The Abominable No-Man Who Made Warren Buffett Better
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 1
There's a recurring joke in financial circles that Warren Buffett deserves credit for discovering Charlie Munger. Munger's response to this kind of hagiography would probably be some variation of: "That's very flattering, and almost entirely wrong."
Poor Charlie's Almanack opens with exactly this dynamic — Buffett writing glowingly about his partner, and Munger immediately writing a rebuttal. It's the most honest possible introduction to a book about a man who spent eight decades refusing to tell people what they wanted to hear.
I'm writing these notes as someone who reads this kind of material as a practitioner, not a scholar. Nothing here is investment advice — I'm not in the business of telling you what to buy. What I am interested in is the thinking style underneath the results.
"My Partner Charlie"
Buffett's foreword is affectionate to the point of being almost embarrassing, which is itself revealing. He calls Munger the person who "expanded my horizons" and "forced me to think about businesses, not just securities." He credits Munger — not Ben Graham — with pulling him away from the cigar-butt style of buying cheap, mediocre companies. That is a significant concession from a man who trained under Graham and spent the first decade of his career executing Graham's playbook.
The phrase Buffett uses most memorably: Munger is the "abominable no-man." As in, when everyone else is eager to do a deal, Munger is the one who methodically lists every reason it could go wrong, and frequently refuses to proceed. Buffett frames this as a virtue. Most organizations desperately need someone who will say no and can explain exactly why.
Munger's own preface is shorter and characteristically deflating. He notes that Buffett's account of their relationship is "overly generous," points out a few factual embellishments, and expresses mild alarm that a book of this length has been assembled around his speeches and letters. He is not being falsely modest. He seems genuinely puzzled by the enterprise.
What the two pieces together reveal is something unusual: a decades-long partnership where each man appears to have genuinely improved the other, and where neither seems to have let admiration curdle into deference. Munger still argued with Buffett. Buffett apparently still needed arguing with.
From Omaha to Everywhere
The biographical sketch in Chapter 1 is the section of Poor Charlie's Almanack that gets underweighted in discussions, because readers tend to fast-forward to the investment frameworks. That's a mistake.
Munger grew up in Omaha in the 1920s and 1930s — the same city, the same neighborhood, practically the same cultural moment as Buffett, though Munger is seven years older. He worked as a teenager at Buffett's grandfather's grocery store. He left for Caltech, then the Army Air Corps, then Harvard Law, without ever finishing an undergraduate degree. Harvard let him in anyway, reportedly because a dean made a phone call.
He became a lawyer, a good one, building a practice in Los Angeles in the 1950s. For most people, that's the story: Omaha kid, wartime service, Harvard Law, successful attorney. The end.
What doesn't appear in the resume is the texture of the period. Munger married young. He and his first wife Nancy had three children before their marriage ended in divorce in 1953 — uncommon and genuinely costly in that era, socially and financially. Then his son Teddy, from that first marriage, was diagnosed with leukemia. In an account from friends in the book, Munger would visit the hospital, hold his dying son, then walk out into the California sunshine and continue working. Teddy died in 1955. Munger was 31.
I don't mention this to be maudlin. I mention it because it's the kind of event that separates theoretical stoicism from actual stoicism. Munger had read the Stoics. He apparently also practiced what they taught. The friends who knew him in this period describe someone who did not collapse, did not catastrophize, did not become bitter — who instead seemed to understand, with unusual clarity, that suffering is real and that you still have to figure out how to live.
He remarried in 1956, to Nancy Barry, and by most accounts this was a far happier arrangement. He also, around this time, began seriously thinking about money and investing — not as a hobby, but as a systematic intellectual project.
The Pivot from Law to Capital
The transition from lawyer to investor is one of the genuinely interesting puzzles in the Munger biography, because he doesn't describe it as a dramatic awakening. He describes it as simple arithmetic. A lawyer's income is proportional to hours worked. Invested capital compounds without you. If you have ideas about which businesses are worth owning, the logical extension is to own them.
This is the kind of reasoning that sounds obvious in retrospect and is almost never actually acted on. Munger acted on it.
He formed the Wheeler, Munger & Co. investment partnership in 1962 — the same year Buffett's partnership was hitting its stride, and before the two men had formalized their business relationship. He ran it as a concentrated portfolio, in direct contrast to the diversification orthodoxy that Graham had institutionalized. Where Graham's approach said to spread risk across many cheap securities, Munger wanted to concentrate in a few great ones.
The Partnership Record: Real Numbers
The performance of Wheeler, Munger & Co. from 1962 to 1975 is documented in the book, and it's worth sitting with the actual figures rather than the myth.
