Lambda_ele

A man who escaped China with no money and no English went on to compound about 30 percent a year for two decades. In 2006 he sat down in a Columbia classroom and taught the entire method to a room of students. For free. No bank and no fund has ever put this recording in front of you. His name is Li Lu. He fled after Tiananmen in 1989 and reached America with nothing, then wandered into a lecture that turned out to be Warren Buffett speaking to a value investing class. Years later Charlie Munger handed him about $88 million of his own family money, the only outside investor Munger ever trusted that way. The lecture is not a formula or a screener. It is about why the market is built against the few people who treat a stock as a piece of a business. He walks Timberland live off a stock manual, bought near book value at about 5 times earnings, a stock that rose about 7 times in two years. Then he does the same with a forgotten Korean stock that was even cheaper. The uncomfortable part is what he says about the crowd. By one estimate fewer than 5 percent of the money in the market belongs to value investors. The other 95 percent is built to trade, and it funds the whole game. Columbia charges tens of thousands a year to sit in that room. The man at the front gave the method away for nothing. His thesis was blunt. The stock market was not created for value investors. The edge, he said, is not more data. It is the temperament to stand alone when everyone disagrees. He says that same class made him more than $100,000 within the year, just by acting on what he heard. The recording has sat online for years. Almost nobody sits through an hour of it. The man Charlie Munger trusted with his own money taught the whole thing to a room of students for free. The people charging you to manage your savings have known it for decades. They just never sent you the tape.