jjtheblunt · 2 years ago

Do you have a citation with statistics for this?

I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but regardless, it’s extremely interesting as far as assertions go.

scott00 · 2 years ago

Dark pool trades are reported to the FINRA TRF within at most 10 seconds and appear on the consolidated market data feed.

nabla9 · 2 years ago

bboygravity is right.

>BRK.A Off Exchange & Dark Pool Summary

>Today's Off Exchange & Dark Pool volume is 6,792, which is 98.11% of today's total volume. Today's Lit volume is 131, which is 1.89%. Over the past 30 days, the average Off Exchange & Dark Pool volume has been 97.51%. The average Lit volume has been 2.49%.

https://chartexchange.com/symbol/nyse-brk.a/exchange-volume/

qwytw · 2 years ago

> so even if there are (huge) trades you wouldn't necessarily see the price move.

So you're saying there is an arbitrage opportunity and you can literally make free money? Because that doesen't make much sense..

You might not see all the trades immediately, but they are still reflected in the price with minimal delay.

paulpauper · 2 years ago

I wonder what killed him aside just being really old. he died at a hospital and not at home, so something must have happened. his last media appearance was on the 17th of nov 2023.

petrusnonius · 2 years ago

Weirdly I was just looking for this data today, thanks.

everydaypanos · 2 years ago

Click on any book other than the first. Resize the window. Awkwardly jumps to first book..

ketzo · 2 years ago

My favorite tweet about his death:

"TRUE G IS IF YOU DIE AT AGE 99 AND THEY STILL WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE CLOSE FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT."

[1] https://x.com/INVESTMENTSHULK/status/1729608350751449218?s=2...

enos_feedler · 2 years ago

I just listened to the Acquired interview walking through the redwoods on Sunday. I am gutted because he talked about his 100th birthday celebration at the California club and joked how it was a full party with no invitations left. It broke my heart that he isn't around to celebrate and enjoy that experience.

perlgeek · 2 years ago

I actually found that interview to be quite hard to listen to.

Charlie often interrupted the question, answered one that could have been asked, and then later on the interviewer (Ben or David) came around to actually finishing the question, and it turned out not to be the one that Charlie prematurely answered.

He also gave several answers that I didn't think were really insightful, of course YMMV.

I found this interview to be one of the least interesting to be ever published by Acquired.

BiteCode_dev · 2 years ago

Nice work but the scrolling in mobile terrible, making it hard to read.

hiAndrewQuinn · 2 years ago

Great summary. One I'll be revisiting myself every now and then.

MichaelZuo · 2 years ago

There's also some speeches of his that are really fascinating too.

tm-guimaraes · 2 years ago

> What you mean is probably 'as far as public billionaires goes'. And with regards to 'down to earth' like anyone of prominence they don't care about you or wouldn't help you in any way (and couldn't possibly)

That applies to any stranger. Basically, a billionaire is human like any other.

We do idolize Billionaire / celebrity too much, but these unkind takes don't help anyone.

> Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in order to be involved and run an enterprise of that magnitude.

every human is selfish in their own way.

> What does down to earth mean anyway? Most people probably think that it means you appear to be more like the common man and don't have the typical trappings of wealth (or if you do nobody knows about them).

by your definition, he is down to earth. I would not define it like that, but i don't even know how to define it, but i would say that it correlates with not living for the apparatus or "big life" / hype / spend, and enjoying "small" things (ie, good and long lasting friendships, healthy family relations, simply enjoying a meal with people they care)

Munger and Buffet do seem to fit that.

