Reading Warren Buffett’s Annual Letters to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders
2011–2020
Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor (1949)and Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street (1973) have a tremendous impact on my investing style. They used empirical data to prove that, the long-term buy and hold investors have often outperformed the traders.
I also learned that the legendary investor of our time, the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett was one of Graham’s students at Columbia Business School and has always been a follower of Graham’s value investing principles. I tried to find books written by Buffett but realized that there is no better resource than his own Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Letters to Shareholders — a collection of always updated and refreshed learnings from Warren Buffett, free of charge. So I started a one-month-long shareholder letter reading marathon.
I love how Buffett wrote the letters in a way that a layman like me can understand, the humility when admitting his mistakes, cited wise quotes, recounted history and anecdotes of many businesses, and his principles vividly reflected in the real-life practices. Every letter is full of wisdom.
Buffett has so far authored 56 shareholder letters in total, from 1965 to 2020, since Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway. In this article, I will…
