The Good Life Summarised

There will be no more annual shareholder letters from Warren Buffett, the greatest investor the world has ever seen, nor will he do the marathon question-and-answer session that Berkshire Hathaway’s general body meeting was so famous for. This has been a tradition going back decades, and between Buffett and his late partner Charlie Munger, just about every principle of investing was discussed.

Buffett informed this decision to the millions who admire him in his annual Thanksgiving letter, a less formal missive. This, at least, he plans to continue every year, and that might be the sole insight into his thinking going forward. The reason for taking a step back is his age, 95, even though he is still in good health. All this we know from the letter itself, which, as always, is a fine guide to what a good life ought to be.

It is nostalgic but with many takeaways. As when he writes that he has spent his entire life in Omaha, buying a house near where he was born. He has not changed it since 1958 even though his net worth went up by US$150 billion. And that he is giving his money surely but steadily to his children’s foundations, which will then go into causes of public good. So also that he is not giving up his shares until the transition of the trust of all stakeholders of Berkshire in the new leadership that he has selected is complete. Everything Buffett has done, even though under­pinned by investing genius, has at its base been guided by common sense and values available to anyone to emulate.

Berkshire, a textile manufacturer going through a crisis when Buffett bought it in 1965, is now an unimaginably vast conglomerate but without any of the friction that such a vehicle ought to have. How he did that is available by reading for free all the shareholders’ letters he wrote. There will not be any more of them, but enough has already been said.