Apparently, you’re better off lending money (bonds) to Warren Buffett than Barack Obama. Two-year notes sold by the billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity. This comes as the USA risks its AAA rating.

I was stoked last night to see Michael Lewis talk about his book, The Big Short, on 60 Minutes last night. Even better was getting to hear Dr. Mike Burry talk about his experience. Not a lot of new information if you read the Vanity Fair article, but still very interesting.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d have stayed in the finance world. I miss it. It was extremely fascinating to me (and still is). I’d opt for more of an investment route versus the audit role I had. Regardless, I still enjoy reading about investing, finance and other money matters, especially if it’s written by Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis as this article on Dr. Mike Burry is. Note that Burry is featured in Lewis’ The Big Short.

Burry seems to be the sort of investor I like to read about: a value investor (read: like Warren Buffett). By betting against the banks lending practices, he’s been one of the success stories through the investment troubles widely publicized. Combine that with the fact that Burry is a one-man business, prefers writing letters to human interaction and has made most of his investment decisions based on 10K’s and public information and he’s my sort of guy. I wish I could find his old website letters – some are on the Scion Capital site. I’ve selected a few blurbs from the article that further explain why I’m fascinated with Burry.

By his late 20s he thought of himself as the sort of person who didn’t have friends. He’d gone through Santa Teresa High School, in San Jose, U.C.L.A., and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and created not a single lasting bond. What friendships he did have were formed and nurtured in writing, by email; the two people he considered to be true friends he had known for a combined 20 years but had met in person a grand total of eight times. “My nature is not to have friends,” he said. “I’m happy in my own head.”

…

Buffett had had trouble with people, too, in his youth. He’d used a Dale Carnegie course to learn how to interact more profitably with his fellow human beings. Mike Burry came of age in a different money culture. The Internet had displaced Dale Carnegie. He didn’t need to meet people. He could explain himself online and wait for investors to find him. He could write up his elaborate thoughts and wait for people to read them and wire him their money to handle. “Buffett was too popular for me,” said Burry. “I won’t ever be a kindly grandfather figure.”

…

“I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.” Once you became an idea’s defender, you had a harder time changing your mind about it.”

I’ve always secretly wanted to be a quant (aka, math guy) on Wall Street. Saying that, I found Newsweek’s profile of Paul Wilmott – who Nassim Taleb, the mathematician and author of the bestseller The Black Swan (high on my ‘to read’ list), calls him the smartest quant in the world. “He’s (Wilmott) the only one who truly understands what’s going on … the only quant who uses his own head and has any sense of ethics” – to be quite interesting.

Michael Lewis has writen up a review of The Snowball, a book about Warren Buffett.

Apparently, this morning Malcom Gladwell kicked off The New Yorker Summit (dying to go next year, btw) with this little gem.

What’s going on on Wall Street isn’t the result of experts failing to act as experts: it’s the result of experts acting exactly like experts act. It’s not a result of incompetence, it’s a result of overconfidence.