“I have always thought,” Franklin once wrote a friend, “that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan and…makes the execution of that same plan his sole study.”
"Expressing an opinion with total certainty discourages others from offering their view" ~ Annie Duke
“We have some single-digit P/E stocks in the portfolio, but dad always made the most money out of good companies that stub their toe.” - Maple-Brown Abbott: Lessons from 40 years of ASX investing (afr.com)
And you can have fun doing it too:
That's WB on the Geico Harley.
Geico is the jewel of Berkshire's insurance arm, and Berkshire Hathaway make money from insurance in three primary ways:
- Underwriting profits
- Investing insurance “float”
- Risk management
He has some very talented people working for him in terms of working out the premiums to charge to insure what many others won't insure, so to provide specialised insurance as well as general insurance, and the massive pool of capital provided by the insurance "float" (being the money people pay for insurance that has to be set aside to be used to pay out claims at some point) is something he identified early as being a valuable and plentiful source of investment money. He doesn't ever borrow money to invest; people give him their money in the form of insurance policies and he gets to invest the bulk of that (after insurance company overheads) to make more money. And insurance is just one part of the Berkshire Hathaway empire, but it's a fairly important part.
Another one I like is:
He got that right!
And this one is interesting:
So you can make a deal with a bad person that is profitable, but does that make it a good deal? Deal with good people, and invest in good companies.
And don't overpay...