Thanks for the article. Thought provoking. This Buffett quote also reminds me of his admonition to "delight the customer." In businesses where the customer experience matters -- retail, cable, restaurant, consumer -- I won't touch any company that my wife thinks poorly of. Why? She's a decent barometer of the average customer. And no mat…
Thanks for the article. Thought provoking. This Buffett quote also reminds me of his admonition to "delight the customer." In businesses where the customer experience matters -- retail, cable, restaurant, consumer -- I won't touch any company that my wife thinks poorly of. Why? She's a decent barometer of the average customer. And no matter how good the spreadsheet math is, if the customer isn't happy then the business won't last. Buffett seems to do well with stocks/businesses where he likes the product (Coke, Sees Candy, or in the case of Apple, where he saw how much his grandkids loved the product) and then he applies back-of-the-envelope math to be directionally correct if not precise about the company's earning power. I also think wealthy investors -- who are likely out of touch with what poor people really think about the retail/product experience (e.g., Eddie Lampert and Sears, or anybody pitching DG) -- ought to be extremely reticent to trust spreadsheets if they don't shop at that store or use the actual product. All of this reminds me of the popular meme with the bell curve: the idiot investor buys a stock just because he likes the product, the average investor buys the stock because of the spreadsheet math, and the genius buys the stock because he likes the product (and the rough math works).
Thanks for the article. Thought provoking. This Buffett quote also reminds me of his admonition to "delight the customer." In businesses where the customer experience matters -- retail, cable, restaurant, consumer -- I won't touch any company that my wife thinks poorly of. Why? She's a decent barometer of the average customer. And no matter how good the spreadsheet math is, if the customer isn't happy then the business won't last. Buffett seems to do well with stocks/businesses where he likes the product (Coke, Sees Candy, or in the case of Apple, where he saw how much his grandkids loved the product) and then he applies back-of-the-envelope math to be directionally correct if not precise about the company's earning power. I also think wealthy investors -- who are likely out of touch with what poor people really think about the retail/product experience (e.g., Eddie Lampert and Sears, or anybody pitching DG) -- ought to be extremely reticent to trust spreadsheets if they don't shop at that store or use the actual product. All of this reminds me of the popular meme with the bell curve: the idiot investor buys a stock just because he likes the product, the average investor buys the stock because of the spreadsheet math, and the genius buys the stock because he likes the product (and the rough math works).