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I finally finished reading The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren E. Buffett and Lawrence A. Cunningham. While there was a variety of useful information (some of it repetitive) in the compiliation, two things really jumped out at me from the essays.

First, Warren Buffett is a huge student of Ben Graham. (Which I knew, but the essays continued to emphasize that point.) “Read The Intelligent Investor” and “read lectures from Ben Graham” have been added to my to-do list, especially after this seeing paragraph:

“…in Chapter 8 of The Intelligent Investor…[Ben Graham] introduced ‘Mr. Market,’ an obliging fellow who shows up every day to either buy from you or sell to you, whichever you wish. The more manic-depressive this chap is, the greater the opportunities available to the investor. That’s true because a wildly fluctuating market means that irrationally low prices will periodically be attached to solid businesses. It is impossible to see how the availability of such prices can be thought of as increasing the hazards for an investor who is totally free to either ignore the market or exploit its folly.”

Hm, a manic-depressive market sure sounds familiar right about now. And then there’s this, which I believe was written in 2000:

“Really juicy results from negotiated deals can be anticipated only when capital markets are severely constrained and the whole business world is pessimistic. We are 180 degrees from that point.”

Well, we’re certainly not 180 degrees from that point now. I think that “severely constrained” markets and “the whole business world is pessimsitic” are pretty apt descriptions of today’s economic environment.

All of that really just makes me itch to buy more stocks, especially if I could get better at picking the “right” ones. Meanwhile I am continuing to read about investing, and buying in small amounts. I hope that I’ll be able to look back in 10 years on 2008 and 2009 and think that I made good buys. (Especially since the alternative is looking back and thinking I made stupid decisions.) Either way, I am learning.

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