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Warren Buffett: 10 pieces of investment advice from America's greatest investor

Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of the past century, celebrates his birthday Aug. 30. Here is some of his best investment advice. 

8. 'If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety.'

Nati Harnik/AP/File
Buffett and Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh react as Buffett misses a putt at the Justin Boots booth in Omaha, May 4, 2013.

Source: 1997 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

Berkshire Hathaway's annual meetings, commonly referred to as "Buffett Woodstock," have become can't-miss events in the financial world. Last May, 35,000 people descended on Omaha, Neb. for the weekend-long convention celebrating all things Buffett. The Oracle himself fields questions from investors and journalists, hobnobs with luminaries ranging from Bill Gates to NFL players, and sometimes plays a game or two of ping pong. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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