Warren Buffett and the Reading Unlock
One Buffett lesson I'll share with my kid: read, read, read.
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Today, we will talk about Warren Buffett’s retirement and the one lesson from his career I’ll be sharing with my kid: read, read, read.
Also this week:
How sportsbooks throttle good players
Fed Chair Jerome Powell
…and some wild posts (including Claude Code)
Warren Buffett officially retired as Berkshire Hathaway CEO on December 31st, 2025.
The 95-year old is undoubtedly the GOAT investor and Chris Bloomstran, CIO at Semper Augustus, succinctly put his career into perspective:
Congratulations to the greatest investor the world will ever know. The returns speak for themselves — Berkshire earned 6,118,651% or 19.9% annually over his 60 years running the company. The S&P 500 returned 46,491%, or 10.4%.
Berkshire’s shares could decline by 99.2% and still have outperformed the market.
I repeat: Berkshire’s shares could decline by 99.2% and still have outperformed the market!!!!!!!!!!!
A multi-decade heater.
The food equivalent of this run would be diluting a toothpick dab of Pepper X — the hottest hot sauce in the world — in a litre of water, and that drop is still spicier than Sriracha.
As we all know, Buffett shared a lot of wisdom during his career. Ask a Berkshire Stan about literally any topic and they’ll hit you with some version of:
“Hey man, did you know it’s only when the tide goes out, that you see who’s swimming naked. Also, it’s not about timing the market, it’s about time in the market. Furthermore, price is what you pay but value is what you get. Oh, btw, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. Don’t forget that the best holding period is forever. Finally, remember these two rules: Rule #1 is Never lose money. Rule #2 is Never forget Rule #1.”
All bangers (to be sure, he was ruthless and made a number of decisions that didn’t reflect these values).
The #1 Buffett lesson I’ll share with my kid is find an insurance company and invest the premiums in profitable manner with smart underwriting so you have juicy float the Oracle’s lifelong commitment to reading.
“Read 500 pages like this every day,” Buffett once told a class of students. “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
I don’t know what speed-reading sorcery Buffett used to get to 500 pages a day.
But based on this chart of teenage reading trends, someone can build a durable advantage by knocking off 50-100 pages a day consistently.
On that note, I just got my kid his first Kindle and — for the first time ever — I’m OK with my credit card popping off with “AMZN Mktp” charges. Don’t worry, he’s not downloading books on value investing…yet. We still rolling with “Dog Man” and “Who Would Win? Great White Shark vs. Orca”.
I just want my kid dedicating time to reading and thinking instead of getting short-form AI-video slopped.
There is actually an entire genre of investors talking about how much they love reading and the Investment Master Class website has a solid round-up including:
Marc Andreessen: “I’ve really read all the time since I was a little kid, it’s been a lifelong thing. It’s basically trying to fill in all the puzzle pieces for the big discrepancies. A great term is ‘sense-making’. Essentially, ‘what the hell is happening and why?’ The world is an incredibly complex and erratic place and trying to figure that out ...is kind of a lifetime occupation.”
Charlie Munger: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people — over a broad subject matter area — who didn’t read all the time. None. Zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
Howard Marks: “I think it helps to read broadly, what good does it do to know everything about one little thing if you don’t know how it fits into the world, and how the world is going to affect it.”
Seth Klarman: “Never stop reading. History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme.”
Sam Zell: “I’ve said it before and I’ll underscore it here: I am a voracious consumer of information. I have honed my ability to digest a lot of information, sift out what’s potentially relevant, retain it, and then recall it when it’s useful. I read at least five newspapers every day, and five business magazines a week. I remember all of it, or at least everything relevant. I also like to read escapist fiction — mystery novels, spy thrillers — and I go through about one book a week. I usually remember nothing about them. Unless all of a sudden something becomes relevant.”
Warren Buffett (You May Have Heard Of Him): “The advice I would give is to read everything in sight. And to start very young. It’s a huge advantage in almost any field to start young. If that’s where your interest lies, and you start young, and you read a lot, you’re going to do well.”
