Interesting quotes on Mickey Mouse:
And his character was the kind I wished I'd had as a child: brave and sassy and nasty and crooked and thinking of ways to outdo people.... Not the lifeless fat pig he is now.
Mickey Mouse would never do anything wrong or interesting because he is Disney's logo.
Ok. Here's the excerpts from OID I promised:
And we're very happy with Mark [Byrne of Value Capital, L.P.] running that piece of money - even though he does it, as you say, in fixed-income strategies that involve derivatives and borrowed money. But I've looked at the positions - and they all make sense to me.
This is a nod to the fact that Buffett will opportunistically employ capital. Value investing is just one of the tools in his toolbox, alongside derivatives and other leverage.
In engineering projects, people build big margins of safety into systems - atomic power plants being an extreme example. But in the financial world, in derivatives, it's as though nobody gives a damn about safety - and they just let it balloon and balloon and balloon in usage and number of trades and size of trades. And that ballooning is aided by this false accounting where people are pretending to make money that they're not really making.
Charlie and Buffett clearly believe many Wall Streeters operate with too much leverage for a given situation. So, it'd be interesting to understand more about how Value Capital manages its risk.
It's a mechanical system. And any mechanical system in securities markets is going to misprice things from time to time. As I said, last year we made one large commitment that had somebody that took the other side of it after using the Black-Scholes formula - and we made $120 million. We love the idea of others using mechanistic formulas to price things - because they may be right 99 times out of a hundred, but we don't have to play those 99 times. We just play the one time when we have a differing view.
Only bet when you know the other guy is working from a flawed premise, or with some faulty logic gates. ;)
You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads. You'd be amazed at how much I read. My children just laugh at me. They sort of think of me as a book with a couple of legs sticking out.
Buffett and Munger recommend Forbes, Fortune magazine, the Wall Street Journal, in addition to reading a slew of 10-Ks. The goal is to understand the business and the environment it operates in (the industry, macroeconomics, etc.). Also, Munger and Buffett occasionally drop in on Stanford's Investment Management and Entrepreneurial Finance", so being overly familiar with those resources probably is a very good idea. Also, just plain working through Stanford's Finance electives would probably be good, too. ;)