You will be able to take the market in front of you, gather the evidence that bears on where it stands, and reach a defensible reading without forecasting anything. You will be able to convert that reading into one decision about how much risk to carry, and to know what would have to change for the reading to move. You can run it yourself on any date you name, with nothing more than free public series and a calculator. What follows is the method itself, module by module.

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Charles Thomas Munger was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on January 1, 1924, the son of a lawyer. His first job was at Buffett & Son, an Omaha grocery store where Warren Buffett would later work. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1948 and moved to Southern California. In 1962 he helped found the firm that became Munger, Tolles & Olson, and by 1965 he had left the law. He was vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway from 1978, chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation from 1977 to 2022, and chairman of Wesco Financial from 1984. He died on November 28, 2023, at 99.

He argues that stock picking is a branch of worldly wisdom, and that worldly wisdom needs models from many disciplines. With only one or two models, he told students at the University of Southern California in April 1994, a person tortures reality until it fits them. The same lecture explained how he and Buffett moved past Benjamin Graham’s bargains: over decades, a stock can hardly earn much more than the business underneath it. In his Wesco letter for 1989 he wrote: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

The mental model he built the stock market on is the racetrack, where everybody bets and the odds move with the betting. The track takes 17 percent off the top, the market much less, so the wise bet heavily on the rare mispriced bet and the rest of the time do not. Misjudgment is his catalog of twenty-five tendencies, incentives first: FedEx got its night shift to load the planes fast enough only when it paid by the shift and let them go home once the planes were loaded. The wonderful business is See’s Candies, bought in 1972 for $25 million, about three times its net tangible assets; he and Buffett then raised its prices a little faster than others might have.

The program opens at the Daily Journal annual meeting in Los Angeles in March 2015, where close to two hours went to questions. It goes back to Omaha and the two clients of his father’s practice, Grant McFayden and Mr. X. It has the 1986 commencement address at the Harvard School, a speech on how to guarantee misery, built backward. It works through the 1994 lecture on worldly wisdom, the misjudgment talk, the Wesco letters and his 2014 account of the Berkshire system. It closes with what he told the law graduates of 2007: that, like Epictetus, he had had a favored life.

Beginning in 2018, members of MOI Global, the community behind the Best Ideas conference and the Latticework summit, gathered in Omaha on the Berkshire weekend for Best Ideas Omaha. In 2017 Phil Ordway updated the misjudgment talk with newer cases, which MOI Global published as Human Misjudgment Revisited. At Latticework 2025 in New York, Tom Russo of Gardner Russo & Quinn recalled meeting Munger at Stanford Law School. For more, see Remembering Charlie Munger: Life and Legacy, the This Week in Intelligent Investing episode MOI Global recorded two days after the news and released on December 2, 2023.

The complete program runs sixty-seven minutes.

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Jean-Marie Eveillard finished at HEC Paris in 1962 and went to work for Société Générale that fall. In the summer of 1968, bicycling in Central Park with two French students, he heard the name Benjamin Graham and bought The Intelligent Investor. He spent ten years trying to convince the bank to let him run money on Graham’s ideas. Early in 1979 it let him, with the SoGen International Fund, then $15 million, and for seven years he ran it alone. He handed the fund to Matt McLennan in 2008. First Eagle announced his retirement as senior adviser on July 1, 2020.

Value investing, he says, makes sense and works over time, and the reason so few practice it is almost entirely psychological. Most professional investors think six to twelve months ahead. A value investor thinks five years or more and accepts in advance that now and then he will lag. At an MOI event in 2015, asked what to look for in a young fund manager, he named the willingness to suffer. His example was the late 1990s: “I was not losing money, but I was making much less money than more aggressive fund managers. After one year, my shareholders were disappointed. After two years, they were really upset. After three years, they were mad at me. After three years, they were gone, basically.”

Graham abroad meant small stocks in continental Europe in the 1980s, where the fund was among the first to invest in a major way. A Paris money manager told him a small French stock would never go up if the French did not buy it. It would go up, he said, if it deserved to. Gold as insurance is how his January 2004 letter put it, and the letter counted the cost: the premium was much more expensive with gold at about $400 an ounce than near $250. The patience to look wrong is Tokyo. He sold his last Japanese stock in mid-1988, eighteen months and 30 percent too soon, and the market peaked at the end of 1989.

