing are in that book,” says Buffett, while noting that there are really only three investing ideas you need to know.
- Oh, and if you want to know who would win a fight between one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses, ask Bill Gates.
You know: important stuff.
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