Blog - Investment Masters Class

Warren Buffett was once asked about the management fads that seem to sweep through business schools and boardrooms every few years.

At university, I spent the week of study leave before exams cramming a semester into my head.

David McCullough was widely regarded as one of America's greatest biographers and historians.

In early 1995, Don Gooding, a telecom analyst at the venture firm Accel, kept returning to a useful guide to the internet with a peculiar name.

Some of the greatest businesses in history were not built by inventing something entirely new.

Richard Farmer had a favourite way of explaining costs at Cintas.

In 80 CE, the Roman emperor Titus minted a coin with a strange little emblem on the reverse: a dolphin coiled around an anchor.

Picture two people standing in the same restaurant, watching the same rival open across the street.

Ron Vachris started at Costco forty years ago as a forklift driver.

Warren Buffett once said, half-joking, that the secret of life is weak competition.

There’s a story from the early days of Charles Schwab — the steel man, not the brokerage founder — that tells you almost everything you need to know about internal competition.

Top 14 [Ranked Top to Bottom] By the time I closed the last page of The Invisible Billionaire — Jerry Shields' biography of Daniel Ludwig — I had read thirty-five books this year.

A couple of months ago I spent eight days crossing America — Indianapolis to Cincinnati, Boston, New York, and finally Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting — visiting businesses, investors, ballparks, bookstores and art galleries.

Spend enough time studying exceptional organisations and you begin to notice recurring patterns.

There's a consulting industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars built on a surprisingly simple arbitrage: companies pay outsiders enormous fees to tell them what their own employees already know.

There is a word that appears, unbidden, in the writing and speeches of the founders of some of the greatest businesses ever built.

In his third year at a New York hedge fund, Christopher Hohn had a huge year — and they paid him a US$10 million bonus.

Reading 2025 - Top 30 [Top to bottom] Each year I set out to read widely — across business, sport, art, psychology and history — knowing full well that it rarely follows a straight line.

Every so often you stumble across a book so old, so unassuming, that it shouldn’t have any relevance to modern investing… and yet it reads as if it were written yesterday.

If you’ve ever wondered why some companies seem to compound advantage for decades while peers stall, In Search of Excellence - Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies is still one of the cleanest lenses you can pick up.

At just five years old, Dame Stephanie Shirley’s parents placed her and her eight-year-old sister on a Kindertransport train from Vienna to England in 1939.

One dollar invested in John Malone’s TCI in 1973 had grown to $3,950 by 2024.

2025 Reading - Favorites People often ask me what's on my reading list, and to be honest, there’s usually one or two books I’m keen to read, but most of them pop up along the journey. 2025 has been no different.

If you're looking for a masterclass in business building — one that transcends geography, culture, and time — Born of This Land, the autobiography of Chung Ju-yung, is essential reading.

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of spending two weeks traveling across the U.S. - a journey that blended markets, memories, and meetings with some of the most influential minds in investing.