To be sure, “read a lot” is reasonable advice but also incredibly generic.
Take another piece of generic advice: “get 30 minutes of exercise a day”. This practice is certainly beneficial, but its effects are diminished if your diet is crap and (like me) have an urge to buy a Spicy Chicken burger whenever you are within five square kilometers of a Wendy’s.
A follow-up question for advice about reading is, “Are you in a position to do anything with the hard-earned insights you have gained from your reading efforts?”
Frederik Gieschen has a great piece called “The Reading Obsession” that looks critically at Buffett quip, “I just sit in my office and read all day”. This work routine may be true in his 80s and 90s but the Oracle of Omaha was doing a lot more than just reading in his early career. He was travelling, hobnobbing, networking and spending thousands of dollars on long-distance phone calls. Buffett got to the point where he could read all day because he spent decades building an insane Rolodex, which was undoubtedly boosted by the fact his father was a Congressman.
Buffet was also exceptionally good with numbers…doing 35-year discounted cash flow calculations in his head before cutting 9-figure deals with a spit and handshake. All while drinking 5 Cherry Cokes and housing a cheeseburger for lunch everyday (not health or investment advice).
The GOAT.
Anyway, it is easy to see the benefits of reading for investors. Good investors combine unique insights with capital to unlock profitable trades. And you don’t need many unique insights to have an incredible investing career.
In 2017, Buffett’s long-time colleague and BFF Charlie Munger (RIP) gave a talk at the Daily Journal Annual Meeting and talked about how he had read the finance magazine Barron’s for 50 years and only ever got one investment idea from the publication.
Stemming from a single article, the investment idea would earn him $500m:
“I talked about patience. I read Barron’s for 50 years. In 50 years, I found one investment opportunity in Barron’s. I made ~$80m with almost no risk. I took the ~$80m and gave it to [Himalaya Capital’s] Li Lu, who turned it into $400-500 million. So I have made $400-500 million from reading Barron’s for 50 years and following one idea.”
The pipeline from reading-to-investing is easy to visualize.
But what about other ventures? Can a single insight from an article or book blurb change the trajectory of a business?
Yes, it can.
Since reading about the Munger / Barron’s story a few years ago, I tuned my information-gathering antennae to find stories of entrepreneurs who read a single article (or blurb) that unlocked something for their businesses or careers.
Here are a few that I have collected:
Joe Coulombe built the Trader Joe’s brand to appeal to educated shoppers who wanted international cuisines after reading two magazine articles. The first one was from Scientific American, which discussed the increasing percentage of the US population with a college degree. The second was an article from the Wall Street Journal that talked about the launch of Boeing 747s, which would reduce the cost of international travel.
Jeff Bezos decided to found Amazon after reading on a news website that the internet was growing at a rate of 2,300% per year.
Morris Chang laid the seeds for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) after discovering an insight in a graduate-level textbook called Introduction to VLSI Systems. The textbook excerpt explained why it made economic sense for the design and manufacturing of microchips to take place at different companies, instead of being totally integrated in one organization (e.g. Intel).
Elon Musk’s first steps towards creating SpaceX began when he visited the NASA website and was surprised to find the agency had no schedule or plan to go to Mars.
Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia got the idea for their platform because they wanted to attend a design conference in San Francisco. When they checked the conference’s website, they found that all the recommended hotels were sold out. So, they figured they could rent out the extra space in their apartment and use the funds to buy tickets to the conference.
Sara Blakely gave her shapewear company a perfect name (Spanx) after researching why Coca-Cola and Kodak were so well-known. She discovered that the Kodak founders liked the sound of the letter “K” and made it the first and last letters of the company name. Blakely then chose Spanks, but then changed it to Spanx (with an “x” instead of “ks”) because she found that “made-up words work better for products than real words do, and they are also easier to trademark.”
Chip Wilson was motivated to build Lululemon partly due to his reading about the demographic trend of women staying in their jobs for longer periods of time and delaying childbirth. As these women were going to the gym, running errands, and spending hours at the office, he believed there was an emerging need for female technical athletic gear that could be worn throughout the day.
