Sam Walton’s heirs have an estimated net worth of more than $90 billion. To put that into perspective, the Walton family is as rich as Bill Gates and Warren buffet combined. Virtually all of this wealth came from Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the publicly traded company that operates as the world’s largest retailer, bringing in a…
When you hear the name Bill Gates, what do you think? Microsoft. At least, that is what comes to mind for most people. It makes sense. After all, Bill Gates owns 620,973,551 shares of Microsoft. At today’s market price of $24.38 per share, this puts the pre-tax value of his holdings in the software giant…
Due to our disciplined value investing philosophy, coupled with our insistence upon diversification of income and assets, we haven’t experienced a lot of big losses. When we do, we try and study what went wrong so we can understand if there was a structural problem or a blind spot in our mental cognition that should be avoided in the future. We never want to have to “return to Go” in Monopoly terms. That is just intelligent portfolio management.
The manufacturing sector in the United States generates the same inflation-adjusted profits it did in 1960. Surprised? Here is a look at the numbers.
Coco Chanel was able to launch her business by partnering with financier Pierre Wertheimer. She ended up with 10% and creative control, her friend, Théophile Bader, owned 20%, and Wertheimer owned 70%. She came to resent the arrangement.
There is a traditional Chinese proverb that goes something along the lines of, “Do not take the seeds and throw away the melon”. Though there are many ways you can approach this, and multiple lessons that can be extracted from reflecting on it, it can be particularly sage when it comes to running a business and allocating the cash flow from that business. One of my favorite examples comes from The Coca-Cola Company.
Whether or not a business can lavish employees and owners with huge bonuses, paychecks, dividend checks, and profits on a sustainable basis depends upon one metric and one metric only: operating profit per employee.
Pension costs and calculations are one of those areas a lot of people don’t think about in their day-to-day lives but it can be really interesting if you love investing and are mathematically inclined. It’s also important as a voter given the political implications should your municipality find itself in a pension funding crisis.
