Kevin Carpenter @kejca

Peter Lynch: "You cannot lose money in a stock you don't own. The only way to lose money is to buy a stock, have it go down, and [then] sell it. That's the only way."

Berkshire Hathaway director Chris Davis: "Every investor, if they're honest, will say that their biggest mistakes were what they sold." "I first bought Amazon in 2002, but I sold it in 2004." "I'm trying to really learn and think about how can I improve results, over the next twenty years, by being more willing to hold." (h/t @Ritholtz)

Charlie Munger: "In my whole adult life, I've never hoarded cash waiting for better conditions. I've just invested in the best things I could find." "Berkshire has excess cash. Quite a bit of excess cash. But it's not doing that because it thinks it knows how to time investments — [Warren Buffett] just can't find anything he can stand buying." (Daily Journal AGM || 2022)

Warren Buffett: "I could have done way smarter things [during the GFC]. I did not optimize the period, looking back." "If I had just saved the money and put it in the market six months later, I would have done way better than making these deals. But I didn't know that at the time." "I don't try and pick bottoms. When I get a call and it makes sense and I've got the money, I do it." (Charlie Rose Show || 2009)

Chris Hohn: "Most industries are bad industries. Maybe there are 200 companies that we consider to be high-quality and investable." "The one important thing that I've learned in my time in investing is [that] investors underestimate the forces of competition and disruption."

Mohnish Pabrai: "See's is a wonderful business. It taught [Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger] a lot. It taught them more than they ever thought they'd learn from a stupid candy business." "Both [Warren] and Charlie were amazed that you could have a business where you are continuously raising prices significantly above the rate of inflation — and there is no resistance from the customer base to accepting those prices. That gave them a huge lesson in brands." "They paid 3x book value for See's. They were choking almost when they paid that amount. I think they bought See's for $25 million. Looking back, they could have paid $200 million and it [still] would have been great." "If they had not bought See's, they would have never bought Coke. The lessons that they learned about branding and the power of brands is what led to the Coke investment — which was a much bigger home run." (h/t @myfirstmilpod)

Charlie Munger: "The director's table in the Heinz Corporation cost $600,000. The director's table at Costco cost about $300. They are different places [with] different ethos." "If you get fat like that, somebody like 3G comes along and says, 'I want to buy you and cut you back to normal.'" "Of course, it's possible to over-cut — but my guess is there's a lot of fat in our successful places." (Daily Journal AGM || 2022)

Warren Buffett on America: "We've got the best system. We've got a better system than we used to have — and we'll have [an even] better system fifty years from now." "I've never seen a period where I didn't believe that." "In a herky-jerky — but dramatic — manner, business moves forward, government moves forward, and, more important, people move forward." (Charlie Rose || 2022)

@AngelListBets Thanks!

A closer look at Taylor Morrison — Berkshire Hathaway’s first acquisition of the Greg Abel era. kingswell.io/p/taylor-morri…

Berkshire Hathaway director Chris Davis: "We have a country that loves to tear down the heroes. We admire the guy on the way up, but once they succeed we somehow decide they're a villain." "It's a strange thing for us to admire athletes and not admire Jeff Bezos for what he created and how it has served all of us every day. We all use Amazon." "We continue to vilify our heroes, instead of judging people by their biggest accomplishment, not their weakest moment." (h/t @Ritholtz)

Warren Buffett on the three key ideas of intelligent investment. (1) "Think of investing as owning a business and not [as] buying something that wiggles around in price." (2) "If you have the proper attitude toward market movements, it's an enormous help in securities." (3) "The margin of safety — which means don't try to drive a 9,800-pound truck over a bridge that says capacity 10,000 pounds. Go down the road a little bit and find one that says capacity 15,000 pounds."

Charlie Munger: "If you have a very rich corporation, human nature [being] what it is, it will get a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of excess cost in it and a lot of meetings and so forth." "There is huge waste in that. In fact, a lot of the excess meetings make you worse off, not better off." "Many places, after they've wrung out 30% of the excess costs, they run better than they did before." "On the other hand, you can cut too much. There should be some mercy for people who have been around a long time and have served well in the past. You don't necessarily want 100% perfect efficiency." (Daily Journal AGM || 2022)

Warren Buffett in 2022: "Elon [Musk] is taking on General Motors and Ford and Toyota and all these people who've got all this stuff — and he's got an idea. And he's winning. That's America." 🇺🇸

Mohnish Pabrai: "I always find it strange if I run into investors who haven't been entrepreneurs — because I think they're missing a very key part. And, on the other hand, I find that entrepreneurs are very naturally already set up to be great investors." (@ShaanVP || @myfirstmilpod || 2024)

Chris Hohn: "Pre-Financial Crisis, I had a look at Credit Suisse. I sat down with the then CEO Brady Dougan and put his balance sheet in front of him from the annual accounts and said, 'You have a multi-trillion-dollar balance sheet. Can we walk through the line items because I don't understand it?' He said, 'I don't either.'"

MUNGER: Warren talks about these discounted cash flows, [but] I've never seen him do one. BUFFETT: If you have to actually do it with pencil and paper, it's too close to think about. It ought to just kinda scream at you that you've got this huge margin of safety.

Charlie Munger: "I've always believed that nothing is worth an infinite price. So even an admirable place like Costco could get to a price where you would say that's too high." "I can't bring myself — with my habits — to pay these big prices, but I never even think about selling a share of Costco just because it's selling at a high price." "I think it's going to be a big, powerful company as far ahead as you can see." "I wish everything else in America was working as well as Costco does. Think what a blessing that would be for us all." (Daily Journal AGM || 2022)

Warren Buffett: "Apple, I think, sells less than 25% of the smartphones in the world. But Apple has produced the one that is the most useful to people. It's an aspirational product."

Catch up on this week's Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news! Including... ✨ Warren Buffett's advice to college students on company culture and a partnership mindset ✨ New CEO Greg Abel splashes the cash on homebuilder Taylor Morrison and Alphabet/Google stock ✨ Charlie Shamieh (reportedly Ajit Jain's successor) in his own words ✨ BNSF Railway intermodal traffic picks up ✨ MacBook Neo sales continue to impress for Apple kingswell.io/p/the-berkshir…