When you know you are ready to manage other people’s money?
Warren would not have formed his first partnership if he thought there was any chance that he would lose the money.
What he was worried about was not how he would behave, but how his partners would behave. So he invited them all to a dinner and showed the partnership agreement form.
He told them: “Here is the ground rules as to what I think I can and how I want to be judged, and if you are in sync with me, I want to manage your money, because I won’t worry about the fact that you will panic if the market goes down or somebody tells you to do something different. So we have to be one the same page. And if we’re on the same page, then I’m not worried about managing your money. And if we aren’t on the same page, I don’t want to manage your money, because you may be disappointed when I think that things are even better to be investing and so on.”
You don’t want to manage people’s money until you have a vehicle and can reach people who are in sync with you. You ought to have your own ground rules.
It’s enormously important that you don’t take people that have expectations of you that you can’t meet.
It might mean that you turn down a lot of people.
You start very small and get an audited record.
Once you get the confidence that if your parents come to you and give you all their money, you will invest for them. Then you are ready.
About me and why this series:
I got a life-changing experience studying Warren Buffett’s annual letters in 2013 after 10 years of speculating, market timing, charting, and forecasting. I started investing in the Vietnamese stock market in 2015 with what I saved from my engineering job. In 2018, I decided to study Warren Buffett’s investing again by going through all of available Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting videos. It has been another life-changing experience. Warren Buffett’s teaching is a real germ and yet not many people replicate. Hence, I am committed to share what I learned.
You can subscribe to my blog to follow the series of what Warren Buffett has been teaching in his annual meetings. I attempted to modify but keep as much as possible what he spoke.
The Samurai Coach 