巴菲特英文介绍——可做英文名人介绍作业用

The makings of the world’s greatest investor

Warren Edward Buffett was conceived approximately one month after the Wall Street crash in 1929, to be born in Omaha, Nebraska in the United States on 30 August, 1930. His early childhood was deeply affected by the crash and the great depression that follo wed. Buffett’s father, Howard, was a securities broker in Omaha, but he lost his job and his savings when the bank he worked for went bankrupt in 1931 –shortly before Warren’s first birthday. Howard responded by establishing his own stockbroking firm, but it was a tough way to earn a living in the early thirties. For a long while, as investors shunned the market, Buffett’s business was little more than a sign on a door. Buffett’s mother, Leila Stahl, had been brought up in West Point, Nebraska, with a family that owned and operated a local newspaper: the Cuming County Democrat. She moved to Omaha with Howard after they married in 1925.

Buffett’s tough early years probably helped to forge his parsimonious nature and his desire to make certain that he would never have to struggle for money. Combined with his early exposure to the stockmarket and investing, through his father’s work, Buffett was light years ahead of most children at money management by the time he began school at the age of six.

Around this time, Buffett is said to have embarked on the first of

many money making schemes, buying six-packs of Coca-Cola

for 25 cents and then selling the individual bottles for 5 cents

each. According to his mother, during a severe illness at age

seven, Buffett lay in a hospital bed calculating his future riches

on a sheet of paper, exclaiming to a nurse ‘I don’t have much

money now, but someday I will and I’ll have my picture in the paper’.

Howard Buffett was a man of high principles and this led him into politics. Politics, in turn, led to the family being relocated to Washington DC in 1942, when Buffett was twelve, after his father won a seat in congress. Warren was very unhappy about being away from Omaha, but his time in the capital was significant in terms of his fledgling business career. A paper round began a very profitable lifelong association with The Washington Post. When his paper round was at its peak, Buffett was making US$40 a week from it. To this could be added US$20 a week earnings from his share of a partnership with his friend Don Danly, owning, operating and servicing pinball machines in barber

shops. He filed a tax return in respect of his earnings and refused to let his father pay the taxes.

In 1947, the seventeen-year-old Buffett went, somewhat reluctantly, to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. He didn’t feel that he was learning very much from his university studies, however, and in 1949 he returned to Omaha, after his father lost an election, and he transferred to the University of Nebraska. In Omaha, he was rushing through his studies and at the same time adding to his funds with various jobs on the side, including one where he managed 50 paper boys for the Lincoln Journal.

For all his business acumen and earning power, though, Buffett was still unsure about what to do with the money. Buffett’s stockmarket epiphany came in 1949 when he first read Benjamin Graham’s legendary book on investing, The Intelligent Investor, which had been published that year. This encouraged him to enrol at the University of Columbia to study under Graham.

What Buffett learnt from Graham laid the foundations for his investing career, by ramming home the crucial distinction between price and value. After scoring the only A+ that Graham had awarded in 22 years of teaching, Buffett had hoped to be employed by Graham’s investment firm, Graham Newman, but he was rejected because the firm only employed Jews (since they were shunned by the traditional Wall Street investment houses). Buffett even offered his services for free, for the honour of working with the Master, but his approach was rebuffed.

So Buffett returned to Omaha, where he took employment with his father’s firm of Buffett Falk. Asked whether the firm would be renamed Buffett & Son, he is said to have retorted: ‘No, Buffett & Father.’ At this time, Buffett courted Susan Thompson, whose parents were family friends, and the two were married in 1952. They raised three children, Howard, Susan and Peter.

In 1954, Ben Graham relented and Buffett completed his education by working for two years, for US$12,000 a year, at Graham’s firm in New York, until Graham retired in 1956. The firm was wound up because, as one investor said at the tim e, ‘Graham Newman can’t continue because the only guy they have to run it is this kid named Warren Buffett. And who’d want to ride with him?’

It turned out that plenty of people did want to ride with Buffett. When he returned to Omaha, his own investing partnership began with friends and