The program opens in New York in 2012, with the Tokyo market of the late 1980s. It goes back to Central Park in 1968 and to the Berkshire Hathaway letters that illuminated him again in 1978. It follows the fund into continental Europe and to a dinner with Walter Schloss before Enron. It reads his letters through the late 1990s and the December 2002 letter on the two meanings of risk. It ends with the Austrian school, gold, his analysts, Japan and India, his farewell letter, and Hayek’s Pretense of Knowledge.

MOI Global, the community behind the Best Ideas conference and the Latticework summit, recorded the New York conversation in 2012 and had him back at its summits. At the Asian Investing Summit in April 2014 he said the bank had sent him back to New York late in 1978, probably because it had tired of his complaining. At the European Investing Summit in October 2015 he called continental Europe more inefficient than the British market, and more attractive for that reason. At the Asian Investing Summit in 2017 he took the other side from Charlie Munger on China against India.

The complete program runs sixty-four minutes.

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You will be able to take any family-controlled or founder-controlled company and read its control structure from the annual report and the proxy. You will be able to judge from the record whether the controlling owner will spend against reported earnings, name the facts that would disqualify the company, and know, before you decide, what the tests do not tell you. You can run it yourself on any company you are researching, with nothing more than its filings and a calculator, and you can do it before you buy rather than after. What follows is the method itself, module by module.

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Arnold Van Den Berg was born in Amsterdam, to parents who had fled the Nazis to Holland. His parents went into hiding, and a young woman from the Dutch underground carried him through the German lines to an orphanage. They were caught, taken to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz, and both survived. The family came to the United States in 1949. He sold insurance, then got his mutual fund license six months before the market peaked. In 1974, about three months before the market reached its bottom, he opened his firm in Century City, which gave it its name. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Century Management, in Austin, Texas.

He built his method out of a shoebox. Whenever he read about an acquisition, he cut out the article, and on the weekend he ran every ratio. The file showed him what a sophisticated buyer would pay, and about 80 percent of that became his sell point. He gave MOI Global the rule in Omaha in May 2014. “I had the private market value, I have my worst case, and then I buy it no more than 20% above the worst case, and that gives me my five to one.” He says none of it needs more than fourth grade math.

He learned visualization on a rope, by accident. He watched the city champion from Venice High School shoot up the rope, replayed it in his mind, and practiced the move in front of the mirror every night. He once wrote his wife, Eileen, a check for $250,000, when he was $20,000 in debt and grossing $8,000 a year. He says he has a hundred rules of thumb, and that his favorite milestone is an industry eight years into a bear market. The patience is in oil: in June 2021 he said the firm had bought early, been wrong for two or three years, and lost clients before the price went from $15 to $60.

The program opens in 1987, with 50 percent of the portfolio in cash, clients leaving, and, by his account, the crash two weeks later. It follows his mother’s two kinds of people, and the market she made in garlic in Auschwitz. It covers the slide from 1969 to 1974 and the funds that did well, all run by people who believed in Benjamin Graham. It has his father’s death march and the one thought he kept on it, to move that leg. It has the prospect who counted four stocks where he had claimed three, and closed the account on the third call. It ends with the seismologist’s map, the move to Austin, and the wall of photographs.

Arnold spoke at MOI Global’s Latticework summit in New York in 2019. He said that investment counselors are wrong a lot of the time. MOI Global, the community behind the Best Ideas conference and the Latticework summit, sat down with him in Omaha in May 2014. On November 18, 2014, at the offices of Century Management in Austin, the whole conversation went to using the subconscious mind in business. For more, see Arnold Van Den Berg: Five Decades of Investing and Life Lessons, which replays a segment of the 2019 Latticework session.

The complete program runs fifty-three minutes.

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The introduction of Ed Wachenheim as a Latticework 2018 speaker took four lines. Williams College, then Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Three years at Goldman Sachs. Then Central National Corp, as an analyst and then as a portfolio manager. In 1987 he set up Greenhaven Associates on the family’s own money, and three years later took outside money, an amount he limited deliberately. The firm runs out of Purchase, New York, and has never published a letter. He is its chief executive and chairman, and he wrote Common Stocks and Common Sense. By April 2026 the firm had $12 billion under management.