Almondsetat · 2 years ago

The funny thing is that since this guy died at 99yo it means that 30 years ago he was still an old 70yo man. Screws with my brain sometimes

alexb_ · 2 years ago

It was revised and updated by Munger - it's better than the original because it has more experience and information. The old one is fine too, but is harder to read and a bit more dated.

nojito · 2 years ago

Much better version here

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~venky/teach/Munger-misjudgmen...

trompetenaccoun · 2 years ago

Every now and then the mask fully slips and you see how many users here really think. Munger was famously anti modern tech and even called the internet a "net negative" for capitalism at one point in 2000, but it doesn't matter because he was rich. Also he made so much money that all the comments where he praised a brutal dictatorship are apparently no big deal, for example for cracking down on Jack Ma who dared to mildly criticise Xi's leadership.

Everything for that share price, Chinese people don't need human rights anyway.

jpamata · 2 years ago

I guess lots of people find him interesting (see HN guidelines)

Charlie (and Buffett) are often recommended here for their mental models as their approach to investing and finance are very transferrable in startups/engineering. At the end of the day, large scale software engineering is mostly about managing risk, strategy, and corporate finance/value. Often, Poor Charlie's Almanack is recommended by my top Staff+ colleagues.

KerryJones · 2 years ago

I think it depends on what you mean by sharp. Quick? No, physical capabilities. His understanding of companies/markets/etc still were considered quite sharp by most investors I know.

artursapek · 2 years ago

I guess he's on his way to a windowless dorm now aha

paxys · 2 years ago

> Munger donated $200 million to the project on the condition that the university follow his design exactly.

Multibillionaire hubris is truly something else.

divbzero · 2 years ago

… at least the halls were wide and the ceilings high.

Waterluvian · 2 years ago

I’d support excluding windows in dorms if we’ve already checked the cushions for other possible cuts around campus and couldn’t come up with any.

divbzero · 2 years ago

Munger himself mentioned this as the rationale: having fewer windows flows logically from maximizing interior space.

apexalpha · 2 years ago

Not OP but mr Munger and Buffet have also held steady course in an increasingly hype driven financial world.

And they've stayed course since the 60s!

For that alone they've become (cult) legends among small time investors. As a small time investor myself born in the 90s it is insane the amount of bullsh*t social media will push onto you regarding finance.

Their annual meetings where they answer questions are some of the only sane financial advice to be found on YouTube.

mdp2021 · 2 years ago

> [doing ...] worthy of admiration

Being. Being well is an achievement.

What you come up to be is something you do - you develop it.

fastasucan · 2 years ago

>Arguably the guy did nothing worthy of admiration.

Hm, isn't that a purely subjective thing? And did he really did nothing worthy of admiration? Isn't it admirable to be great at your job? To write books that people read and enjoy, and draw inspiration from?

newshorts · 2 years ago

Im not trolling here either.

Genuinely wondering who your heroes are?

Could be a case of mismatched focuses. If someone is focused on tech, they might idealize Musk or Jobs. If someone has roots in the financial realm, they might thing Buffet is their hero.

That’s why I’m asking. Is it possible you can’t understand why Munger is a hero to some because you don’t live in that world?

For the record my heroes are Steve Irwin and my Aunt Patty, so it’s also completely subjective and highly contextual.

KerryJones · 2 years ago

This obituary might add some information for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/comments/1867de5/obi...

Specifically, this paragraph is the general way I was thinking about: "Munger’s hero was Benjamin Franklin, whom he admired for his curiosity, ingenuity and wit. Munger’s own common sense, biting humor, pathological bluntness and disdain for conventional wisdom made him a celebrity among investors"

For me, personally, it was the way that he lived his life, was extraordinary brilliant, a polymath, and changed multiple fields of study (investing and arguably behavioral psychology.) He has not only directly created jobs, as others have stated, of millions, but has also indirectly altered the lives of millions for the better. He is one of the greatest minds in investing and he freely educated millions on his methods.

At the same time, he had some incredibly rough times and bore it with grace. For me, setting this type of example is also noteworthy. There are also the small things -- people who have been around him, he's incredibly respectful on an individual basis, always showed up early, and in general, lived in a way that I aspire to living.

