In 1998, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger spent 4 hours explaining why the smartest people in finance keep going broke. It might be the most valuable finance lecture ever recorded: 1. The smartest people in finance went completely broke. Long-term Capital Management had 16 people with possibly the highest average IQ of any firm in the country, 350 to 400 combined years of experience, and most of their own net worth in the fund. They still went bankrupt. Buffett said if he ever wrote a book it would be called why smart people do dumb things. 2. Life and markets have no relation to sigmas. Buffett keeps a 1901 newspaper on his office wall. Northern Pacific went from $170 to $1,000 a share in a single day when two buyers accidentally cornered the stock. A brewer who had shorted it, facing a margin call, dove into a vat of hot beer. That man probably understood sigmas and knew such a move was impossible. Buffett has never wanted to end up in the vat. 3. Beta and sigmas tell you nothing about the risk of going broke. the LTCM team relied on mathematics and believed a six- or seven-sigma event could not touch them. they were wrong. history does not tell you the probabilities of future financial events. the real risk is a permanent blind spot in something crucial, often caused by knowing a great deal about something else. 4. To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Munger's explanation for why brilliant people do dumb things. They learn a set of mathematical techniques and then twist every problem to fit the solution they already know. Combine that with a poor grasp of history, and you get people with advanced degrees blowing themselves up. 5. To make money they did not need, they risked money they did need. That is just plain foolish, Buffett says, no matter your IQ. Hand him a gun with a million chambers and one bullet, offer any sum to put it to his temple and pull once, and he will not do it. there is nothing on the upside that justifies the downside. people do this financially all the time without thinking. 6. The major banks all had risk models and had no idea what they owned. they met weekly at risk committees, printed all the statistics in neat columns, and did not have the faintest idea what risk they were carrying. The rare and essential quality is someone who can contemplate perils that have not popped up yet, the ones no past model contains. 7. A chief risk officer often just makes you feel good while you do dumb things. munger compares him to the Delphic oracle who convinced the Persian king to attack. he has a PhD and does advanced math, but he tortures reality to defend a model that does not hold under extreme conditions. all that computation makes you feel like you clobbered the risk when you have only clobbered your own head. 8. The whole quant risk system just changed the shape of the curve and kept going. Munger notes the business schools "improved" by throwing away the Gaussian curve and drawing a different one. They talk about fat tails now, but they still have no idea how fat to make them. he and Buffett always knew the tails were there, and used to roll their eyes at the risk-control people at Salomon. 9. Never risk what you have and need for what you do not have and do not need. Buffett will not explain to his family, who hold most of their net worth in Berkshire, that they went broke on a 100-to-1 gamble. Their returns get penalized 99 years out of 100 by being too conservative, and in the hundredth year they survive when others do not. 10. Build the business so that if the world stops working tomorrow, you have no problem. Berkshire double-layers its protection. First, they behave so no rational person questions their credit, then they hold so much liquidity that if the world suddenly hated their credit, they would not notice for months. It gives up higher returns 99% of the time and survives the one time others do not. 11. The real danger is a risk that has never happened before. Buffett wants someone who can imagine perils that have not yet appeared, the ones no model contains. The major institutions all had models, and that inability to envision the unprecedented is exactly what proved fatal. He and Munger spend a lot of time thinking about things that could hit them out of the blue that others leave out entirely. 12. Investing is simple, but not easy. The framework is not complicated. you did not need a high IQ to buy junk bonds in 2002 or stocks at low multiples in 1974. you just needed the courage of your convictions and the willingness to act when everyone else was paralyzed. Following logic rather than emotion is obvious, and yet some people find it almost impossible. 13. You cannot get rich with a weathervane. Buffett and Munger pay no attention to predictions about the economy or the market. People love predictions, entire industries are built on them, but it is like the king hiring a forecaster to read sheep guts. They have never made or avoided a single business purchase because of a macro view. 14. Name one super-wealthy economist. Munger's challenge. All these economists with 160 IQs spend their lives studying markets, and you cannot find one who got rich buying securities. Even Keynes tried to predict the credit cycle, broke a couple of times, and only did well once he switched to buying good businesses cheap and concentrating. 15. Focus only on what is important and knowable. Some things are important but unknowable, like whether someone drops a nuclear weapon tomorrow. Some things are knowable but unimportant. You narrow your attention to the small set of things that are both important and knowable, and you ignore everything else. 16. The market is there to serve you, not to instruct you. This is Graham's chapter eight, and Buffett calls it enormously important. When people talk about momentum or charts, they are saying the market instructs you. It does not. It just quotes prices. When it does something silly, you get a chance to act. Otherwise you go play bridge and check again tomorrow. 17. You can make a decision in five minutes or not at all. Buffett and Munger act fast because they rule out enormous territory in advance. Munger blots out startups entirely, and half a dozen other filters, so what remains is small enough to judge instantly. If they cannot decide in five minutes, they will not learn enough in five months to make up for going in deficient. 18. You can make a lot of money on a Sunday. Buffett said the calls you get on a Sunday, when things are truly screwed up, are the ones you make money on. All you have to do is be the collie and not the caller. You never get in a position where the other party can call your tune, so you can always play out your hand. 19. You are not right because others agree with you. Ben Graham said you are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees. You are right because your facts and reasoning are right. Being contrarian has no special virtue over being a trend follower. All that matters is whether the facts are correct and the logic is sound. 20. Know where the edge of your circle of competence is. Buffett says the size of your circle does not matter. Knowing its perimeter does. You do not have to understand 90% of businesses. You just have to know something real about the few you actually put money into, and honestly recognize the ones you do not understand and walk away. 21. Intrinsic value is just the cash a business will produce, discounted back. Buffett thinks of every business as a bond with coupons that are not printed on it. Your job as an investor is to estimate those future coupons. If you cannot estimate them, like in a high-tech company, you pass. Investing is putting out money to get more back from what the asset produces, not from selling it to someone else. 22. The best businesses earn a royalty and need little capital. Coca-Cola sells a formula and takes a cut of every drink. Magazines like People operate on negative capital because subscribers pay in advance. The great businesses are the ones that can grow very large while needing almost no capital, which is why consumer businesses with pricing power are so valuable. 23. You only have to find one good idea, not twenty. Munger said you cannot find twenty deeply mispriced things, and Buffett agreed you do not need to. You do not have to have tons of good ideas in this business. You just need one good idea that is worth a ton, occasionally. For small sums, Buffett said he would have been 100% in Korea a few years earlier, where great companies traded at three times earnings. 24. The trick is measuring everything against your best opportunity. Munger calls this opportunity cost, the doctrine from the first page of the economics textbook that modern portfolio theory somehow ignored. Once you have found the best thing you understand, you measure every other option against it. The higher your default option, the more you can reject. 25. Modern portfolio theory is, in Munger's words, asinine. Most people will not find thousands of equally good things. They will find a few where one or two are far better than anything else they know. The right way to invest is to concentrate on your best opportunity cost, not to diversify into mediocrity because a model told you to. 26. Big opportunities must be seized, and seized big. Buffett says imagine you got a punch card with only twenty punches for your whole life, one per financial decision. You would think hard about each one, make fewer and better bets, and probably never use all twenty. The discipline of scarcity would make you rich. Dabbling in a bull market because it is easy is how people lose. 27. America has always been full of reasons to sell, and wrong every time. Coca-Cola went public in 1919 at $40, dropped to $19 within a year, and then faced the great depression, World War, and atomic bombs. One share reinvested is worth millions now. The country's opportunities have always won out over its problems. It is investors, not the economy, who tend to be their own worst enemy.