QuestionerWhat key steps would you recommend to correct the mindset of typical investor like me, which is what you narrate as lemmings-like, the crowd mindset? I started investing when I was 11. I first started reading about it. I believe in reading everything in sight. And first I started reading about it when I was probably six or seven years old. But for about eight years, I wandered around with technical analysis and doing all kinds of things.
WarrenAnd I read a book called The Intelligent Investor. And I did that when I was 19 down at the University of Nebraska. And I would say that if you absorb the lessons of the intelligent investor, mainly in I wrote a forward and I recommended, particularly chapters 8 and 20, that you will not behave like a lemming and you may do very well compared to the lemmings. There's three big lessons in there which relate to your attitude towards stocks generally, which is that you think of them as part. of a business and your attitude toward the market, which is that you use it to serve you and not to instruct you. And then the idea of a margin of safety of always leaving some extra room in things. But the people in this room, I think, have learned that important first lesson. I mean, I think most people that own Berkshire do not see themselves as owning something with a little ticker symbol or something that may have a favorable or unfavorable earning surprise or something of the sort. But they rather think of themselves as owning a group of things. those businesses that are out there in the other room. And that's the way to look at, that's the way to look at stocks. She'll never be a lemming if you do that.