"My first day... I found out that we were not permitted to invest in a company until one month after an article about it had reached subscribers. I cooled my heels. Precisely one month after we'd published a piece about the real estate company Webb & Knapp, I went into a Merrill Lynch office and announced to a startled registered rep that I wanted to buy 200 shares of the stock, then trading at a princely 13/16ths of $1. The company was so speculative that the RR had to get the office manager's okay. I tucked this treasure away for two months, then sold at $1.25, making a profit after commissions of $62 on an investment of $162.50. I congratulated myself in a letter home, calling this roundtrip a 'pretty shrewd deal.'"

"{The} Personal Investing {column} also required me to write now and then about futures. I didn't think I should opine about something I had no experience with, so I opened a commodities account at Merrill. I at first made small amounts of money -- the worst thing that could have happened to me, because it made me think I knew what I was doing. And then, in 1967, I flamed out selling silver short. My loss, gulp, was $13,176 -- a cruel 75% of my annual salary!"

"I realized [Warren Buffett] knew everything about business I'd like to, and he sized me up as someone unusually interested in learning. John {Loomis's husband} and I were so impressed by Warren that we soon bought shares in his company, Berkshire Hathaway (our lowest cost basis per share is $173), and have therefore benefited from its tremendous rise in price (to $83,000 recently). Leaving aside one trade that John made in 1965, we have never sold a share."