He wants to double his money, and he wants a reason for it that Wall Street has not already priced. He has no opinion on the market. Balance sheets come first, under an office rule that a firm makes its money off the income statement and survives off the balance sheet. He gave Graham & Doddsville the method in April 2026 in one sentence. “We project earnings two or three years out, put a multiple on them (16x or 16.5x for an average company, maybe 19x for an above-average company), and that is what the business is worth to us.”

In the fall of 2025 he had thirty percent of the portfolio in homebuilders, and he told the room that thirty percent is the limit. General Motors, at ten percent, he calls a truck company. In 2011 he put a housing thesis into Home Depot, Lowe’s, Masco, Owens Corning, Lennox and Whirlpool, because the builders’ balance sheets were too weak to own. He bought Union Pacific late in 2003 and one airline, Southwest, which had as much cash as debt.

The program opens in October 2025 with 45 percent in cash, which he called historic, and a market at about 28 times earnings. It follows the friend he met off the train on October 19, 1987, who had sold that day. It covers the 2014 letter asking Whirlpool’s chairman not to buy Indesit, and the sale around the start of 2023 after an acquisition put too much debt on the balance sheet. It has AIG, which he called the worst investment of his life in July 2016. In March 2020 he said he felt like a sailor lost in a fog, and that the firm had been net sellers until the day before. It ends with the Lennar walk to $315 a share and the tennis coach who told him to buy a ticket.

He spoke at MOI’s Latticework summit in New York in the fall of 2018 and again in the fall of 2025. In 2018 he set out the hunter-gatherer thesis and worked Whirlpool to $300 a share. In 2025, asked whether a new technology justified a permanently higher multiple, he said he did not want to be the skunk at the picnic. MOI Global’s members also gather at the Best Ideas conference. John Mihaljevic, MOI Global’s chairman, opened a special online session on March 19, 2020. For more, see Ed Wachenheim: How a Contrarian Mindset Leads to Outperformance, which replays the 2018 conversation, and Latticework 2025: Ed Wachenheim on Homebuilders, which replays the 2025 session.

The complete program runs sixty-nine minutes.

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You will be able to take any company with a filing history and split the return its shareholders earned into five contributions: sales, share count, margin, multiple, and the dividend. You can turn each contribution around and ask what it would have to deliver for a forward return to be earned, and name which one is carrying your thesis. You can run it yourself on any company you are researching, with nothing more than its filings and a calculator. What follows is the method itself, module by module.

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Tom Russo grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, a General Motors town. His mother kept a globe on the dining room table. He read philosophy at Dartmouth, then went to Stanford, where in the early 1980s he found value investing and Warren Buffett came to his class. From Stanford he went to the Sequoia Fund in New York and to Bill Ruane. In 1989 he left New York for the Gardner firm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he is Managing Member of Gardner Russo & Quinn.

The capacity to suffer, as he uses the phrase, belongs to the management and not to the investor. When a management spends the right amount to develop long-term competitive advantage, there are periods when the spending weighs on reported profits, and Wall Street likes smooth and predictable. He pairs it with the capacity to reinvest. The distinction came in his first sentence at the Latticework summit in December 2022: “…it’s not because you have to suffer, it’s because the company management must have the capacity to suffer.”

Family control, for him, earns a premium rather than a discount. European family companies carried a lower multiple because of an overblown investor fear of mismanagement or self-dealing. In Heineken, which he first bought in 1986, his firm owned the control shares at a twenty percent discount to the same instrument. An example of reinvestment is Nespresso, which Nestlé kept supplied with capital for eleven years before it broke even. The price of patience is in his letters. In November 2022 he reported Semper Vic Partners down 23 percent for the first nine months of the year.

