Circle of Competence

About a week ago, I came across an interesting article called The Checklist on the blog Street Capitalist. The piece, from the New Yorker, was about a doctor who, through the use of checklists, was able to dramatically improve the critical care unit of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Today, I posted a Reflection on the other blog [...]

We all know that intelligent investing works.  Finding businesses, analyzing their worth, paying less… The whole deal.  Even the academics have pretty much realized that they’ve been wrong.  You can only tack on so many sigmas.
But the burning question for so many investors is why.  Why in the heck isn’t this market, comprised of millions [...]

You’ve got Berkshire; the king, the original, the Mecca.  Investing in Berkshire Hathaway over the last 40 years has been like injecting rocket fuel into your portfolio, generating 20%+ returns since 1965 and, in the process, minting millionaires and loyal followers. However, nowadays Berkshire is getting so large that, by the laws of statistics, its [...]

I put up a new Reflection this evening on the use of ROIC metrics to improve and value an organization. Go over to Reflections on Value Investing and enjoy.
Here’s an excerpt:
Warren Buffett has made it clear that Return on Capital is one of the most useful metrics in evaluating the strength of a given [...]

On Monday, Buffett held court at a press conference in Frankfurt, Germany to begin his trip through Europe. He commented on buying great businesses, European acquisitions, and the real purpose of his trip. As always, he was in good humor and dropped many investing gems.

Watch the Video Here

On Tuesday, Buffett’s news conference moved [...]

Buffett has reflected many times on the workings of a great businesses. In looking at the transcripts of his speeches to students, this theme and many other recurred. I put my first post up at Reflections on Value Investing today with some Buffett quotes and two terrific transcripts of his talks to MBA [...]

I just wanted to update everyone quickly on a great new situation for me. I’ve been invited by the current contributors of Reflections on Value Investing, a terrific site that features “Reflections,” stories of interest to the value investing community, with excerpts and a link to each interesting item. The site was started [...]