DontchaKnowit · 2 years ago

What? This sounds like it waz a company that ran a loyalty program for retailers. How is that anything like a tulip mania? Sounds like jist a normal, legit business

missedthecue · 2 years ago

He was already very rich before he made that deal with Goldman. It didn't put him on the map, in fact it only happened because he was already there.

sfsylvester · 2 years ago

"The youth of today love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for elders, and love talking" ~ Socrates, 432 BC.

The only older than elders writing off the youth is the youth proving them wrong. Let's hope some follow Charlie's quote instead: "If you've got anything you really want to do, don't wait until you're 93. Start now, and don't stop!"

jeffreyrogers · 2 years ago

Gen Z has fat tails, it will produce both great investors and great traders of all types.

axlee · 2 years ago

Value investing has very little to do with investing in ETFs/indexes. By definition, investing in an ETF can't be value investing, because value investing is about picking (yes, picking) stocks that are undervalued. And that implies going against the market. The complete opposite in buying into the market through an ETF.

truculent · 2 years ago

Value investing is “an investment paradigm that involves investing in stocks that are overlooked by the market and are being traded below their true worth”.

Correct me if wrong, but I don’t think index funds come under that paradigm.

chollida1 · 2 years ago

> Every financial advisor and 401k plan recommends index funds by default, and it is how the vast majority of people and organizations store their wealth. It doesn't need any more cheerleaders or icons. It had simply become synonymous with investing at large.

This is passive investing, not value investing.

Value investing is very much active investing, otherwise how would you select the undervalued assets?

Value investing is about finding undervalued companies and buying them while avoiding the properly valued or over valued companies. It has nothing to do with ETF's or index funds.

rchaud · 2 years ago

In addition to getting in on the 'value investing' train early, they built their fortunes because they were there with capital in the 1960s, the best time to begin a 'buy and hold' strategy.

Back in the '60s and '70s, stock market capitalization grew roughly in line with GDP. But from the 1980s onwards, it grew at a level that far outpaced GDP growth [0]. So investors who were already wealthy in the '60s had the capital necessary to take advantage.

[0] The Big Bang: Stock Market Capitalization in the Long Run, 2022: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.09.008

icedchai · 2 years ago

Many "financial advisors" will put you in funds with high expense ratios that give them a good sales commission, then take another 1% of assets under management on top. Eventually people wise up and move elsewhere.

WalterBright · 2 years ago

> investing of any kind was wildly out of reach for the common man

Oh baloney. I signed up for a Schwab account and started buying stocks at my first job long before the internet. My dad started buying stocks in the 1940s on his military pay (never much). Elevator boys were famously buying stocks in the 1920s.

All the "reach" required was some get-up-and-go to sign up for a brokerage account. It didn't cost anything. They didn't check your tax returns or do a credit check.

The whole point of the stock market was to sell stock to anyone who would buy it.

christophilus · 2 years ago

Mohnish Pabrai is another good candidate.

zhdc1 · 2 years ago

Vanguard lucked into hiring one of the greatest fund managers of all time in John Neff.

There were very, very few people who could do what he did.

throwaway2037 · 2 years ago

Wiki says:

    In the annual letter to shareholders on 2014, it was suggested that both [Ajit] Jain and Greg Abel could be appropriate successors for Warren Buffett as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

Animats · 2 years ago

Yes. I got that too. I don't want their brokerage, just their funds. I'm paying the $25/year fee. I want separation of functions, for security reasons.

qd011 · 2 years ago

Diet of coca-cola, sweets and dry humor.

kypro · 2 years ago

> When is it that "hackers" and people into doing risky businesses started getting so into in the most boring, most conservative investor of all time?

I won't comment on the general sentiment of your comment, but I will take exception to your characterisation of Munger as "the most boring, most conservative investor of all time".

