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Last Saturday morning at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger answered questions from the Berkshire shareholders. Here are some of their comments.

On Future Returns 

Buffett: We would be very happy if we earned 10%, pre-tax. Anyone that expects us to come close to replicating the past should sell their stock; it isn’t going to happen. We’ll get decent results over time, but not indecent results.

Buffett to Investors – Think Small

Warren Buffett once again shows his preference for investing in easy to understand businesses when he teams up with candy maker Mars to buy Wm Wrigley Jr, the world’s largest chewing gum meaker for US$23 billion.

The recently announced deal meant that Berkshire Hathaway will have a minority stake in Wrigley. The purchase price of US$80 a share is a 28 per cent premium over Wrigley’s closing price of US$62.45 last Friday.

In early April, Warren Buffett invited 150 students from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to his premise. Fortune Magazine was also invited to sit in with the chance for an interview. The following were covered in the session:

  • Why the efficient market theory is misguided.
  • Why it is very difficult to regulate people.
  • His thoughts about the election.
  • His first job.
  • How he gets his ideas.
  • His advice to you if you are not a professional investor.
  • The extreme leveraging in the current turmoil.
  • The impossibility of understanding CDOs.

I always say you should get greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. But that’s too much to expect. Of course, you shouldn’t get greedy when others get greedy and fearful when others get fearful. At a minimum, try to stay away from that.

Click here to read the entire story.

With reference to my earlier post on the Warren Buffett by NUS students, I got lucky and managed to find a report of their visit. Here are some key extracts from the students about Warren Buffett:

More on Omaha Visit by NUS Students

A few days ago, Warren Buffett took part in a question-and-answer session with business college students during the “Emerging Issues and Trends in Real Estate” forum and educational conference at the Trulaske College of Business at the University of Missouri.

The session was conducted over a video conference. These are some points from Warren Buffett:

Warren Buffetts Shares with University of Missouri Students

Some lucky postgraduate students from the National University of Singapore got a chance to visit Warren Buffett during a recent study trip to the US in February 2008. It was the first time an Asian university held a dialogue with the investment guru.

The 21 Master in Business Administration or MBA students also visited companies like Apple and Google in Silicon Valley in San Francisco.

But the highlight of their study trip was a personal session with Warren Buffet in Omaha.

I don’t have any details of what Warren Buffett said to them but if the past is any guide, it should be something similar to this:

Warren Buffett Speaks at University of Florida

This video is hidden among a ton of posts here so I thought it would be good to bring it up again.

It has been a while since I last sumarised the annual letters that Warren Buffett writes to his shareholders. I was halfway through the 2001 letter, and will attempt to round it up here.

In that year, Warren Buffett had lukewarm feelings about stocks for the rest of the decade. He felt that the market had outperformed the business for a long period of time, and that had to end. Any investor buying in at that time would likely be disappointed.

Berkshire Annual Letters 2001

A few days ago, Warren Buffett had a live appearance and interview session on CNBC Squawk Box with Becky Quick. The session was pretty long and a part of it was for Warren to answer a series of email questions from CNBC’s readers. I’m producing a summary of some points from the interview. Some of these are his replies to questions from the emails:

Warren Buffett on CNBC Squawk Box

Warren Buffett has just released his latest annual letter to his Berkshire shareholders a few days ago. While I haven’t read through the entire thing yet, a quick scan shows Warren critisising pension funds for their over-optimistic projections of their returns.

Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders for 2007

CNBC’s Squawk Box will be interviewing Warren Buffett this coming Monday morning and has invited us to send in our own questions. From the questions received, CNBC will select some to ask Warren. If you are interested to send in your question to Warren Buffett, you can do so at this page.

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