The Charlie Munger principles to invest and live by

CHARLIE Munger, who worked with Warren Buffett to build Berkshire Hathaway into a global investing powerhouse, died on Thursday (Nov 28) at the age of 99. Among his many contributions, Munger was a prolific armchair philosopher, whose speeches and interviews included hundreds – maybe thousands – of nuggets about how to invest and live well.

Blunt, witty and scholarly in his assessments, here is my distillation of the Munger philosophy and how he lived by it. The overarching principles are mined from his remarks at Berkshire shareholder meetings and his classic 2007 commencement address to the USC Gould School of Law, which can be found here.

Take a multidisciplinary approach

Munger, a lawyer by training as well as an avid poker player, credited much of his success to his interest in seemingly everything. He advocated for learning “all the big ideas in all the big disciplines”, and his talks were peppered with references to Confucius, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton and even Mozart. In a way, his sweeping academic interests seemed to mirror Berkshire’s portfolio, which currently includes holdings in Apple, auto insurer Geico and See’s Candies, a conveyor of chocolates and peanut brittle.