The program opens at the summit in December 2022, where he reads his holdings by age rather than by weight. It follows the man in a Chicago club who ate lunch alone and owned the bear grease the railroads could not run without. It takes Heineken to Brazil, where Kirin outbid it for Schincariol at five billion dollars in 2011 and Heineken bought the business in 2017 for seven hundred and fifty million. It shows General Mills, which could have answered a yogurt startup for twelve million dollars and did not, and the startup became Chobani. It covers Weetabix, where the cash grew from 7 million pounds to over 105 million and Semper Vic, he wrote in October 2023, earned nearly 17 percent a year over fifteen years. It closes with the Stanford students who think of him as Mr. Weetabix.

He gave the capacity-to-suffer talk at MOI’s Latticework summit in New York in December 2022 and opened the day there in October 2025. At Best Ideas Omaha in 2022 he presented Heineken and told that room a return of 11 to 15 percent over a long period can make a big difference.

The complete program runs sixty-six minutes.

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Murray Stahl grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in a household that spoke Yiddish and Russian. He went to Brooklyn College and joined Bankers Trust in 1978. He stayed sixteen years, working up investment strategies off the beaten path. He and Steven Bregman left the bank in the fall of 1994 to start Horizon Asset Management. Kinetics followed in 1996 and FRMO in 2001. He wrote with a ball point pen to slow his writing. He died on April 7, 2026.

On his account, the indexes behind ETFs changed their calculation around 2006, from market cap to float, the shares in public hands. The index is price indifferent, with no price at which it stops buying. On a call in October 2016 he described what he looked for: “For us, a true alternative asset is a rare company that’s not likely to access the capital markets. Therefore, in the long run, the behavioral characteristics will be based on a certain scarcity value. That’s kind of what we’re looking for, scarcity value of a hard asset, encased in scarcity value of corporate structure.”

An owner-operator, he said in 2018, is a company whose leaders own more equity than anyone else. Dormant assets, he said in October 2015, are potentially productive but dormant at the moment. Spin-offs he compared to expelling the worst student from a class: the average grade goes up, but the average student learned no more. The opportunity was with the parent. In late 2007 he launched a fund to own securities exchanges. In 2008 he could not find a single person who agreed with him. One royalty company he worked through had more reserves in its 2021 annual report than thirty years earlier.

The program opens at the Best Ideas conference in January 2018. Near the end of that talk he said he had owned one stock since 1984 and bought more that day in his own account. It goes back to 1984, when he turned the wrong way out of a downtown elevator and read an unfamiliar name off a door. It follows the business plan he and Bregman made at a Burger King table in 1994, which put a ceiling on assets. In 2008 every investment he touched did poorly, and he did not blame his own analysis. It quotes the July 2010 letter telling shareholders he had begun designing indexes of his own. Its last section covers the quarterly call of March 3, 2026, on which he answered what he most regretted.

He spoke at MOI Global’s Best Ideas conference in January 2018 and at the Latticework summit in September 2018. At Best Ideas he said he could not run a diversified portfolio and worked through Texas Pacific Land Trust. At Latticework he named companies one at a time, with his reasons for each, and withdrew the timing call he had made in April 2016. For more, see Replay of a Fireside Chat with the Legendary Investor at Latticework 2018.

The program runs sixty-nine minutes.

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Howard Marks has spent more than half a century on a problem he says he still has not solved: what risk actually is, and what an investor can do about it. His career runs from equity research in the late 1960s, through the launch of Citibank’s convertible and high-yield bond funds in 1978, into distressed debt in 1988, and on to the firm he co-founded in 1995. Through all of it he has written memos to anyone willing to read him.

One of the recurring lessons in Howard’s work is that knowing where a market is going and knowing where it stands are entirely different problems, and only the second one is solvable. He is unusually willing to say so plainly. Asked at a Latticework summit what he was still curious about, he named the subject he is best known for: “In investing, the greatest puzzle for me is risk, how we should think about it, and how we can work with it.”

That idea runs through this audio program. It traces Howard’s early years as an analyst and the three lessons he took from them; the 1978 telephone call that sent him into a market with a bad name and no data; the first memo he ever published, in October 1990, written five years before Oaktree existed and already containing the sentence the firm would be built on; the decade he wrote without receiving virtually a single reply; the memo he published three days after Lehman failed; and the argument with his son Andrew that revised part of his own framework fifty years into his career.

