The Oracle speaks

Some light Friday-afternoon reading for everyone, as Warren Buffett's annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders is out and available online.

I'm a big fan of the Buffett investing philosophy and I make a point of reading it every year. It's full of insightful financial insights, but also riddled with quaint and endearing anecdotes that give us a glimpse of the what makes the richest man in the world really tick. I myself own a single Berkshire Hathaway B share and it's on my life's list to one day go down to Berkshire Hathaway's AGM and cavort with the man himself. They call it Woodstock for Capitalists, and it sounds like a nerdy good time.

I bet it'd be full of gems like this:

Our exemplar is the older man who crashed his grocery cart into that of a much younger fellow while both were shopping. The elderly man explained apologetically that he had lost track of his wife and was preoccupied searching for her. His new acquaintance said that by coincidence his wife had also wandered off and suggested that it might be more efficient if they jointly looked for the two women. Agreeing, the older man asked his new companion what his wife looked like. “She’s a gorgeous blonde,” the fellow answered, “with a body that would cause a bishop to go through a stained glass window, and she’s wearing tight white shorts. How about yours?” The senior citizen wasted no words: “Forget her,
we’ll look for yours.

What we are looking for is described on page 25. If you have an acquisition candidate that fits,call me – day or night. And then watch me shatter a stained glass window.

You've just got to love a company that can include a section like that in its annual report. That, and the 18.4% return in 2006.