QuestionerHow do you get a few excellent investment ideas to be so successful? Do you read any special newspapers or industry magazines? Or do you visit the headquarters or any subsidiaries of companies?
WarrenWe read a lot and we read daily publications, we read weekly or monthly periodicals, we read annual reports, we read 10Ks, we read 10. 10Ks, we read 10 Q's. And fortunately, the investment business is a business where knowledge accumulates. I mean, everything you learn when you're 20 or 30, you may tweak some as you go along, but it all kind of builds into a knowledge base that's useful forever. 40 or 50 years ago, I did a lot of talking to management. I used to go out and take a trip every now and then and really drop in on maybe 15 or 20 companies. I haven't done that for a long, long time. We do not find it particularly helpful to talk to managements. Managements frequently want to come to Omaha and talk to me, and they usually have a variety of reasons that they say they want to talk to me, but what they're really hoping is we get interested in their stock. That never works. You know, management are not the best reporting. parties in most cases. The figures tell us more than a management does. So we do not spend any real amount of time talking to management. The more basic knowledge you have, I think the less new knowledge you have to get, and the game is a lot like that fellow that plays chess blindfolded. He's got a memory of the board and everything that happened before. and that enables him to do the next move in a way he never could if you just showed him the board mid-game cold.