We are grateful to Howard for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community over the years, at Latticework summits, at Best Ideas, and in conversation during the crisis of 2020. He has spoken with unusual candor about what cannot be known, about the difference between controlling risk and avoiding it, and about the discipline of daring to look wrong for as long as it takes to be proved right.

Our hope is that this special episode, Howard Marks: Higher-Level Thinking, will help more investors appreciate the depth of Howard’s approach. It is a program about risk, but also about writing, temperament, and the willingness to keep an important question open for fifty years rather than pretend it has been settled.

For those willing to think at the second level, the lesson is not that the future can be read. It is that knowing where you stand, and sizing your positions accordingly, remains one of the investor’s most durable advantages.

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Bob Robotti has spent decades doing the kind of investing that is easy to describe but hard to practice: looking carefully where others are not looking, studying unfashionable businesses, distinguishing temporary difficulty from permanent impairment, and waiting patiently for value to surface. His career has unfolded across deep-value securities, cyclical industries, energy, housing, shipping, board service, and active ownership. Through it all, he has remained unusually committed to the bottom-up work of understanding real-life businesses.

One of the recurring lessons in Bob’s work is that investing is not an abstract exercise. It is not enough to say that an industry is cyclical, a stock is cheap, or the market is wrong. The real work is in understanding the business, the balance sheet, the capital cycle, the incentives, the industry structure, and the people making decisions. As Bob has put it, “There are no universals. There are only specifics.”

That idea runs through this program. It traces Bob’s early exposure to Tweedy, Browne, Walter Schloss, Joe Reilly, and Mario Gabelli; his founding of Robotti & Company; his development as a value investor in overlooked and capital-intensive sectors; and his long study of how markets misprice businesses when fear, institutional constraints, or short-term thinking obscure normalized earnings power.

We are deeply grateful to Bob for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community and the broader investment community over the years. His willingness to explain not only what he has done, but how he thinks, has made him an important teacher for intelligent investors. He has spoken with unusual candor about mistakes, cycles, patience, active ownership, and the emotional discipline required to stay with an investment when the market disagrees.

Our hope is that this special episode, Bob Robotti: Turning Over Rocks, will help more investors appreciate the depth of Bob’s approach. It is a program about value investing, but also about apprenticeship, temperament, independent judgment, and the enduring importance of doing the work.

For those willing to turn over enough rocks, the lesson is not merely that bargains exist. It is that the act of looking carefully, patiently, and specifically remains one of the investor’s most durable advantages.

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We are delighted to share The Flawed Bulb, a special audio program on Chris Bloomstran, president of Semper Augustus Investments Group and one of the most rigorous, patient, and underheralded investors of his generation. The program is part of the MOI Global series on great investors whose lessons deserve a wider audience than the quarterly interview cycle allows.

The essay opens in the Grand Ballroom of the Yale Club of New York City at Latticework 2025, where Chris read a Joni Mitchell parody to a room of professional investors before walking them through the case that hyperscaler capex (on the order of $350-400 billion against less than $40 billion of corresponding revenue) is one of the largest bubbles in American history. From there, the piece moves backward to 1998, when a St. Louis patriarch who had bought GE for twelve cents a share in 1932 handed a 29-year-old Chris a family portfolio and the mandate that became Semper Augustus.

The through-line is a single word Chris has been defending for a quarter century: price. In November 2000 he wrote Price Matters and closed it with a sentence he has never really stopped arguing: the market has a way of fairly pricing stocks over long periods. Ten months earlier, in January 2000, he had written a related piece on Microsoft — predicting zero percent returns for fifteen years. Microsoft compounded earnings at 8.4% and sales at 10.1% over those fifteen years and still returned 0.6% annualized to shareholders. The company was always great. The price was the problem. When the price reset at 17× in late 2014, the same business compounded at 26.6% annualized for the next decade.

That is the argument, lived out across 26 years of client letters, letters that began at seven pages and have grown, without losing a single founding client, to 184. The essay and audiobook collect the ideas, cases, and stories — from the patriarch’s twelve-cent GE to the options-as-hidden-liability critique, from Ross Stores to the Berkshire Scorecard — into a portrait of a manager whose method is itself a kind of patience.

We are grateful to Chris for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community over many years.

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