When Anne Hathaway is in the news, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway stock price increases.

One of the reasons I read Warren Buffett’s (2010) Annual Letter to his shareholders is the way he states things – so simple and effective.

Our final advantage is the hard-to-duplicate culture that permeates Berkshire. And in businesses, culture counts.

It seems to me Buffett’s themes in this year’s letter are “opportunities and culture.”

Founder Collective is something I’d love to work/start/emulate: angel investors that are more business partners than investors.

Founder Collective offers an average of less than $200,000. In exchange, it takes less equity. But it provides more in the way of personal support to the entrepreneurs than a VC would.

More financial trading irresponsibility?

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”.

The most innovative product for a financial firm is one that always has volume and, sometimes, always has volatility. Many investors would prefer neither, they would prefer their investments boring. So there’s a clash here.

Similar sentiments were what I gathered from my reading of The Big Short by Michael Lewis. While there was a lot of common sense ignored in some of the large investment firms, it seems that the more transactions you can skim fees off of the better (if you’re a banker) and little thought was placed on the outcome or the quality of investment vehicle.

To me, I take the Warren Buffett philosophy on investing when I think of finance; it should be boring.

As I’m reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis, my mind can’t help but wander to his other book on the financial world, Liar’s Poker. This morning I was thinking about Dr. Mike Burry and I remembered reading this update on Liar’s Poker and thought it was worth mentioning.

Two alternative routes to banking have passed by my radar: BankSimple (no confusing products or hidden fees) and On Deck Capital (small business loans based on cash flow with no loan officer). On Deck Capital has been around for a couple years (I’ve had the site bookmarked for 2+ years) and BankSimple is soon to launch. It’s interesting to see these new players in the money world. I hope they both are successful as I think we need a swift kick in the pants with how we manage money.

One other “money” product to consider is Square, the mobile phone add-on device that allows anyone to take credit card payments on their phone. What’s interesting about Square and BankSimple is that both are founded by early Twitter employees.

David Swensen was pretty revolutionary in his methods for investing the Yale Endowment fund (it’s worth noting this great Fortune article on the Harvard/Yale Investment rivalry), earning higher returns than the S&P. Recently his portfolio, like many others, has taken a hit. I think it’s too quick to judge his philosophy and whether it works. Personally, I think it will/does as his approach makes sense.

Read Pioneering Portfolio Management and you see very quickly that his approach calls for constant thinking and retesting of assumptions and changing of allocations

Actually, shouldn’t our approach to life follow this theory?

Rather than just buy locally a community is now investing locally.

A business owner submits a business plan, references, and a request in a specific amount, and LION distributes the application to residents who want to invest. From there, the business and the investor figure out the details of an equity investment or a loan. (…) When an investor helps a neighborhood business grow, the profits and jobs stay local as well. Investing in a corporation headquartered elsewhere, by contrast, merely increases profits in some far-flung corner office or helps open a new store in another part of the country.

Read the whole article for an interesting bit about how the community is “working around” the SEC.

I bought the wrong damn stock(s) right out of college (2001). AAPL would have brought some pretty sweet returns.