The Essays of Warren Buffett

Why it’s on the list: Lawrence Cunningham’s arrangement of decades of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters into a single thematic course on capital allocation, owner-mindset investing and corporate governance — the canonical distillation of Buffett’s thinking.

Where I heard about it

• Spotted at Amazon Books at Washington Square, Tigard — December 2018 (Books photo album)

• On Jay’s investing reading list — a Google Sheet of 92 books by discipline, saved in Kyle’s Roam notes on April 15th, 2020 (Jay’s Investing Reading List). Jay highlighted it as one of the six to start with. Jay’s reason: “Systematic overview of important business/investing concepts”

• My own Kindle highlights — saved from a highlight in the book and tagged next to Warren Buffett; the line is below.

• A Goldman Sachs reading list — on the firm’s recommended reading list (careers site), shared by @F_Compounders on X in July 2025.

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, under Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism, where it appears twice (entries 7 and 8), as both the Cunningham and the Buffett-credited editions.

• In Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Full Reading List (Investor Field Guide, 2016) — the archive of his monthly book-club recommendations, saved by Kyle in April 2020 — Full Reading List (Investor Field Guide).

• In Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s A Curriculum for the Modern Investor, saved by Kyle in April 2020 — A Curriculum for the Modern Investor (Patrick O’Shaughnessy).

The line I flagged

“So smile when you read a headline that says ‘Investors lose as market falls.’ Edit it in your mind to ‘Disinvestors lose as market falls — but investors gain.’ Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other. (As they say in golf matches: ‘Every putt makes someone happy.’)”

Connections

• Warren Buffett — the source of every essay; Berkshire’s shareholder letters, arranged thematically.
• Berkshire Hathaway — the letters span Buffett’s Berkshire tenure.
• Goldman Sachs Recommended reading list… (tweet) — recommendation #2: on Goldman Sachs’s reading list.