Brett

Thank you, I hope you love it! On your first question: Net-net investing, particularly in the U.S., HAS gotten much tougher. There are objectively fewer of them as the economy has shifted from being dependent on property, plane, and equipment to tangible assets being a minority of those for the companies in the S&P 500. With that said, there are still these types of opportunities on the fringes (and more internationally!). You only need 1 or 2 a year to make your returns. Can Buffett find that one or two? Yeah, I think so. It's possible it would be international than here, and my guess is it may be in even smaller companies. I'd add, Buffett also did a lot of arbitrage, and he would also use this. I think he would pivot to companies more dependent on the earnings a little sooner than he did if he were running today, especially as he scaled, but he would still do a lot of balance sheet-oriented investing / activism. On the second question, I think he can definitely get 50% on $1 million deploying broadly the same tactics he did in the pre-partnership years and the first half of the partnership (he did fewer net-nets in the second half of the partnership, such as Amex and Disney). I think the anchor scale presents is pretty drastic, though. Meaning the returns on $10 million are way worse, $100 million are way worse than that, etc. I think there are a lot more investors that had outstanding returns for 10+ years than is commonly known. But they sort of stop investing other people's capital after accumulating their initial fortune.

This is my exact take while researching and I'm so thrilled to hear the point came across! Buffett was blessed with some abilities: high IQ, natural mathematical abilities. But he got to where he was through hard work. We are not all going to be Warren Buffett--but we can still be successful investors (or we can thrive at whatever endeavor we choose!).

Thank you all for your kind comments! I really appreciate it. You made all that work worth it!

I posted about this in the Berkshire forum, but was moving over here. I am the author of the book--I hope you all enjoy it! I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you! That's a good idea! I hope you enjoy my book.

Thank you so much, Eric! That is a very generous offer and would be incredible--assuming you like it!

Of course! Hochschild Kohn was as private company when Diversified Retailing bought the company in 1966. But they had a number of stockholders (all family) and issued debt, so they put together some annual reports. HK was a critical company to the Baltimore community, so one of the local libraries had a whole host of company documents, including annual reports! In terms of finding old annual reports, these are some great websites: https://apps.lib.purdue.edu/abldars/ https://www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/bruno/annual-reports/ The Mergent archives, a database that some public libraries, such as the New York Public Library, have is a great resources as well. They have a ton of them on PDF that you can download.

Ha! Of course, will always remember you folks. To answer your other question: I had a much harder time finding enough investments on Charlie's partnership to write about. His documents aren't public, so I don't know enough of his positions. Kilpatrick's book has 1950 and 1951, and then I had to piece together the rest from The Snowball... so the answer is no! Thank you! Have you seen this video by her? She does a great job here of analyzing it.

I'd say three things: 1. The degree to which Buffett was concentrated not only in his partnership but throughout his Berkshire years. I had an idea but the data surprised me! 2. The level of gumshoe / detective work Buffett did. People think Buffett got rich reading Moody's Manuals... It's a gross oversimplification. He burned a lot of shoe leather to uncover differentiated insights into companies. 3. The amount of activism Buffett performed in these early days, and how it informed the creation of Berkshire Hathaway. My favorite chapter in the book is Philadelphia and Reading--I think you can draw a straight line from P&R to Berkshire. Buffett saw all the levers a control investor could pull to create value... and then did the same with Berkshire!

Great question. I have read this. I believe I go deeper on each investment and my work is much more valuation and financials focused. The annual reports for these companies are the foundation of my work--I think I'm the first author to obtain the Hochschild Kohn annual reports, for example. My book is aimed more at practitioners than a general audience, with more data on each company. I probably spend less time on 'lessons for investors' than that book did. I also think I have different takes than his: for example, Buffett had to underwrite a major corporate governance risk with the Disney investment that I don't think other authors have covered. I tried my best to analyze these investments the way Buffett would have at the time, with proper attention devoted to the underlying risks of each investment.

Hi all, I recently wrote Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns, which is coming out in one month (Amazon: https://amzn.to/4gRJaiy). I cover ten case studies from the 1950s and 1960s (which includes both partnership investments and investments he made pre-partnership). Pre-partnership, I cover: Marshall-Wells, Greif Bros, Cleveland Worsted Mills, Union Street Railway, and Philadelphia and Reading. The partnership investments I cover are: British Columbia Power, American Express, Studebaker, Hochschild Kohn, and Walt Disney Productions. I have been posting some Buffett-content that didn't make it into the book on X, such as his letter to Merchants National Properties: https://x.com/brettgardner_10/status/1836016824833515657 Happy to answer any questions about the book! I will be having some events in NYC promoting the book and will be at Berkshire next year.

BTW, I'm writing a book on ten of Buffett's earliest investments (50s/60s). This is one of them. Happy to send a draft if you'd like.

Buffett bought the stock in '66. Bought $4mm, sold it for $6mm a year later. Disney compounded at around 18.9% from '67 to '95. Berkshire compounded at 24.8% during the same period. Dividends would close the gap a bit, but not much. The investment in '66 had so many ways to win. Theme park business was set to explode. Monetization of the film library. The film business actually was not a good business post the Paramount consent decrees in '48. Disney had a niche in family focused films that allowed them to earn supernormal returns/margins. Animation capabilities no one really had. So cheap. ~4x EBIT. Mary Poppins just came out. But it was still going around the globe in '67. '67 earnings were actually up vs. '66. Walt passed away in '66. You lost a driving force of the film business and strategic force of the company. The 70s and 80s weren't great decades. You needed Roy Disney (Walt's nephew) to replace management and bring in Eisner to turn the company around in the 80s. Look at the current company. Massive amounts of value has been created due to ABC and ESPN. ESPN in particular has driven enormous valuation creation. How can one Buffett anticipate that? I don't think selling was an error at all. My view is Walt drove the film franchise when Buffett bought the stock (he had a meeting with him in California, he made a judgement on Walt). His passing was a huge blow to the upside of the company. You had film in the library you could re-release or sell to TV that was probably worth the entire market cap of the company. You had the theme parks. But underwriting the film franchise growing post Walt was very hard. Forecasting theme park growth was very hard. You knew earnings were going up, but how fast? The price gave you a huge margin of safety for most of these. But it made sense Buffett sold after the pop + Walt's death.

Thank you so much!

I'm curious if anyone here has written to Munger. Did you write to the Daily Journal address? Did you receive a response?