High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / recommendation

Published · transcript-backed

Mentions personal use of Intelligent Investor.

20 Feb 2024 Lex Fridman Podcast #413 – Bill Ackman: Investing, Financial Battles, Harvard, DEI, X & Free Speech

“My first book I read in the business was the Ben Graham Intelligent Investor, but fairly quickly you get to learn about Warren Buffett and I started by reading the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports.”

— Bill Ackman

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Bill Ackman
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
20 Feb 2024
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…You mentioned Warren Buffett. You said you admire him as an investor. What do you find most interesting and powerful about his approach? What aspects of his approach to investing do you also practice? Sure. So most of what I’ve learned in the investment business, I’ve learned from Warren Buffett, he’s been my great professor of this business. My first book I read in the business was the Ben Graham Intelligent Investor, but fairly quickly you get to learn about Warren Buffett and I started by reading the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports. And then I eventually got the Buffett partnership letters that you could see, which are an amazing read to go back to the mid 1950s and read what he wrote to his limited partners when he first started out and just follow that trajectory over a long period of time. So what’s remarkable about him is one, duration, right? He’s still at it at 93. Two, it takes a very long-term view, but a big thing that you learn from him investing requires is incredible, dispassionate, unemotional quality. You have to be extremely economically rational, which is not a basic, it’s not something you learn in the jungle. I don’t think it’s something that… If you think about surviving the jungle, the lion shows up and everyone starts running, you run with them. That does not work well in markets. In fact, you generally have to do the opposite, right? When the lemmings are running over the cliff, that’s the time where you’re facing the other direction and you’re running the other direction, i.e, you’re stepping in, you’re buying stocks at really low prices. Buffett’s been great at that and great at teaching about what he calls temperament, which is this sort of emotional or unemotional quality that you need to be able to dispassionately look at the world and say, “Okay, is this a real risk? Are people overreacting?” People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they’re going down. And I think that’s just inherently human. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive. You’ve been a part of some big battles, some big losses, some big wins. It’s been a roller coaster. So in terms of temperament psychologically, how do you not let that break you? How do you maintain a calm demeanor and avoid running with a lemmings?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Named in this claim

Books, apps, tools, and people.

Search evidence