In other words, perhaps part of his success belongs to a bygone era that won't come around again.
In other words, perhaps part of his success belongs to a bygone era that won't come around again.
This is drastically different from "quant analysis", which tries to determine a stock price, or engage in arbitrage, from previous movements, relations to other stocks, and a host of other data largely irrelevant to computing the implicit value of a company. This information comes from real-time data streams from god-knows-where.
To the extent that anybody was a quant back then, Graham probably counted: he did use lots of statistical rules, and he didn't use very much else.
another good book on buffett which has some sections dedicated to buffett vs quants and buffett vs 'its all luck' ppl is "The making of an American Capitalist" (http://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowe...) -- first book I got on him, perhaps the best (got snowball, haven't read it yet).
What would be really great would be a wikified list of his transactions, linked to the financial statements and news stories that were current at the time.
By looking at certain bits of data, they attempted to find these 'cigar butt' companies - Graham more than Buffett. The way they did that was to comb through a lot of data in a way that can now be done by a computer extremely quickly. So perhaps 'quant' is wrong... shall we say 'data driven'? Of course that's not all Buffet did/does, but it just struck me as an edge that he had then that he couldn't have now.