That's the title that CNBC slapped on a video clip of the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Their sub-head was "Warren Buffett explains the process he would go through if he were getting out of school today with $10,000 to invest.". There are quite a few additional snippets should one follow the link.
Here's the story from CNBC, June 23, 2021:
In 1999, Warren Buffett was asked what you should do to get as rich as him—his advice still applies today
If you want to be as rich as Warren Buffett, don’t wait to get started. That’s the advice that the investing titan shared in 1999 at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting when asked how to make $30 billion, which was roughly his net worth at the time.
The then-68-year-old Buffett — whose fortune has since grown to more than $120 billion — said that compound interest is an investor’s best friend and compared building wealth through interest to rolling a snowball down a hill.
“Start early,” Buffett said. “I started building this little snowball at the top of a very long hill. The trick to have a very long hill is either starting very young or living to be very old.”
The Oracle of Omaha said that if he were graduating from college in 1999 and had $10,000 to invest, he would be strategic about choosing where to put his money. “I probably would focus on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller sums and there’s more chance that something is overlooked in that arena,” Buffett explained, saying he would start examining companies alphabetically and work his way from there.
Investors, Buffett explained, need to fend for themselves and rely on their own knowledge and intuition when searching for promising businesses to invest in. He added that savvy investors would do best to “learn what you know and what you don’t” and act “very vigorously” when they see something they consider to be a good opportunity.
“You can’t look around for people to agree with you,” Buffett said of putting money into an investment. “You can’t look around for people to even know what you’re talking about.”....
....MUCH MORE
Now all that is true, and Warren covered both ends of the temporal spectrum, starting young and living old, allowing the compounding snowball a really, really long time to build mass and momentum.
But there will never again be a Warren Buffett. Or on lesser scales a George Soros or a Jim Simons making their moolah from portfolio investing..
If interested see 2016's "Why we'll never see another Warren Buffett or George Soros ever again" along with some of the links embedded therein:
- Warren Buffet: The King of Leveraged Low Beta (BRK.B)
- Buffett's Alpha Redux (BRK.b)
- The Last Word On Asness' Alpha, Buffet's Beta and The Failure of Commodity Quants (and how to turn hyperlinks into footnotes)
- Warren Buffett's 50th Anniversary Letter to Berkshire Shareholders and Some Thoughts on the Early Years
- Buffett's Alpha or How To Generate Better Risk Adjusted Returns Than Anyone Else in the Biz (BRK)
- Is Alpha Dead? Beating the Market Has Become Nearly Impossible
