The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Alice Schroeder
Bloomsbury, Rs 995

Warren Buffett lets in on how a six-year-old who sold packs of chewing gum remained on the right side of the market and became the richest man

There is something fascinating about the lives of superbly successful people and that itself lends much attraction to reading Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett, unarguably the most successful investor in the history of modern capitalism. The fact that Buffett allowed Schroeder — whom he first met when she was a financial analyst studying his famous firm Berkshire Hathaway — complete access to his family, friends, files, personal documents and his own thoughts makes the biography quite complete. With humility, seemingly characteristic of the man, he even requested Schroeder to choose a version of the story that was least flattering.

The biography doesn’t quite begin at the beginning. It opens in 1999 at the height of the technology and dotcom boom in the US — one which Buffett never bought into because he never thought it was for real. In 1999, many attending a speech he delivered at Sun Valley thought he had finally missed a fundamental change in the way things were going to be and this despite his close friendship with Bill Gates. Buffett was proved right a year later when the boom turned bust. He rightly understood that while technologies come and go, not all of them can be reaped directly for investor profits. Tech companies which were being valued at many times their actual revenue and profit performance were a road leading to bust.

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