Munger throughout his life Munger came up with many interesting (and sometimes controversial) ideas, he even made some fairly risky speculative investments. For example just in recent history he was looking to invest in building windowless dorms to much push back and outrage. He also made a very risky leveraged bet on Alibaba which was far from conservative.

yreg · 2 years ago

Y Combinator is a business incubator, of course investing is relevant here.

kypro · 2 years ago

I actually agreed with his reasoning on this and don't think it was motivated by greed at all.

Firstly it would have been cheaper for the students. But secondly and more importantly, the buildings did have windows, it was only the dorms themselves which didn't, but the reasoning for this was that were primarily built for sleeping so he argued they didn't need windows. And not requiring windows meant that each student would get their own room and would not need to share. The building was designed so that when not sleeping the students would make use of the communal areas which did have windows.

You don't have to like it, but it wasn't a completely stupid idea. The main problem really was just that the idea of a billionaire who wanted to build dorms without windows to save on development costs was too tasty of a story for the media to not run with.

missedthecue · 2 years ago

I have noticed very online communities were outraged about this and other people I knew in real life weren't. I wonder if it's because people who dominate HN and reddit are more likely to spend their college life in their dorm, where a windowless environment would naturally get depressing very quickly.

My dorm room was windowless when I went to university and I didn't notice because I was only there when it was dark anyway. But I remember I got the flu once and was inside for a while and I very distinctly recall that the lack of natural lightcycle began to take its toll. Still, cheaper room and board would be my preference.

VladTheImpalor · 2 years ago

I'm going to assume your comment is in good faith. In which case, yes, they are more important than almost anything else. Modern humans spend more and more time indoors, and this has catastrophic consequences on our mental and physical health. Even in properly sized apartments, most of us have too much CO2 in our rooms. But worse (and especially in the US), there is all manner of ghastly outgassing from furnitures, fumes from cooking, germs from other people and whatnot. This is in buildings that are not too cramped to begin with (unlike Munger hall).

Not every college student is an outgoing, life-of-the-party, loves hiking type. And the trend thanks to the ubiquity of screens means more and more teenagers are shut-ins. In which case, the deleterious effects of no sunlight and no fresh air are even worse, especially at a developmentally-important age.

But what is worse is the hubris of billionaires who think they know best. It's what Maciej Ceglowski calls the lack of imagination at the top. What do the billionaires of our society, our overlords, want for the rest of us? What are their hopes and dreams, their utopia? Elon Musk wants to terrorise Mars with nasty bacteria from Earth. Bezos wants to run driverless cars around the city to replace public transport. And copy Musk. Page and Brin want to cure ageing, cowards unprepared to die both of them. Dipshit billionaires want shitty things like AI assistants who see and hear everything, lithium cars instead of walkable cities and trains. They want us to have Tide buttons in our houses so we can order it like a Pavlovian monkey. Dipshit billionaires convinced we're living in a simulation. Assholes buying bug-out bunkers in New Zealand. Or fuckers like Altman hoarding gold by the tonne, and gas masks from the IDF, while they pillage and rape San Francisco and its former residents shit on the streets and then sleep there.

And now, they even want to take away our sunlight and our fresh air. Even though the architects telling them otherwise railed against the idea, and resigned. Hubris like this gave us open offices. They want their chattel to be well-behaved and do what it's told. Sit in your privacy free 1m2 'office', drowning in the din made by your fellow plebs, during the day, and sleep in your windowless prison in the night.

mrazomor · 2 years ago

I don't interpret it the same way as you.

My understanding of Munger's intent: find the issues and risks that you are not aware of, by looking at the project from a different perspective.

What Google X (and many others) do: do the most risky parts first, so you fail fast and minimize the wasted effort (save time and money by not doing the less risky parts first, in case the project is doomed).

michaelcampbell · 2 years ago

This sounds like an academic version of the "return to office" mandates.

naveen99 · 2 years ago

Doubt it. He believed Amazon and walmart did more good than any charity. Also 8 children could probably use a few hundred million each and still not be billionaires.

vasco · 2 years ago

I don't think you understand the quote if you're focused on being true to yourself. The whole point is your opinions change over time, there's no true self. Just keep a curious humble mind and keep going.

