Bucket, Not Thimble

From Warren Buffett’s 2009 Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders, released February 2010. The line sits in a self-critical paragraph: Buffett looks back on his year-earlier view that corporate and municipal bonds were “ridiculously cheap” relative to Treasuries, notes that Berkshire did back the call with purchases, and concludes he should have done far more.

The line is a verdict on his own sizing during the crisis. He calls a climate of fear an investor’s best friend; the failure he names is reaching with a thimble while it pours. It is the other half of Buffett’s twenty-slot punch card image, which frames a lifetime of investing as a card with only twenty punches: refusing nineteen times only pays off if the twentieth swing is sized to the moment.