Dietrich Mateschitz tried an energy drink in Thailand and realized that it was a huge business opportunity after reading that the country’s top corporate taxpayer sold the drink. His idea: add carbonated water and sell the drink in Europe. We know it as Red Bull.
Bill Gates saw a Popular Mechanics magazine issue about the ALTAIR 8800 in 1975 that he said “stopped me in my tracks”. It convinced him and Paul Allen to write a version of BASIC for the machine, which laid the foundation for the PC revolution.
Phil Knight found crucial financing for Nike — as well as a manufacturing partner — after reading an article about Japanese trading companies that “do just about everything — import, export, and extend easy credit to all kinds of companies.”
Wide and random reading on its own is beneficial. The practice nurtures the mind and is a good antidote for digital dopamine distractions. When you combine that with hard-earned expertise and skills…the results can be very very real.
Joe Coulombe’s insight was so impactful because he used it to augment 10+ years of running retail stores.
Sara Blakely’s insight was so impactful because she used it to augment years of perfecting a textile product.
Morris Chang’s insight was so impactful because he used it to augment decades spent building expertise at Texas Instruments and in the semiconductor field.
Chip Wilson’s insight was so impactful because he used it to augment 18 years of building a previous sportswear brand called Westbeach.
The insights for Elon and Bezos were so impactful because they combined them with capital and a decade of work (Zip2 and PayPal for Elon; the D.E. Shaw hedge fund for Bezos).
The ability to combine insights from reading with other skills reminds me of a concept from cartoonist Scott Adams, who passed away last week at 68.
One of his concepts completely changed the way I viewed work: the “Talent Stack”, which started as a blog post but became a key part of his best-selling book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”.
Did Adams create one of the most popular (and highly syndicated) comics ever by being the best — or a 99th percentile — artist? No. He says he was probably in the 70th percentile when it came to drawing. But he was also in the 70th percentile for humor and 70th percentile for business writing (from his experience in the corporate world).
For his specific Venn diagram of skills — drawing, humor, and business writing (aka his “Talent Stack”) — Adams was in the 99th percentile.
Reading and comprehension are skills. In an increasingly digitally distracted world, fewer and fewer people are honing these skills. This presents a huge opportunity for those who want to build a niche 99th percentile talent stack by combining reading — and the insights gained from the experience — with a few other skills.
As we discussed earlier, the bar is actually very low to be considered a top-percentile reader.
A Pew survey conducted in 2021 found that 23% of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the past year and the average amount of time spent on leisure reading was only 16 minutes a day. Comparatively, people spend over 2 hours a day on social media (granted, some of that time is spent reading but it is not the best medium for it and short-form video consumption obviously pales in comparison to deep reading).
Reading 1-2 hours a day (50-100 pages) for leisure puts you in the upper upper echelon of the skill.
It is obviously good to curate your reading diet — as in what are you actually reading — but that step follows just reading more, period.
“It almost doesn’t matter what you read,” says investor Naval Ravikant. “Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life. Just like the best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day, I would say for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever — anything with ideas and information and learning — the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time.”
The most impactful thing I’ve done for my reading habit in recent years is using two phones: a “cocaine phone” (with all apps) and a kale phone (with only reading and note-taking apps).
Take out a few glances at social media or YouTube rabbit holes or Slack check-ins.
Put in reading apps and you’ll get dozens of extra pages done a day.
Video and audio just can’t compare to the written word for sustained thinking, ideating and comprehension.
Let’s go back to Munger’s story about reading Barron’s for 50 years.
The single insight he found was for an auto-parts manufacturer called Tenneco. After making $80m (~10x return) he gave the money to investor Li Lu. For the uninitiated, Lu was one of the leaders of the student protests during the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989. He fled to America and then attended Columbia University (BA, MBA, JD) before launching his own hedge fund in 1997.
