Where to Start with Warren Buffett: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Warren Buffett — how to approach The Essays of Warren Buffett, the essential collection of his shareholder letter wisdom. A complete reading guide.
By Marcus Webb
Warren Buffett (born 1930) is an American investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway who built one of the largest fortunes in human history through value investing — a discipline he learned from Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School — and through the construction of Berkshire Hathaway as an acquisition vehicle for exceptional businesses at fair prices. He has been called the greatest investor who ever lived. The annual letters he writes to Berkshire shareholders — available free on the company’s website — are the most widely read documents in investment literature.
Where to Start: The Essays of Warren Buffett (1997)
The essential Buffett primer — and the most direct access to his thinking available to readers who haven’t worked at Berkshire. The annual shareholder letters Buffett has written since 1965 are where he has always been most direct, most honest, and most illuminating about how he thinks about business, investment, management, and corporate governance. Lawrence Cunningham solved the access problem — reading sixty years of letters chronologically requires significant patience and context — by reorganising the key passages thematically. The result is a coherent account of Buffett’s investment philosophy, in his own words, without intermediary.
The intellectual heart of the book is Buffett’s account of intrinsic value: what a business is actually worth, as distinct from its book value (what the accountants say) or its market price (what buyers and sellers are currently willing to pay). For Buffett, a business is worth the present value of all the cash it will ever generate for its owners — a deceptively simple definition that requires genuine judgment to apply, because estimating future cash flows is partly a matter of understanding competitive dynamics, management quality, and business durability that no formula can fully capture.
The Mr. Market allegory — which Buffett inherited from Graham — is the book’s most memorable illustration. Imagine that you own a share in a business, and a business partner named Mr. Market offers to buy your share or sell you more every day. Some days Mr. Market is euphoric and offers very high prices; some days he is depressed and offers very low ones. The key insight: Mr. Market’s mood tells you something about the current consensus of other market participants, but it tells you nothing about the actual value of the business. The investor’s job is to use Mr. Market’s emotional swings to buy at low prices and sell at high ones — not to treat his offers as authoritative statements about what things are worth.
The writing is extraordinary for a business document. Buffett has a gift for plain expression of complex ideas — analogies that are precise rather than decorative, technical concepts rendered accessible without being simplified. He has said this clarity is partly a discipline: if you cannot explain an idea clearly, you probably don’t understand it as well as you think. The annual letters are worth reading as essays in clear thinking as much as investment documents.
Reading Warren Buffett
The Essays of Warren Buffett is the essential starting point. The annual shareholder letters, available free on the Berkshire Hathaway website, are the source material and reward reading directly once you have the framework.
For the full Warren Buffett bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Warren Buffett author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Warren Buffett?
The Essays of Warren Buffett (first compiled 1997, updated regularly) is the essential starting point — Lawrence Cunningham's thematic compilation of Buffett's annual shareholder letters to Berkshire Hathaway, which are the most widely read documents in investment literature. Buffett in his own words, organised by subject: corporate governance, valuation, investment philosophy, accounting, and what makes a great manager.
What is The Essays of Warren Buffett about?
The Essays of Warren Buffett is a thematic compilation of passages from Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder letters, which Buffett has written since 1965. Topics include what intrinsic value means and how to calculate it; why stock prices are often disconnected from business value (the Mr. Market allegory); what corporate governance should look like; what accounting practices reveal or conceal; and how to evaluate management quality. The writing is exceptional for a business document — Buffett is one of the clearest writers in finance.
Should I read The Essays or the shareholder letters directly?
The shareholder letters are available free on the Berkshire Hathaway website and reading them all is valuable eventually. But reading them chronologically requires patience and significant context. Cunningham's thematic compilation makes the core ideas accessible in a way chronological reading does not — the ideas emerge clearly rather than distributed across sixty years of letters referencing specific Berkshire transactions. Start with The Essays, then go to the letters directly for depth.
What should I read after The Essays of Warren Buffett?
After The Essays, Alice Schroeder's The Snowball is the definitive Buffett biography — the only full account written with his cooperation. Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor is the foundational text of value investing that Buffett built on, and he has called it the best investment book ever written. Poor Charlie's Almanack covers the complementary thinking of Buffett's partner Charlie Munger.
