Table of contents

Child pages

• 2002.05.03 - Austin Chronicle - The Johnson Treatment
  • Caro revealed that Johnson openly bragged that he was interested only in taking out coeds who had rich daddies. During college, Johnson firmly attached himself to C.E. Evans, the lonely bachelor president. Early on, Caro noted Johnson's proclivity to make allies of older men he could flatter and use to get ahead.
    
  • Johnson was practiced at attaching himself to older, powerful men, but in the person of Richard Russell he had met his match. Russell didn't roll over when Johnson flattered him or accompanied the older man to baseball games

Monitor whether they're going to be teaching a class

Examples

• 1984 - Warren Buffett - The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville

  • Walter [Schloss] never went to college, but took a course from Ben Graham at night at the New York Institute of Finance [and then worked for Graham]. Walter left Graham-Newman in 1955 and achieved the record shown here over 28 years.
    (...)
    The second case is Tom Knapp who also worked at Graham-Newman with me. Tom was a chemistry major at Princeton before the war; when he came back from the war, he was a beach bum. And then one day he read that Dave Dodd was giving a night course in investments at Columbia. Tom took it on a non-credit basis, and he got so interested in the subject from taking that course that he came up and enrolled at Columbia Business School where he got the MBA degree. He took Dodd's course again, and took Ben Graham's course. [And he then went to work for Graham]
    (...)
    Table 4 shows the record of the Sequoia Fund, which is managed by a man whom I met in 1951 in Ben Graham's class, Bill Ruane. After getting out of Harvard Business School, he went to Wall Street. Then he realized that he needed to get a real business education so he came up to take Ben's course at Columbia, where we met in early 1951. 

  • A common theme: they heard a successful guy was giving a class, they took the class, then they tried to get a job with Graham (with the possible exception of Ruane).

Send them letters / emails with profitable ideas

1998 - Warren Buffett - Talk at University of Florida

• Just like Mike Burry with Joel Greenblatt, Warren attracted the attention of big-shot Ben Graham by sending him investment ideas over the course of several years. Source:
• 24:14 - "...but I kept pestering him; I sold securities for three years, and I kept writing him and giving him ideas and doing all these things...finally I went to work for him for a couple of years."

I should get copies of the book on predicting the weather and the books on castles that I can give away as gifts.