Lu was able to turn Munger’s $80m into $500m based on only a few bets, including a big one into Chinese electric-vehicle maker BYD (in 2008, Berkshire itself invested ~$230m in BYD and exited the position at $9B by Q3 2025 a gain of 39x).
During a lecture at the Columbia Business School in 2006, Lu shared thoughts on lifelong reading and learning that are relevant to this article (Lu was talking about his own portfolio, not anything specific to what he did with Munger):
You go through your life and you may not have more than five or ten insights which you develop over many, many years of study. Fifteen years ago I studied an American company and now I find the Asian counterpart and I find the valuation that I like. I can bet on it now but I studied that business for 15 years in between. I know everything about that industry and what really makes that business tick. An opportunity like that doesn’t come very often, so when it comes you have to seize it.
You need to have that kind of insight in order to really swing with conviction and if you cannot do that either psychologically or because you’re ill-prepared, you just will never really make any real amount of money [in investing].
How do you really build that insight? There is no other way than continuous curiosity, intense curiosity, continuous studying for your whole life.
The things about this approach is you progressively get better and better and better, to the point that you read a page and it only takes you a couple minutes to tell right away whether something jumps out. You can smell it when you see something.
The truth is that no one knows when the reading will pay off, but as the saying goes, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity”. And reading is a form of preparation that is available to anyone.
In fact, one of Buffett’s last major bets was an application of his lifelong commitment to deep reading. Back in 2019, he made a series of investments in 5 Japanese trading houses.
Berkshire has now invested >$10B for 8-9% of the 5 trading houses and position is now worth over $30B. During the 2025 Berkshire annual general meeting, Buffett says he found them reading through a book of 3,000 Japanese companies and references Robert Caro’s “turn every page” philosophy on the research process:
It’s amazing what you can find when you just turn the page. We showed a movie last year about turning every page [HBO’s documentary about Robert Caro “Turn Every Page”]. I would say that turning every page is one important ingredient to bring to the investment field. Very few people do turn every page and the ones who turn every page aren’t going to tell you what they’re finding. So, you got to do a little of it yourself.
There’s always alpha in this world from deep reading.
That’s the Buffett lesson I’ll share with my kid….well, that and the importance of a good morning routine:
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How sportsbooks throttle good players
Prediction Markets blew up in 2025.
They allow you to bet on literally anything. Some available bets right now include: “Will Trump flip the bird again?”, “Will Mr.Beast Celebrity Challenge Get 80m views?” and “Will Iran have regime change by end of the year?”.
Kalshi and Polymarket — the two main prediction markets — are each valued at $10B+ while trading volume hitting ~$50B last year (by 2030, that figure could reach $1T).
The promise of these platforms is that they become “real-time news” on various political, economic, cultural and geopolitical events. A new way to uncover truth. I think that mission is very valid.
But, over the past year, these platforms have basically become sports betting apps with nearly 1/2 the trading volume based on sports “predictions”. We’re going from “prediction markets as news” to “prediction markets as another avenue for young men to degen wild parlays”.
Having said that, there is an argument to be made that bringing in degen sports gamblers provides liquidity (as in, these same gamblers will punt on other random predictions) to help the world uncover information in the other categories.
Ideally, sports betting is 10-20% of prediction market volume instead of the 80-90% where it’s heading towards (separately, there have been prediction market issues around insider trading and the way that bets get resolved).
While the prediction market-to-sportsbook trend isn’t ideal, it is probably better than the default situation: existing sports betting apps (FanDuel, DraftKings) are just straight up gambling machines — in your pocket — that are actively hostile to their users.
Prediction markets are peer-to-peer platforms and make money by taking a commission on the trading volume. Conversely, sports betting apps are the “house” and are pitted against the players. Their business model rely on problem gamblers and making sure smart bettors aren’t allowed to bet.
The Economist recently had a great piece on how hard sportsbooks throttle good players and it is packed with wild details:
Skilled players are called “sharps” and given “stake restrictions” if they play too well (bets are capped).
The rest of the players are called “Squares”.
According to Britain’s Gambling Commission, 4.3% of active accounts active in 2025 had a “stake factor” below the maximum bet allowance of 100%.
