A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

— Warren Buffett

BIG DEAL! I said the same thing last week!

Who needs Warren Buffett when you have a good dog?

Talking about Warren Buffett is making me hungry because his name looks like “buffet.” I wish someone would open an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant for dogs.

I would invest in that . . .

— Lightning

As Ted Kennedy has spent virtually all of his personal wealth on personal consumption of mansions, private jets, women, booze, etc., any help that he has provided to Americans has come at the expense of the “forgotten man” paying taxes. Ted’s own contributions to charity have been minimal (source).

Let’s compare to Warren Buffett. . . . Buffett has spent a negligible portion of his $60+ billion in personal wealth on personal consumption, giving almost all of it away to charity.

Perhaps Buffet is “the forgotten man.” He creates jobs by the thousands. He pays taxes by the $billions. He consumes very modestly considering his means. Yet Buffett is not considered a hero here in Massachusetts, at least.

John Maynard Keynes said in his masterful The General Theory: ‘Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.’ (Or, to put it in less elegant terms, lemmings as a class may be derided but never does an individual lemming get criticized.)

I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre.

Our gain in net worth during 2003 was $13.6 billion, which increased the per-share book value of both our Class A and Class B stock by 21%. Over the last 39 years (that is, since present management took over) per-share book value has grown from $19 to $50,498, a rate of 22.2% compounded annually.

Hey now!

Buffett is one of only two people that I know of (Peter Lynch is the other) with a documented record of making a lot of money for people over a significant period of time.

You may remember back in the dot-com boom years that Buffett, despite his excellent long-term track record, was frequently raked over the coals for his refusal to hold tech stocks in the Berkshire portfolio.

Here’s what Buffett said in his 1999 shareholder letter, a year in which Berkshire had its worst-ever performance relative to the S&P 500:

. . . we don’t own stocks of tech companies, even though we share the general view that our society will be transformed by their products and services. Our problem — which we can’t solve by studying up — is that we have no insights into which participants in the tech field possess a truly durable competitive advantage. . . .

If we have a strength, it is in recognizing when we are operating well within our circle of competence and when we are approaching the perimeter. Predicting the long-term economics of companies that operate in fast-changing industries is simply far beyond our perimeter. If others claim predictive skill in those industries — and seem to have their claims validated by the behavior of the stock market — we neither envy nor emulate them. Instead, we just stick with what we understand.

It’s been a long time now since I’ve seen any “Warren Buffett is an idiot for not owning Internet stocks” articles . . .