Intelligent Investment Today - The Warren Buffett Way
Oct 13, 2026 · 13 min · 8 segments
What can a wonderfully cynical book from 1940 teach us about investing today? In this episode of *Intelligent Investment Today*, we explore Fred Schwed Jr.'s classic *Where Are the Customers'…
David CoombsHost
What makes Where Are The Customers Yachts so enjoyable is that Sweat isn't writing a dry financial textbook.
The jargon, the predictions, the theories, the confidence, the endless advice, and the rather remarkable belief that somewhere out there is a person who actually knows what's going to happen next.
Schwed looks at all of this and essentially asks, are we sure these people know what they're doing? One of Schwed's observations is that the stock market creates an enormous temptation to believe that somebody, somewhere, must know the answer.
Why did the market rise? Why did it fall? What will happen next? Should we buy? Should we sell? What will interest rates do? What will the economy do? What will oil do? And apparently there's an expert for every possible answer.
This is where Schwed's book becomes particularly relevant to the value investor.
Because one of the great attractions of value investing is that it doesn't require you to know everything.
He was trying to construct a sensible way of making decisions in a world where the future is unknowable.
question is not what will happen it is what am i buying what is it worth and what am i paying for it and once you understand that it changes the whole game and this is perhaps where the modern investor can learn something from swed that goes beyond simply laughing at wall street We often assume that the more information we have, the better our decisions will become.
What makes Where Are The Customers Yachts so enjoyable is that Sweat isn't writing a dry financial textbook.
The jargon, the predictions, the theories, the confidence, the endless advice, and the rather remarkable belief that somewhere out there is a person who actually knows what's going to happen next.
Schwed looks at all of this and essentially asks, are we sure these people know what they're doing? One of Schwed's observations is that the stock market creates an enormous temptation to believe that somebody, somewhere, must know the answer.
Why did the market rise? Why did it fall? What will happen next? Should we buy? Should we sell? What will interest rates do? What will the economy do? What will oil do? And apparently there's an expert for every possible answer.
This is where Schwed's book becomes particularly relevant to the value investor.
Because one of the great attractions of value investing is that it doesn't require you to know everything.
He was trying to construct a sensible way of making decisions in a world where the future is unknowable.
question is not what will happen it is what am i buying what is it worth and what am i paying for it and once you understand that it changes the whole game and this is perhaps where the modern investor can learn something from swed that goes beyond simply laughing at wall street We often assume that the more information we have, the better our decisions will become.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