Sportsbooks will take bets with a profit margin as low as 4.5%.
If they are able to do good “player-profiling” and keep the “sharps” from playing, the profit margin can reach 10-20%.
As important as keeping out “sharps” is hooking “whales”, the deep-pocketed players that are willing to keep playing (and losing) large sums.
Some “whales” are actually “sharps” in disguise, though. They’ll lose a bunch of bets to lull the sportsbook then put down a massive bet when they have an edge.
While there is a risk of a “whale” being a “sharp”, the value of a real “whale” is so high that sportsbooks will take the risk.
“In March 2024, PointsBet raised its share of online sports-gambling revenue in New Jersey from 11% to 24% after wooing a single cash-spouting customer away from DraftKings.” (I can confirm that this wasn’t me).
How sportsbooks profile players:
Playing on Mobile is a good sign (where the majority of people play)
Playing on PCs is a bad sign (it’s easier to compare odds and run models)
E-wallets are a red flag (sportsbooks prefer debit direct deposit that can attach a player to a single account; e-wallets can be anonymized and players can move cash between sportsbooks more quickly to shop for the best odds)
Women bettors are a red flag (most bettors are men and “sharps” often use women to place bets)
The first wager is a major tell (typical bettors go after top leagues — NFL, NBA, EPL — and do so within a few minutes of a game starting).
Popular bets for “squares”: who will win, scoring margins and how star player will perform (also, they love multi-leg parlays).
“Sharps” go after less popular leagues and place bets as soon as odds are published, when they are most mispriced. They also go after less popular bets such as “points in Q3” or stats from a random player (“Sharps” rarely do parlays and don’t withdraw winnings often).
One gambling consultant tells The Economist that, “By the time a customer places his first bet, [sportsbookss] are 80-90% certain they know the lifetime value of the account.”
A key metric is “closing-line value”, a measure that compares the odds at which a player bets with those available right before a match begins. If the player has a track record of being ahead within the first 10 wagers, he is flagged as suspicious (can likely beat the House in the long run).
Sportsbooks mathematically monitor players and create a new risk score every 6-8 hours (risk score = estimate of probability that customers will wind up unprofitable).
E-wallet users, women and bets over $100 are flagged. These suspicious bettors are given 30% of maximum bet (and proven sharps only allowed 1%).
This isn’t just a one-way street, though. Smart bettors go to great lengths to get their bet in. YOU CAN’T HOLD THEM DOWN FOREVER!
High-skilled players will often get a “beard” to bet on their behalf. Most sportsbooks ban this practice but it is widespread.
The safest “beards” are close friends and relatives because you can mostly rely on them to pay out any winnings.
“Sharps” are diligent with operational security (“One BetBash attendee says he owns around 20 iPads, each with its own data plan, and routinely drives around his state so that each wager comes from an appropriate address.”)
Sportsbooks “prey on degenerates and irresponsible gamblers”, so smart bettors do something called “priming”: they have their “beards” lose a lot of money to look like marks (playing at 3am like a degen and doing ridiculous parlays) before smashing the House over the head with a major bet.
The most effective strategy for “sharps” is “whale-flipping”. Find a losing gambler, then ask to put a (likely) large winning bet amongst their pool of guaranteed losers.
Famed American gambler Billy Walters whale-flipped golfer Phil Mickelson, who wagered $1B over decades and purportedly lost $100m.
Once “sharps” max out the people they can use as “beards”, they tap professional networks called “movers”. These “movers” employ a bunch of “mules” who can put down bets on behalf of the network. Low-end movers charge 10-20% while high-end movers charge 50% of winnings.
Interestingly, a lot of top-tier “Sharps” don’t mind the extra monitoring. They know that the sportsbooks only allow high limits and provide decent odds because they get to milk the “Squares”. The “Sharps” can make a living while everyone else gets bodied. Ugh.
