Ted Weschler was a successful investor in his own right as managing partner at Peninsula Capital Advisors before he ended up at Berkshire. While interviews with Weschler are rare, here’s an excerpt from one he did a couple of years ago with Business Insider in which he provides some great insights into successful investing:
Q: As you have been a very successful investor for years: Is there a recipe to it?
Weschler: There is one, but I am not telling you [laughing]. Investing is kind of a game of connecting the dots. The nice thing about it is the longer you are in the business, as long as you are intellectually curious, your collection of data points of dots gets bigger and bigger. That is where someone like Warren is just incredible. He has had a passion for investing for well over 70 years. He started by the age of 10 or 12. He keeps building that library of data, the ability to recognize patterns in data.
Being a successful investor you need to be hungry, intellectually curious, interested, read all the time. Read a lot of newspapers. You need a certain level of randomness in order to connect things that might give you an insight into where a business is going in five years that somebody else might not see.
When it comes to wholly owned businesses among other factors it is about pricing power. You have something that is so attractive to the consumer that they pay a premium to walk into your store and do something. There is a number of attributes like that. But you can never just point to one thing. It is a mosaic of all sort of different things. If then you read the book of a business you can pretty quickly find out if that is a good business or not.
You can read the entire interview here:
Ted Weschler Interview Business Insider
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