IT’S POSSIBLE TO MAKE a lot of money so quickly that you don’t realise the import and scale of what you’ve accomplished. Because of this it’s possible to lose it quickly, too. That’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing enough to make it difficult to admit what’s happened, even to yourself.
WARREN BUFFETT describes value based investing in a zen-like koan: “Find a wonderful business and buy it at an attractive price.” This deceptively simple doctrine begs the question of what makes a business wonderful. One of the hallmarks of a wonderful business is that it has a sustainable competitive advantage – a moat.
WARREN BUFFETT SAYS, “In the short-term, the market is a popularity contest; in the long-term, it is a weighing machine.” A possible way to interpret this is that no one can predict with meaningful accuracy what any publicly traded company’s stock price will be tomorrow but almost anyone can learn to correctly anticipate, most of the time, what the likelihood of success for an established business that they understand will be over time.
TEACHING OUR DAUGHTER ABOUT investing – sharing values informed by our family’s circumstances, interests, and ideas extending to the larger economy. It’s the story of how we helped her to understand what money is and how it works while still learning to treat each person as having inherent worth and dignity – of how she learned to make informed choices in the context of freedom consonant with personal responsibility.
