Contents of this article
Warren Buffett is surely a familiar name to people all over the world, especially to investors. He is a brilliant investor who has been among the 10 richest people in the world throughout the past 20 years. As a result, his life and career are a constant subject of discussion among scholars and investors. The Snowball is one of the defining books about Warren Buffett’s life. It portrays everything about this great investor as truthfully and in as much detail as possible.
Who Wrote The Snowball?
Alice Schroeder was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Between 1978 and 1980 she earned a BBA in finance and an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. She is both an author and a highly regarded insurance analyst, and she also served as a project manager at the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).
Alice Schroeder was hand-picked by Warren Buffett himself to write the book about his life. While she was a managing director at Morgan Stanley and a well-known Wall Street analyst, she unexpectedly received a special offer from Buffett: “You could spend all your time writing a book about me”. She accepted, and so began her journey working with the respected billionaire. She conducted a great many interviews with people connected to Buffett who knew and understood him well. After all that effort, The Snowball was published and lived up to expectations, being voted one of the “best books of 2008” in the US at the time.
What Is The Snowball About?
In The Snowball, Alice Schroeder gives an overview of Buffett’s childhood. The book contains interesting details, small anecdotes and surprises that Warren Buffett had never mentioned before. Thanks to this, readers gain a clearer and more detailed understanding of the character and personality of this great investor.
An excerpt from the book:
“It was Warren’s ninth winter. He was playing in the snow in the yard with his little sister, Bertie.
Warren caught the snowflakes falling from high in the sky, one by one, and placed them in his other palm until he had a handful. He packed it tight, rolled it into a ball and set it on the ground. The ball began to roll slowly with each push and grew bigger and bigger as it picked up more snow along the way. He rolled it across his lawn, now blanketed in white, and soon reached the edge of the yard. After a moment’s hesitation, he pressed on and kept rolling the ball onto the neighbors’ lawns.
And from then on, Warren kept rolling his snowball all over the world…”
Did you know that Warren Buffett was once a poor student with plenty of F grades? He even ran away from home and stole sports clothing from the Sears store. The Snowball shows how he started his business and investment empire when he was only 13. You may be amazed to learn that the first piece of real estate he bought, in tenth grade, covered more than 10 acres. Although he was very intelligent, he seemed to have a “grudge” against school, and Harvard turned him down.
As an adult, he had an ill-fated romance with Vanita Mae Brown, Miss Nebraska 1949. Warren Buffett was a loyal Pepsi drinker for many years before switching to Coca-Cola’s Cherry Coke in 1987. In 2009 he grew close to Bill and Melinda Gates, the couple who then held the title of the world’s richest, and he regarded them as no different from his own children.
Throughout The Snowball the author also describes many of the boldest deals in Warren Buffett’s investing history. They brought him fame and remarkable success throughout his career. Some people call him the investor most favored by the market. That can be seen as a compliment to the extraordinary talent of one of the greatest investors of all time. In practice, very few of his investment plans have failed, and his fortune has grown through annual compounding.
The Snowball contains almost all of the secrets and hard-won experience distilled from the career of America’s most successful investor. The author gives all readers, and investors in particular, a treasure trove of valuable and fascinating lessons from Warren Buffett’s own life and career.
Our Thoughts on The Snowball – Alice Schroeder
When you finish Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball, you will feel that Warren Buffett’s life is much like any of ours: a mix of flaws and strengths, of successes and failures, of making money and spending it, of love and career. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Warren Buffett is not his place at the top of the world’s rich lists but his philosophy of life, his principles, his deep insight into the times and his own distinctive investment style. This book answers all of readers’ questions, at home and abroad, about this brilliant investor.
More than any other book, The Snowball is considered the best book about Warren Buffett – unsurprisingly, since it is the authorized account of his own life. Buffett was truly wise to choose Schroeder to write it; with her talent, she captured all the light and shade of his daily life and his complex career. This is a genuinely good book, and a meaningful one, that everyone should have on their shelf, especially those interested in investing in financial markets in general and the stock market in particular.
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