Despite that I’m not a book collector yet, hence not doing trophy-hunting - that one was weirdly hard to catch: my pre-order got lost and the next batch was only available after around 2 months - so some minor waiting story is associated with it.

“Good Old Capitalism & Value Investing story”.

More like an ‘Anti-FOMO’ manifests collection.

Initial hardness to get the book also explains the difficulty of writing some notes about it - as it’d have its own following in certain communities, probably lore, probably rules, so it’d would be a minor one.

First, for the context - it’s a ‘wisdoms’ book of Charlie Munger, a long-time partner of Warren Buffet, a legendary value-investor, we’d leave it at that.

The first versions were published quite a while ago (I see even 2005 ones on Goodreads), I have a Stripe Press version, beautifully designed, as usual, but without major additions.

If you’ve been reading some excerpts of Munger’s talks here and there, or met some similar compilations - I think the book would be a bit anticlimactic. All-in-all it’s mainly a transcription of the public talks since around 80s to the 2000s, hence no surprises and new insights.

However, I very much like the style of it being about principles, thinking, and predictions - and the best sort of those books come with history attached, i.e. reading notes from 80s in 2024, you could see how well they panned out - it’s a completely different genre than ‘success’ biography, it avoids survivorship bias to a degree.

Minding that, it gives a very nice experience, as you know that ‘Berkshire’s success happened, but you also have a glimpse of the history snapshots.

The downside - all of it is true to a degree, as we don’t have a ‘fly on the wall’ setup, but rather University/High Schools/Etc. speeches with some examples. As a caveat to note - we won’t see many failure stories here, but they’re visible through time:

Some exactly - in 90s Jack Welch and GE was a highly praised stock (in a book too) and a ‘smart management’ example (the company, as you might know, wasn’t really in a good shape afterwards).

Some are just hints - not everyone would agree with even ‘good’ midwestern republican values, it’s present here and there a bit more than I expected before.

While valuable and entertaining, sometimes it feels a bit repetitive, even though for a good reason.

Main of them - you don’t have to have a lot of principles. Hence: think long-term only, be reliable, avoid bets with the possibility of complete ruin, and be patient with any investment (financial & in life).
In a way, it’s a loud life-long Anti-FOMO statement; the philosophy of Munger/Buffet was to invest with very-very-very high level of certainty and hold those positions for decades.