A curated wiki that distills timeless investment lessons from 48 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters (1977–2024) authored by Warren Buffett. The wiki is written for retail investors learning to invest like Warren Buffett.
1977–1985 — The foundation years: What a business is worth, what to pay for it, and the insurance float that funds the rest.
1986–1995 — The compounding years: Coca-Cola, the moat, Mr. Market, and the pivot from cheap "cigar butts" to wonderful businesses.
1996–2003 — The bubble and aftermath: Sitting out the dot-com mania, surviving 9/11, and calling derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction."
2004–2010 — Scale and crisis: Great/Good/Gruesome businesses, the cost of Wall Street's "helpers," and buying boldly through the 2008 panic.
2011–2019 — Legacy and succession: Why productive assets beat gold and cash, winning The Bet against hedge funds, and building Berkshire to outlast its founder.
2020–2024 — Late Buffett: Doing nothing through COVID, Apple as the textbook buyback, a record cash pile, and farewell to Charlie Munger.
Nearly 60 concept pages, but they don't carry equal weight and some build on others — reading them front to back is the wrong move. Use the curriculum below as your spine; the collapsed question index underneath is for when you'd rather jump straight to whatever decision you're facing.
A reading path in four tiers, from "the worldview" to "advanced machinery." Read roughly top to bottom. Don't reach for Tier 3 before Tier 0 has truly landed.
Tier 0 — The worldview (read these first). Five mental models everything else hangs off of:
- Margin of Safety — the gap between what a business is worth and what you pay; the cornerstone of the whole approach.
- Mr. Market — treat the market as a manic-depressive business partner, not a source of truth.
- Circle of Competence — invest only inside what you genuinely understand; know where the edge is.
- Moat — the structural competitive advantage that protects a business's returns over time.
- Intrinsic Value vs. Book Value — value is future cash output, not accounting input.
Tier 1 — How to value and pick a business:
- Valuation Framework — Aesop's "a bird in the hand" recast as a universal DCF; growth is an input to value, not a rival style.
- Owner Earnings — the true cash a business throws off, and why reported earnings mislead.
- Earnings Quality — how to tell what a business actually earns from what its "adjusted" labels claim it earns.
- Return on Equity as the Yardstick — judge a business and its management on return on equity, not the EPS growth that retained earnings produce on autopilot.
- Economic Goodwill — why a durable franchise is worth far more than its tangible assets.
- Cigar Butts vs. Wonderful Businesses — the pivot from cheap-and-mediocre to quality-at-a-fair-price.
- Great, Good, Gruesome — a three-tier taxonomy of business quality by capital appetite.
Tier 2 — How to behave as an owner:
- Volatility as Opportunity — falling prices are a friend if you're a net buyer.
- Concentration vs. Diversification — index if you know nothing; concentrate if you know something.
- Risk vs. Volatility — real risk is permanent loss of purchasing power, not price wiggle.
- Inversion — define what would guarantee failure first and avoid it; the upside case comes second.
- Leverage Discipline — never borrow so much that a stumble becomes a catastrophe.
- Mistakes of Omission — the costly deals you didn't do.
Tier 3 — Advanced & Berkshire machinery (fascinating, not day-one):
- Capital Allocation — the CEO's central skill; how to judge management.
- Share Repurchases — when buybacks create or destroy value.
- Float — how insurance premiums become an investing engine.
- The Institutional Imperative — the herd behavior a disciplined allocator must resist.
- Passive Investing — for most people, a low-cost index fund wins.
Index by the decision you're facing
When you'd rather skip the difficulty ordering and go straight to a live question. Each group answers one real decision:
"Why should I own businesses at all?"
- Investment Categories — currency vs. sterile vs. productive assets.
- American Tailwind — the long-run case for owning American business.
- Equity Return Expectations — the GDP-tethered ceiling on long-run returns.
- Bonds and Inflation — why fixing a price while costs move destroys value.
- Passive Investing — the index-fund default for non-professionals.
"What makes a business good?"
- Moat — the competitive advantage that resists erosion.
- Economic Goodwill — high returns on tangible capital.
- Franchise vs. Business — what tolerates mismanagement and what doesn't.
- Commodity Business Economics — why undifferentiated products earn poorly.
- Turnarounds Seldom Turn — cheap bad businesses tend to stay bad.
"What's it worth, and what do I pay?"
- Valuation Framework — the universal three-question DCF.
- Owner Earnings — the right cash-flow measure.
- Intrinsic Value vs. Book Value — the gauge for capital decisions.
- Margin of Safety — the discount you demand.
- Earnings Quality — strip the accounting labels back to real cash.
- Look-Through Earnings — your real share of a partial stake's profits.
"How do I behave once I own it?"
- Mr. Market — ignore the mood, use the price.
- Volatility as Opportunity — fear is the fundamentalist's friend.
- Risk vs. Volatility — measure the right thing.
- Concentration vs. Diversification — how many bets to make.
- Inversion — rule out the ways you lose before chasing the ways you win.
- Leverage Discipline — keep enough margin that a bad year can't end the game.
"How do I judge the people running it?"
- Return on Equity as the Yardstick — the scorecard that EPS growth disguises.
- Capital Allocation — the skill that compounds (or destroys) value.
- Incentive Compensation — pay that aligns with owners.
- Corporate Governance — when boards actually protect you.
- Owner Orientation — managers who think like partners.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
wiki/ |
The wiki itself — index.md (full catalog), log.md (journal), and one folder per page type: concepts/, entities/, people/, sources/, synthesis/. |
raw/ |
Immutable primary sources (the letters). Read-only. |
CLAUDE.md |
The editorial playbook the wiki is maintained by. |
Start at the full index for the complete catalog of concepts, entities, people, and sources.