24
This Is Your Life
“He [Buffett] is thinking about [Berkshire] twenty-four hours a day.”
—AN EMPLOYEE OF A BERKSHIRE SUBSIDIARY1
“A fanatic worker, [Peter] Lynch lived and breathed stocks, stocks, stocks, morning, noon, and night.”
—JOHN TRAIN2
ONE EVENING, BUFFETT AND HIS wife Susan had dinner with friends. Their hosts had just come back from Egypt.
After dinner, as their friends were setting up the slide projector to show him and Susan their pictures of the Pyramids, Buffett announced: “I have a better idea. Why don’t you show the slides to Susie and I’ll go into your bedroom and read an annual report.”3
Warren Buffett doesn’t just enjoy reading annual reports. It’s his favorite pastime. “He just had a hobby that made him money,” said Ralph Rigby, a Berkshire Hathaway textile salesman. “That was relaxation to him.”4
Buffett’s investment style is relaxation itself. The only time he’s likely to come under any pressure at all is when the market is insanely cheap and he has more good investment ideas than money. The last time that happened was in 1974, when he said he felt “like an oversexed guy in a harem.”5
The lifestyle of the trader could not be more opposite. The extreme is the trader with quote machines all over his house—even one in his bedroom and bathroom—so he can check prices anytime of the day or night, regardless of what he is doing. Michael Marcus describes the time when he was trading currencies heavily:
It was very exhausting because it was a twenty-four-hour market. When I went to sleep, I would have to wake up almost every two hours to check the markets. I would tune in every major center as it opened: Australia, Hong Kong, Zurich, and London. It killed my marriage.6
If you want to trade currencies, sleepless nights and ruined weekends go with the territory. You have to be alert all the time—as Soros was one Sunday back in September 1985 when he got wind of the Plaza Accord that would drive the dollar down. So he spent Sunday night at home on the phone to Tokyo, where it was already Monday morning, selling as many dollars as he could.
But Soros’s dedication to his chosen profession began much earlier. When his parents arrived in New York in January 1957, having escaped from Hungary the year before, it was Soros’s brother, Paul, who met them. “I was busy. I was trading, I couldn’t miss a day. I could not miss a day, no.”7
He had only been in New York three months himself. But already he was working round the clock, buying stocks in Europe and selling them in New York.
What Other Investors and Traders Say
Ed Seykota: I feel my success comes from my love of the markets. I am not a casual trader. It is my life. I have a passion for trading. It is not merely a hobby or even a career choice for me. There is no question that this is what I am supposed to do with my life.8
Peter Hull: I don’t know a lot about [eighty-one-year-old Australian investor] Jim Millner but I like the idea that he has gone through and kept in the game until he’s a very old man. And I would like to do that as well. I want to still be here in forty years if possible. I don’t want to retire because retirement is death. I want to stay in the game and investing is one game where you are continually stimulated. This is a career that allows you to keep playing the game for a long time and stay active.9
Lou Simpson: I really like what I’m doing.… I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I retire.10
René Rivkin: I love the market, it is my work, my play and my life. I hate weekends because there is no stock market.11
Richard Driehaus: Why am I better? I probably stay in it more. A lot of people like to play the piano. But can you really become a virtuoso? It’s like the Olympics. Practice, practice, practice. Remember the old saying: The harder I work the luckier I get? Or: Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration? Success requires an addiction to what you are doing and it takes a lot of time.12
Michael Marcus: It’s too much fun to give up. I don’t want to make a lot more money … If trading is your life, it is a torturous kind of excitement. But if you are keeping your life in balance, then it’s fun.13
Paul Tudor Jones: Trading gives you an incredibly intense feeling of what life is all about. Emotionally, you live on the extremes.… I wouldn’t have it any other way.14
Laura J. Sloate: I love what I do, so I do it seven days a week.15
Peter Lynch: [While on vacation in Ireland in 1987] I was thinking about Dow Jones and not about Blarney, even at the moment I kissed Blarney’s stone.16
“I would be wakened at 4:30, which is 9:30 in London, and then maybe every hour. I’d be asleep, pick up the phone, listen to the numbers and decide to make a bid or not. I might cable back a bid and go back to sleep. Sometimes I would then dream that the stock I had just bought went up and there were times when I’d wake up and have a little difficulty figuring out what I had done and what I had dreamed.”17
Then he would head for the office to find buyers for his overnight purchases. He didn’t see his parents for several days after they’d arrived, even though it had been ten years since he had seen them last.
One reason the Master Investor is so successful is that investing is all he does. It’s not just his profession, it’s his life. And so he thinks about investing day and night—even dreaming about it, as Soros did.
No one could become a Wimbledon champion, or equal Pavarotti’s status in the world of opera, by practicing tennis or singing in their spare time. But the average investor can make handsome profits, even if investing isn’t his full-time vocation. But he must emulate the Master Investor’s dedication to mastering the craft. To quote Woodrow Wilson:
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.18
Or as the I Ching puts it more succinctly:
Perseverance furthers.