Links and Memes
Some other links for your weekend consumption:
CES 2026 wrapped up and The Verge has a good video round-up. Steven Sinofsky does the best annual write-up of on-the-ground vibes and had this to say about Nvidia’s prescense at CES: “[Nvidia is] executing better than any previous leader in these shifts in a more dynamic and fast-paced environment—better than IBM and mainframes, DEC/Sun in mini/workstations, better than Microsoft with Windows, or Google and the internet. They are executing at the level Apple executed from 2006-2025, but doing so in a way that drives an entire industry at every level of the stack not “only” (not trying to underplay apple just contrast) at the app ecosystem level. Nvidia is executing like a combination of Microsoft, Intel, and Open Source all combined. It is incredible.”
Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, which is a version of their beast Claude Code coding tool…but for normies that just what a natural-language interface. One of their demos was of Claude Cowork cleaning up a user’s desktop, which is impressive but the real move is to just put all the files into a folder saying “JANUARY 2026 CRAP”. Simon Willison has a quick first impressions overview.
Apple Vision Pro has a new filming tech for the NBA app. It lets the viewer watch from court-side seats and looks sick. Ben Thompson is critical of Apple’s approach, though. The Apple Vision came footage keeps panning back to a dedicated TV-style broadcast…instead of just showing the court-side 3D experience the entire time. He says Apple should just do away with the extra stuff and slap a courtside camera at every live event and the value prop for the Apple Vision pro would be obvious…even at $3,500.
An AI-generated singer named Sienna Rose… “has 3 songs getting streamed in the Spotify top 50 and I'm pretty sure nobody knows it's an AI…artist Selena Gomez just posted one of the songs on her Instagram for the Golden Globes”. WE ARE SO EARLY!
How Sicario’s Cinematography Conveys Moral Corruption: A 10-minute YouTube video by Mosaics of Time (only 5k subs!) analyzes two scenes from Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario and its one of the best cinematography explainers I’ve ever seen (and he released another one looking at Sicario’s editing). Thank you YouTube algo which knows me unsettlingly well.
…and here them wild posts:
Finally, let’s talk about the “Marco Rubio realizing” memes. There was that episode last year when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came to the Oval Office and got into a heated argument with President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.
One iconic image from that blow-up was of Secretary of State Marco Rubio looking like that meme of Ben Affleck smoking outside exasperated…but x1,000.
Fast forward to 2026. Rubio is Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. The first person since Henry Kissinger held both roles under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. In other words, Rubio is wearing a lot of hats right now. And he was given more hats as it looks like Rubio played a pivotal role in recent actions in Venezuela and maybe Cuba, Colombia and [Insert Latin American country].
Naturally, the internet decided to assign him to every notable job in the news cycle: Manchester United Manager, Green Bay Packers quarterback and Governor of Greenland.
Last Thursday, Rubio leaned into the meme and posted:
"I do not normally respond to online rumors but feel the need to do so at this moment I will not be a candidate for the currently vacant HC and GM positions with the Miami Dolphins.
While you never know what the future may bring right now my focus must remain on global events and also the precious archives of the United States of America.
Thank you.”
Once the subject of the meme recognizes the meme, that should be the end of it. How could it go on?
Well, let me tell you how. On Sunday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell posted an unprecedented video on X — I legit though it was AI — saying that he was under Federal investigation for going over budget on constructing a Federal Reserve building…and that this was part of a larger pressure campaign from the White House for him to lower interest rates.
This is a massive escalation to undermine the Fed’s monetary policy independence, with the added threat of potential jail time. The market reaction was relatively muted, though. Powell has said he’ll stay through the end of his term in May, and he can remain on the Board of Governors until 2028. Terms for governors are staggered to prevent a single president from stacking the Board all at once. Major Wall Street hitters (eg. Jamie Dimon), US Senators and a long list of Central Bankers threw their support behind Powell. President Trump eventually denied knowledge of the meddling.
Gold, Silver and Bitcoin ended up pumping a bit.
Back to the memes, the quote interactions on Powell’s post (~90m views rn) were absolutely out of control including here, here and here…and it was an ideal setup to bring back Rubio…and I think this format may still have some legs.
