Reviews - The Warren Buffett Way

The Warren Buffett Way by Robert G. Hagstrom

9 reviews for:

Robert Hagstrom is one of many authors hoping to make a few bucks by telling people how they can make their own millions investing like Warren Buffett. Hagstrom gives helpful details about how Buffett calculates owner's earnings, but otherwise he doesn't know much more than anyone else does about Buffett's specifics. Hagstrom outlines Buffett's basic tenets of investing, based on what he has read in the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports and a handful of other Buffett writings. This is an excellent outline of Buffett's fundamental principles of investing and how they were applied to various investments that Buffett made at Berkshire. The most interesting and useful part is Hagstrom's focus in the second half of the book on the focus portfolio. A study of 12,000 computer-generated portfolios showed that the number of stocks in a portfolio directly correlates to the portfolio's chance of beating the market. The small number of stocks in Buffett's portfolio may be the most important factor that allowed Buffett to outperform the market consistently for nearly 60 years.

bookhockleyd's review against another edition

4.0

Bought it a long time ago. Finally read it. Worth the read still. Very enduring advice and approach. Mainly the philosophy of Buffett is the valuable piece and the book explores it thoroughly.

jordm's review against another edition

4.0

informative slow-paced

paul_gallagher's review against another edition

2.0

I actually listened to the version narrated by Stefan Rudnicki - one of my favourite 'voice actors' - and he did a good job of bringing some life to the pages and making this somewhat tolerable.

While the book does present and illustrate the Buffet investing characteristics with enough biographical information to flesh out the story in an interesting way, in the end the book's repetitiveness got to me.

Buffet's philosophy is renowned for it's simple common sense. A great strength for investment theory, but a poison pill for someone writing on the topic. I couldn't help thinking the author really struggled to pad the material out to the requisite number of pages.