Investing Lessons of Warren Buffett

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1 Stockpicking isn’t a hobby. Everyone should be an investor. But not everyone should choose their own investments. To be a successful investor requires thousands of hours of deliberate effortful study to master the necessary skills, and then thousands more (or in Buffett’s case, tens of thousands) to use those skills to find worthwhile investments. Buffett read every investing book in his local library, many of them multiple times… by the time he was eleven years old. If you aren’t willing to put in the time and effort that stockpicking requires, the person on the other side of your trades is likely to know more than you, which is a recipe for underperformance. In that case, you’re better off simply buying a low-fee index fund which passively tracks the market, like VFINX, which tries to match the S&P 500. All of the lessons below are relevant for active investing, but many of them also apply to passive investing, so I encourage you to read on regardless of whether you decide to pick stocks yourself or just buy the entire market. [Extra for experts: market-weighted index mutual funds like VFINX hold more in stocks that have already risen and less in stocks that have already fallen, which reduces returns because stocks that are up tend to slightly underperform those that are down. As an alternative, consider RSP, the equal-weight S&P ETF from Rydex, which has historically outperformed market-weighted S&P index funds by 1-2% per year.] 2 Invest unemotionally. It’s human nature to be emotional, and life is richer for it. But it reduces investment returns. Many people make systematic errors in their investment thinking, due to their emotions, egos and innate cognitive biases. They suffer from confirmation bias, tending to seek out and find evidence to support their position rather than evidence that might refute it. They think about risk more when

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