so you want to be the next Warren Buffett?

I came across an insightful talk to Harvard Business School MBA students by Mark Sellers, the founder and managing member of Sellers Capital, LLC, a Chicago-based money management firm incepted in 2003 which runs a long/short equity hedge fund and other private investment partnerships.

Here's an excerpt from his talk with advice I've never seen anyone mention before that shows the reality of becoming an equity guru like Warren Buffett...

You have almost no chance of being a great investor. You have a really, really low probability, like 2% or less. And I'’m adjusting for the fact that you all have high IQs and are hard workers and will have an MBA from one of the top business schools in the country soon. If this audience was just a random sample of the population at large, the likelihood of anyone here becoming a great investor later on would be even less, like 1/50th of 1% or something. You all have a lot of advantages over Joe Investor, and yet you have almost no chance of standing out from the crowd over a long period of time.

And the reason is that it doesn’t much matter what your IQ is, or how many books or magazines or newspapers you have read, or how much experience you have, or will have later in your career. These are things that many people have and yet almost none of them end up compounding at 20% or 25% over their careers.

As of exactly one year ago, the hedge fund boasts roughly $115 million in assets and annualized returns of 35% (before fees) since inception, including a 45% year-to-date return.

But as of recently, things have soured very fast that even Sellers could not believe what was happening:

The firm—which managed $230 million as of July—reported a net loss of 49.96% in Q3 after running its flagship fund at breakneck gains of 65% in the first half.

However, it's important to note that the fund is still up 11% over the trailing 12 months and 27% annualized since inception even after the 50% downturn. He's also retiring from the hedge fund game as of October due to stress (an understatement), which is probably a good thing as I hope he does not get a heart attack in the months to come.

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