market folly

Value investor Mohnish Pabrai has long emulated the ways of the legendary Warren Buffett. When he was asked about how Buffett found so much success and how to follow in his footsteps, Pabrai had this to say:

"In fact there are a couple of professors in Ohio, who studied any stock that Warren Buffett bought, if you bought on the last day of the month, when it was public that he owned that stock, and you sold it after it was public that he had started selling it, you would have generated north of 20% annual rate of return.

I would say that we will never see another Warren Buffett. Just like we will never see any Albert Einstein or another Mahatma Gandhi. Buffett is a very unique individual. His skillsets outside of investment are phenomenal but they get dwarfed by his investing skills. The main thing that makes Warren Buffett Warren Buffett is that he is a learning machine who has worked really hard for, let’s us say seventy years, and is continuously learning every day.

So the thing is if you want to be like Buffett, there is no short cut. First of all, you have to be deeply interested in investing and you have to be very willing spending tens of hours, hundreds of hours, reading the minutiae. There is a very famous value investor called Seth Klarman. He is into horse racing. And his famous horse is called Read the Footnotes."

~ Mohnish Pabrai

You can hear Mohnish and many hedge fund managers present their latest investment ideas at the Value Investing Congress on October 12th in New York City. There are only 23 seats left at the event and Market Folly readers can save $300 off admission here.