One of the least understood secrets behind the success of Berkshire Hathaway and its rise from an $8 stock in the 1960’s to more than $118,000 per share today, is that Warren Buffett focuses on two value “buckets” as he put it in a recent shareholder letter. The first bucket consists of the operating businesses in which the company holds a controlling stake and the second of marketable securities such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, et cetera, most of which are held through the insurance subsidiaries such as GEICO, General Re, or National Indemnity, just to name a few.

This two-pronged approach can be utilized in your own life, allowing you to amass far more wealth with much less risk. Continue reading ...

There is a new investment service called Ticker Spy that allows you to see the investment holdings of great investors that are required to disclose their holdings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It doesn't matter if they run a mutual fund, hedge fund, private equity group, publicly traded corporation, private investment vehicle, or financial institution, if they hit certain eligibility criteria, they must file the paperwork with the government. The Ticker Spy service gets that data and puts it into a format that you can understand and search through in a few seconds.

The service is currently in Beta at the time of this writing, so there are possibly some glitches, but it looks like it would be worth keeping an eye on as a tool that could very well revolutionize money management for the small investor sitting in their home.