Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger was an American investor and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway whose Poor Charlie's Almanack collected his speeches and interviews on investing, mental models, and the examined life.

Charlie Munger practiced law in Los Angeles before turning to investing, partnering with Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, where he served as vice chairman for nearly fifty years. The partnership between Munger and Buffett is one of the most successful and long-lasting in investment history; Munger’s particular contribution was pushing Buffett from the pure Graham-style value investing of buying cheap businesses toward buying excellent businesses at fair prices.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack (2005), edited by Peter Kaufman, is a collection of Munger’s speeches, talks, and writings, organized to present his thinking systematically. The book’s central concept is the mental model — the idea that a broad knowledge of multiple disciplines (psychology, physics, biology, economics, history) provides frameworks for thinking clearly about complex problems, and that the failure to have such a toolkit leads to predictable errors. Munger called his approach “worldly wisdom” and argued that it was learnable by anyone willing to read widely and think carefully.

The most famous of the talks collected in the book is “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment,” a systematic catalog of cognitive biases and their consequences — essentially an independent articulation of much of what Kahneman would later publish in Thinking, Fast and Slow, written without reference to the academic psychology literature. Munger died in 2023, weeks before his hundredth birthday, widely regarded as one of the wisest and most intellectually rigorous investors of his era.