You don’t need a degree in psychology to understand human nature. There was an old dude, Jesse Livermore, who wrote a great book that said the most important thing in investing was to know yourself — your weaknesses, your flaws and your strengths.
.. Do you think that this low-interest-rate environment has helped or hurt the economy? The savings side of the economy has been damaged. At 2 or 3 percent interest rates, there’s no way insurance companies and pension funds can justify their liabilities and guarantees going forward. Same thing with Mom and Dad and their expectations for education, retirement and so on.
.. What motivates you to keep doing this? I have an obsessive quality to me. When I left Pimco — or, put it this way, when Pimco left me — it was important to me to prove that they made a mistake.
Warren’s Way
But Buffett’s popularity doesn’t stem from his life style alone. More important, his success evokes an economy very different from today’s risky, unstable one. These days, workers are told that they need to adapt to a world of perpetual change, constantly reinventing themselves. The investing world is dominated by a manic-depressive style, in which the average mutual fund turns over nearly its entire portfolio every year. Yet Buffett has prospered by ignoring all this. As an investor, he’s known for his patience—he says that he likes holding stocks “forever”—and he prefers a few big bets to an endless number of small ones.
.. In the current stereotype of corporate acquirers, firms like Bain Capital load companies with debt, downsize their workforces, and strip them of assets. Buffett doesn’t do hostile acquisitions or major restructurings, and he almost never sells the companies he buys. He admits that this isn’t purely rational, although Berkshire is very profitable. But it plays to his strengths (he likes buying companies and building them) and mitigates his weaknesses (as he told me, he hates confrontation).
.. Rather than fret about Buffett’s being a traitor to his class, Wall Street and the super-rich should see that his message helps keep the pitchforks at bay. If Buffett didn’t exist, the rich would have had to invent him.