If there's something to be true to and then you'd find it, now you'd have validation to act shitty towards others in the name of being true to yourself. That's the type of brain chains "this is how I am" he means.

harryVic · 2 years ago

It's just a comment, they're not stealing someone's original research. I for one appreciate that they shared the story. Rip charlie munger

robocat · 2 years ago

Suggestion when quoting: put two spaces in front of each paragraph - turns it into monospace and looks a bit like a pullquote e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38439315

iambateman · 2 years ago

This is a great point but given their comment history and 7000+ karma, my money is on this being the original author taking an opportunity to repost their own writing.

Hopefully the benefit of the doubt is well offered here because obviously lifting 100+ words of someone else's writing is poor form.

gist · 2 years ago

Yes. It is a post by the head of a small investment firm simply trying to align themselves with the halo of Charlie Munger.

Also this in particular is particularly ridiculous:

"It’s a fair bet that your present troubles pale in comparison. Whatever it is, get over it. Start over. He did it. You can, too."

First that's quite a bit of an assumption. After all divorce and a medical problem (like Charlie had) as well as a child dying IS something you can get over. There are people that for sure have much worse situations than that. But even if that was not the case it's never a good idea to frame someone's problems by comparing to something worse that someone got through.

You are upset that you have let's say diabetes? Oh get over it 'it's not cancer'.

You have cancer? Oh get over it it could be pancreatic cancer.

And so on.

Many problems you can't just 'get over'. (Addiction and mental health issues holding you back are just 2 examples)

paulpauper · 2 years ago

GPT?

monero-xmr · 2 years ago

Family first, followed by friends. It is sad to me that so many young people are voluntarily choosing not to have children. They are the ultimate - the reason we exist, the mechanism for leaving a legacy, the most beautiful thing on earth. Family is everything

paul7986 · 2 years ago

Chat GPT where else ;-)

yellow_lead · 2 years ago

https://twitter.com/kevg1412/status/1729632415742906370?s=20

lofsigma · 2 years ago

meh, $3,300 ≈ 45% median house price of the time, you'd need to be making ~200k today just to be even.

marcus_holmes · 2 years ago

Also remember that he was able to support a stay-at-home wife and family and buy a house on that salary.

The direct comparison of inflation ignores that the relative cost of things also changes. Our cost of living is much higher than it was post-war. But we get to have decent sanitation, phones and computers, better medicine, etc.

cbsmith · 2 years ago

> If lawyers and doctors earned what they earned in the 40s, i am sure student loan debt crisis would miraculously go away.

What's the expression... "the plural of anecdote is not data"?

It's important to keep in mind a few things... First of all, the point about $42,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars was that he was not doing well. Secondly, "inflation-adjusted" is not "cost of living adjusted" for where he was living. Pasadena was comparatively sparsely populated with a low cost of living back then, as opposed to the densely populated, high cost of living area it is now. Accordingly, he was not making anything resembling the median income of lawyers back then: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/SCB/pa...

Adjusted for inflation, the average legal salary from 1949 would be $104,108.17. The average pay for a lawyer in California in 2023 is... $90,028/yr. So yeah, accounting for inflation, lawyers have been earning comparatively less over time... and yet the cost of law school has been consistently growing faster than inflation.

Beyond that, lawyers and doctors are a special class of white collar worker where scarcity is artificially inflated by trade boards. They aren't representative of the majority of people with massive, unmanageable student debts. As an example, median income for an accountant in California (I can't think of a more stereotypical white collar job) is... $49,479.

I also wouldn't presume that the dividing line between blue & white collar workers is a college education. About ~12% of people with college degrees work in blue collar jobs (and the numbers are way higher for college drop outs).

I don't think the data supports your narrative.

coolThingsFirst · 2 years ago

Lol