Didnt know where to put this. Wasnt aware of his early foray into the horses. Credit to Charlie Garcia over at Market Watch: Opinion: How Warren Buffett went from picking horses to picking stocks — and what you can learn from it Buffett’s sharp insights on racing odds would later help him build his Berkshire Hathaway billions By Charlie Garcia Last Updated: May 3, 2025 at 4:17 p.m. ET Once the Oracle of Omaha stood outside a local horse track selling tips. Now Buffett is the safest bet around. Long before he became the world’s greatest value-stock investor, Warren Buffett was a preteen tipster for horse-racing bettors. Omaha, Neb., 1941. Little Warren, all of 11 years old, hammering away at a Royal typewriter, processing racing intelligence most adults couldn’t decode. Buffett and a friend sold their Stable Boy Selections race-handicapping sheets for a quarter apiece outside Ak-Sar-Ben track — Nebraska spelled backward, the kind of wordplay that counted as clever in those days. Great business, until the bosses got wise and ran the kids off. Young Buffett had already mastered “stooping”— digging through discarded race tickets among the sawdust and cigarette butts. Bettors threw away place and show tickets, believing only winners paid. This vivid image — Buffett rummaging through trash for overlooked value — perfectly captures his lifelong “cigar butt” investment philosophy. Even then, Buffett wasn’t betting on horses. He was betting on information. Not child’s play. It was disciplined, precise, mathematical — calculating odds, weighing risks, placing bets on mispriced opportunities. He was processing information like a tiny human Bloomberg terminal. That mindset stuck. Clear, calm, contrarian. It would make him billions. Buffett tested his theories rigorously. As a teenager, he convinced his congressman father to request hundreds of horse handicapping books from the Library of Congress, and, while other kids were reading comic books, he ordered old racing forms from Chicago to back-test his systems. It wasn’t gambling — it was applied mathematics.
Don't forget using the government to block an oil pipeline that would have directly competed with his railroad. It was Biden's first action in office. How many oil cars tipped over and burned in American towns so Buffet could avoid capitalism?
The Intelligent Investor is mostly just corporate financial literacy 101. If you cannot read a balance sheet or a cash flow statement, you really have no business buying individual stocks.
Not true. Some of the best stock trades are speccy's with zero sense in their balance sheet. They're emotional bets backed by greed of the punters. Bitcoin / crypto would be an example, others are biopharmas, Mining exploration.
Gamblers get lucky sometimes, news at 11! If you cannot explain coherent a hypothesis, or attribute a particular value to what you're burying it starts to sound a lot like you're just a gambler. But I'm sure they have " a system." A credential! So given that you don't think basic knowledge of accounting is necessary, why did you bother to get your degree? Did you wake up one day and say, "I want to get a degree in something that I think has nothing to do with the success or failure of a company."
Given that you think Financial Statements are the be all of Stock trading, why is your name "Engineering"? Did you wake up one day and say, "I want to get a degree in something that I think has nothing to do with the success or failure of a company.