Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger Share Advice On Building Wealth: It's 'People Doing Dumb Things'

The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, where Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger provided traders and investors with insights and advice, was a hotly anticipated event this year.

Buffett, known as much for his quotes as for his multi-billion dollar multinational conglomerate, was keen to offer words of wisdom to not only the analysts whose ears he holds but to regular shareholders, according to The Street.

The 92-year-old was asked at the meeting on May 6 to predict how disruptive technologies, such as AI will affect value investing. Both he and Munger provided answers, with each taking a different approach to answering the question.

What Buffett And Munger Said

Munger’s answer was more pessimistic: “My advice to value investors is to get used to making less."

The increased number of value investors competing over a smaller amount of opportunities would be to blame, he explained.

Buffett pointed out Munger has held that same belief for the more than 60 years the two have known each other. For Buffett, new technologies "do not take away the opportunities.”

What Buffett believed provided new opportunities was, “People doing dumb things.” Something he said increased at Berkshire over the years.

“In the 58 years we’ve been running Berkshire, I would say there’s been a great increase in the number of people doing dumb things, and they do big dumb things,” Buffett said. “The reason they do it is because, to some extent, they can get money from people so much easier than when we started.”

Buffett then went on to give an example of the dumb things people do and how investors could capitalize on them.

“You can start 10 or 15 dumb insurance companies in the last 10 years, and you can become rich if you were adroit at it, whether the business succeeded or not," he said.

Speaking about the opportunities that exist today, when getting funding for lots of new and different ideas is easier than it was a few decades ago, Buffett said, “I would love to be born today, go out with not-too-much money and hopefully turn it into a lot of money,” according to The Street.

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