By Catherine Rentz Pernot
On a Monday afternoon in Omaha, Neb., three Mizzou students sat in a Lincoln Town Car with a license plate that read “Thrifty.” No big deal, except their chauffeur was Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of the modern era and the second-richest man in the world.
From left, Warren Buffett; Andy Kern, finance doctoral student and instructor; Jessica Stack; and Catherine Rentz Pernot stand next to Mr. Buffet's Town Car with the “Thrifty” license plates. |
Those three students were part of a group of about 55 undergraduate, MBA, and PhD students, along with four faculty members and three alumni, who had the rare opportunity for an extensive question-and-answer session with Mr. Buffett. Besides the 90 minutes of Q&A, the MU contingent also toured the Nebraska Furniture Mart and Borscheim's, both of which are owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the firm headed by Mr. Buffett. Also on the itinerary were lunch with Mr. Buffett and a tour of the operations and call center for Ameritrade, a rapidly growing online brokerage firm.
“This is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Andy Kern (MBA '05), a finance doctoral student and instructor of a unique MU business class, FIN 8001: Investment Strategies of Warren Buffett, based on Buffett’s investing principles. Kern has admired Buffett for years and helped organize the trip, the first in MU’s history.
Harvey Eisen, the MU business alumnus who arranged the trip and established the Buffett course in 1997, thinks it might have been the first such course in the nation. “No one is a better role model for business students than Warren Buffett,” said Eisen, a member of the college’s strategic development board, a leading portfolio manager, and occasional panelist on the CNN show, Lou Dobbs Tonight.
Mizzou’s business students, faculty members, and alumni with Warren Buffett. |
Buffett talked to students about several of his investing principles, including the importance of thinking of stocks as “part of a business” rather than “things that wiggle around or split two for one” and of letting the market “serve you, not instruct you.” He also joked about the struggling University of Nebraska football team and why he and others should drink Coca Cola, a company in which Berkshire Hathaway holds a significant position.
Jessica Stack, who is in the Crosby MBA Program, remarked about how humble Mr. Buffett was about his wealth and how she admired his willingness to admit some of his weaknesses during the question-and-answer session. “He was very relaxed, conversational, and quite entertaining — not at all the way you might think a self-made, $35-billion-plus finance guru would be,” she said.
Catherine Rentz Pernot, a student in Finance 8001, is in the master’s program in the Missouri School of Journalism. |