The Master of Money: "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life" review

His share price is still off more than 40 percent from its highs, underperforming even the S&P 500.

Oh, wow. I thought Lewis was in finance, but apparently he doesn't realize that the peak-to-trough performance of one member of an average is very likely to be higher than the peak-to-trough performance of that average. This is true, even with a two-stock index:

    Year  Stock A  Stock B  Avg.
    0     10       12       11
    1     12       10       11
    2     5        5        5

Note that A and B both had a larger peak to trough loss than the average. And yet, the average consists of A and B.

e railed against derivatives as weapons of mass destruction, and now turns out to have been sitting on a $68 billion pile of credit default swaps and exotic put options on various stock market indexes.

He complains specifically about counterparty risk. Someone who read what he said would know that; someone who heard thirdhand quotes might not. The derivatives he holds don't have any counterparty risk for him, because he's getting all the cash up front and paying out based on future events.

I read it recently and liked it quite a bit. I think one of the things that stuck out for me is that he and Graham were taking this sort of 'quant' (using the term very loosely, as some people here do that, and I don't really know about it in detail) approach back in the 50ies - they absolutely poured over the stats in an era when that wasn't as easy as it is now. Now, Buffet is big enough to be able to do stuff ordinary investors can't, like buy entire companies.

In other words, perhaps part of his success belongs to a bygone era that won't come around again.

Great article worth the long read.