It’s chaos all over the world. Trump’s liberation day tariff 2 April 2025 sent a shockwave to the global market, and the trade war that it instigates could possibly cause a global recession after the market crashes subside.
During this mayhem, in the list of 10 of the richest people in the world 9 of them lost a significant amount of money (all in the billions). That is, except for 1 person. Warren Buffett. And so I thought, there’s probably no better time to revisit the wisdom of the Oracle of Omaha than now.
Just like any other finance geeks, I’ve read my fair share of books about Buffett, from the cartoon biography by Ayano Morio, to “Tap Dancing to Work”, “the Tao of Warren Buffett”, “The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soros”, the brilliant “University of Berkshire Hathaway” about the content of plenty of Berkshire’s shareholders’ meeting, not to mention the many generic investment books that mentions about Buffett’s style, such as “Money Masters of Our Time”, or a bit of cameo in “Tao of Charlie Munger” and “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”, or gaining his insights from the books that he reads, like, of course, “The Intelligent Investor” by his mentor Benjamin Graham.
But never have I read a book about Buffett’s pre-Berkshire days. This is the strength of this book that sets it apart from the rest of the pack. In the sea of books, podcasts, videos, etc about Warren Buffett, this book is probably the only one that dived deep into Buffett’s early investment career, when he formed Buffett Associates, Ltd (1956-1970).
It covers the earliest investment thinkings of Buffett, fresh from graduation and mentorship with Benjamin Graham, through his Partnership Letters where he poured everything down and explain them all to his fund’s investors. It shows the thinking behind a young investor’s mind, working with a modest sum of money not unlike the most of us, but can still somehow generate a substantial amount of returns.
As the author Jeremy C. Miller remarks, “[The Partnership Letters] make a powerful argument for a long-term value-oriented strategy, one that is especially viable in turbulent times such as our own, when people are vulnerable to a speculative, oftentimes leveraged, short-term focus that is rarely effective in the long run. They provide timeless principles of conservatism and discipline that have been the cornerstone of Buffett’s success.”
The book is organized around several different topics, in which it extracts Buffett’s take on them in the Partnership Letters, reorganize them into the appropriate chapters, and then add a summarizing introduction at each chapter’s beginning, followed by the most important excerpts on each topic that was presented in full, which allows us the reader to learn directly from Buffett’s words.
The topics covered include: compounding, passing investing (or market indexing), active investing, on incentives, his switch from net-nets cigar puff strategy (“buying fair businesses at wonderful prices”) to “buying wonderful businesses at fair prices”, arbitrage, control over companies, coattailing, how to avoid common mistakes in investing, taxes, on managing growth, and so much more; all with the real-life examples from what Buffett did during his early investment years.
Buffett never published a book. But instead, so many books are written about him and his investment style, using the letters and articles that he has written, as well his many speeches and talks. And this Partnership Letters from his earliest days of investing shed an interesting light into his way of thinking, which makes this book a very important puzzle piece to read and understand Warren Buffett.
THE CHAOS THEORY 