CHAPTER 14Charlie MungerHandling Big Losses

You need patience, discipline, and an ability to take losses without going crazy.

—Charlie Munger Kiplinger, 2005

Netflix, Amazon, and Google are three of the most successful companies over the past decade. Their products have changed the way we live, and their shareholders have in turn been rewarded with tremendous profits. That is, assuming their shareholders had the discipline to stick around. One of the oldest tenets of finance is that risk is tied with reward. If you want big rewards, you can be sure that big risk is never far behind.

Amazon is up a whopping 38,600% since its 1997 IPO, compounding at 35.5% annually. This would have grown a $1,000 investment into $387,000 today. But the degree ...

Get Big Mistakes now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.