Melinda Gates

February 4, 2011 3 Comments


wealthymatters.comI have never really been much of a fan of the Gateses.I have heard of their philanthrophy and it’s done on a truly gargantuan scale.The beneficiaries are in poor countries.The causes are important to countries like India.Obviously urgent problems are getting addressed.Normally this should get me interested.However I have never been able to find a connection with the Gates.I normally avoid reading or watching them in the news.It’s not so much any particular thing they say that is a turnoff as I can’t really relate to where they are coming from.

But while hunting around for the story of how Bill and Melinda met each other , today, I stumbled on an article from Fortune Magazine focussed on Melinda.It filled me in on the details of Melinda’s background and helped me get where she might be coming from.Thought I’d put it up here.

BTW I just figured that the real turn-off comes from her view of the world as a place of finite wealth which needs to be allocated in the best possible manner.I guess I believe that assets are infinite in nature.It just needs imagination and human ingenuity to literally create assets.So sand or silica has been known for just about forever, it’s just when we learnt to use it to make ever smarter computer chips that we humans started creating assets out of materials nobody considered as useful before.Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouths but there is not that much variation in the mental faculties of humans.In fact necessity is the mother of creation and people who grow up facing more constraints are naturally more adept at being creative and seizing opportunity.So I believe it better to get all people to see wealth with their mind’s eye rather than battle to distribute existing wealth.Existing wealth is really puny if you think about it….The richest person in the world has not above US$60 .And there are 6 billion people in the world.So just redistributing the US$60 billion amongst all the people of the world will give each person only US$10……guess that’s not all that much.Don’t you think it’s better to learn how to be wealthy?

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Years before Melinda French met and married Bill Gates, she had a love affair – with an Apple computer. She was growing up in Dallas in a hard-working middle-class family. Ray French, Melinda’s dad, stretched their budget to pay for all four children to go to college. An engineer, he started a family business on the side, operating rental properties. “That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns,” Melinda recalls. The whole family pitched in every weekend. When Ray brought home an Apple III computer one day when she was 16, she was captivated. “We would help him run the business and keep the books,” she says. “We saw money coming in and money going out.” Read more of this post

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Buffett Quotes

January 30, 2011 34 Comments


wealthymatters.comI have always enjoyed Warren Buffett’s quotes.I enjoy the folksy humour.I appreciate the insights.And I find they help me remember important things just when I need to.I have benefitted from sticking to his fundamentals.I thought I’d share my collection of Buffetisms with you.I will add to the list as I come across them.If you have any favourites please share them with me.I’d love to hear them.

  • “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”
  • We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of  the last two years. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”
  • “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”
  • “I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.”
  • “I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board. “
  • “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”
  • “The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as businesses, use market fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That’s what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstone of investing.”
  • “Stocks are simple. All you do is buy shares in a great business for less than the business is intrinsically worth, with management of the highest integrity and ability. Then you own the shares forever.”
  • “The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”
  • “I won’t talk unless they bring me a price.”
  • “I can’t be involved in 50 or 75 things. That’s a Noah’s Ark way of investing – you end up with a zoo that way. I like to put meaningful amounts of money in a few things.”
  • “If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don’t need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.” Read more of this post

Filed under Paper Assets, Theory, Tidbits Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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