Lessons from Warren and Charlie

Value investor Mohnish Pabrai has gotten the chance to do what few other investors have: Eat lunch with investing legends Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. What did he learn from those lunches? Pabrai says Munger told him that an investor could produce vastly better results than most others by doing three things. “One is carefully look at what the other great investors have done,” he tells The Motley Fool’s Morgan Housel. “And the second thing he said is, look at the cannibals. And what he meant by ‘look at the cannibals’ is, look carefully at the businesses that are buying back huge amounts of their stock. … And the third is, he said, carefully study spinoffs.” Buffett, meanwhile, told Pabrai about Rick Guerin, who was Buffett and Munger’s partner in the early days of Berkshire Hathaway. Guerin was overlevered when the 1973-74 bear market hit, and was forced to sell his Berkshire stake to Buffett. “[Buffett] said that if you’re even a slightly above-average investor who spends less than they earn, over a lifetime you cannot help but get rich if you are patient. And so the lesson … was, don’t use leverage. … And be patient.”

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