The partnership compounded at roughly 19.8% annually over that period, against the Dow's approximately 5% annual return. That's the headline number, and it sounds clean and impressive. The experience of living through it was considerably messier.
In 1973 and 1974, Munger's portfolio dropped approximately 31.9% and then 31.5% in successive years — a cumulative drawdown of over 50% at the low. The broader market was terrible in that period, but Munger's concentrated bets made it worse. Blue Chip Stamps, which became one of his core holdings and eventually the vehicle through which he and Buffett would buy See's Candies and Wesco Financial, cratered along with everything else.
The question of whether you would have stayed is not rhetorical. Most limited partners in such a partnership would have left. The rational-seeming decision — get out while you still have something left — is almost always wrong in retrospect and almost always feels obviously correct in the moment. Munger held. His conviction in the businesses he owned did not waver simply because their quoted prices dropped by half.
This is the part of the long-term investing story that rarely gets the emphasis it deserves. Anyone can say "I'm a long-term investor." The statement is cheap. The test is what you actually do when sitting on a 50% loss that may not recover in your investing lifetime. Munger passed the test. His investors, those who stayed, were rewarded. Those who left locked in real losses.
I own no positions in Berkshire or any Munger-adjacent holdings, so I have no financial stake in saying this. But I will say this clearly: the psychological cost of a concentrated, long-term approach is not academic. It is severe, regular, and poorly described in investment literature that focuses on compound annual returns.
In Praise of Getting Old
The section called "In Praise of the Elder" is short, and it is — without competition — my favorite piece in Part 1.
Munger in his late eighties writing about aging has the same quality as Montaigne writing about death: not resigned, not cheerful in the falsely positive way, but genuinely interested. He observes that old age brings certain obvious losses and, less obviously, certain gains. The losses are physical. The gains are perspectival — a kind of earned clarity about what matters and what doesn't.
He notes that he finds it strange that more people don't approach the final decades of life with curiosity rather than dread. For Munger, the question "how do I think well under increasingly difficult circumstances?" is simply a more constrained version of the same question he'd been asking his whole life. The constraint doesn't make the question less interesting. In some ways it makes it more interesting.
This connects, in ways he doesn't quite spell out but that are visible in the surrounding material, to his investment philosophy. Markets don't give you the best opportunities when you're comfortable. The interesting situations — the ones where patient analysis actually pays off — tend to arise precisely when conditions are difficult and most other market participants are making decisions based on fear rather than analysis. Knowing that you can function under pressure is itself a form of capital.
Munger's experience of watching his son die at thirty-one, rebuilding his life financially after divorce, enduring a 50% portfolio loss — none of this is wisdom for the faint-hearted. But it is wisdom that actually holds under fire, rather than collapsing the moment reality gets uncomfortable.
The Man His Friends Saw
The recollections from Munger's colleagues and friends in Chapter 1 sketch a portrait that is, frankly, more interesting than the investing legend mythology.
Otis Booth, a longtime friend, describes someone who was aggressively frugal in personal spending and quietly generous in anonymous giving — a combination that confounds the usual assumptions. The man who negotiated every deal with ferocious intensity also funded scholarships and buildings without wanting his name on them.
Al Marshall, his law partner, remembers someone who could hold enormous amounts of conflicting information simultaneously and who was genuinely interested in being wrong — not as a matter of false modesty, but because being wrong quickly is less costly than being wrong slowly. Munger apparently had a phrase he used when a business decision turned out badly: "I should have known better sooner."
Warren Buffett's wife Susan, in her brief contribution, remembers Munger at social occasions being simultaneously the most direct and the most courteous person in the room — able to tell someone their idea was foolish without being contemptuous of the person. That's actually a rare skill. Most people who are willing to be blunt are also willing to be unkind. Munger seemed to understand the difference.
The cumulative portrait is of someone who had, by some combination of early hardship and deliberate effort, grown genuinely comfortable with reality as it actually is. Not resigned to it, not cheerful about it by force of will — comfortable. Which is a different thing entirely.
Reading the opening section of Poor Charlie's Almanack in 2026, with Munger having died in November 2023 at ninety-nine, the biographical material carries a different weight than it did at first publication in 2005. He got forty more years after those dark years in the early 1950s. He used them.
The framework he built — multi-disciplinary thinking, concentrated conviction, ferocious honesty about one's own errors — doesn't translate directly into investment returns for any individual reader. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does offer is a coherent example of how to think under uncertainty, remain financially solvent through difficult periods, and age without confabulation.
That's more than most books give you. The next four parts of this series will go deeper into the specific mental models and the speeches. For now, this portrait of the man is enough to be going on with.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 1
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