Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2019

By 2019 the Daily Journal meeting had become a fixture on the value-investing calendar, and CNBC carried the entire two-hour session online. Munger was 95 and in full command — fielding questions on markets, banks, China, and his own mistakes with the same economy of language he’d used for decades.

Why watch it. This is one of the strongest single sessions for understanding how Munger actually evaluates a business and a country at once. He explains, plainly, why he was early and unbothered about Chinese stocks while most Americans treated the market as untouchable — a stance that looked contrarian then and tied directly to his and Li Lu’s conviction in companies like BYD. His comments on banking are a useful checklist: most of the money in finance, he warns, is made by people willing to do things he wouldn’t, so the trick is owning the rare bank run by people who don’t.

Notable threads: China as an investable market despite political risk; how to tell a sound bank from a dangerous one; the case for patience and concentration; and his standing insistence that avoiding stupidity beats seeking brilliance.