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In fact, Graham-Newman was forming a new partnership, and some of the investors had given the firm GEICO shares to fund money into the partnership. So in effect, it was they who were selling, not Graham-Newman. Warren didn’t know that.5 But when it came to GEICO, he didn’t care who was selling. It did not occur to him to ask anyone at the firm why they were selling. He was unshakeably certain of his own opinion. Nor did he hide that fact.

“I was sort of a wise guy, with this graduate degree, among people who hadn’t gone to college. One time an insurance agent, Ralph Campbell, came in to see Mr. Falk and said, ‘What’s this kid doing going around promoting this company?’ GEICO was a company that didn’t use insurance agents. And I said, like a wise guy, ‘Mr. Campbell, you better buy this stock for unemployment insurance.’”

The full import of Dale Carnegie’s first rule, don’t criticize, hadn’t sunk in. Warren used what would later become the trademark Buffett wit to show that he knew more than everybody else, but why would anyone have been willing to believe that of a twenty-one-year-old? And yet he did. It must have stunned people at Buffett-Falk to watch him, morning through night, ripping through the manuals, adding to his file cabinets of knowledge.

“I went through the Moody’s Manuals page by page. Ten thousand pages in the Moody’s Industrial, Transportation, Banks and Finance Manuals—twice. I actually looked at every business—although I didn’t look very hard at some.”

Even though endlessly fascinated by the game of finding stocks, Warren wanted to be more than an investor, more than a salesman. He wanted to be a teacher, to emulate Ben Graham. He signed up to teach a night course at the University of Omaha.

At first he partnered with his stockbroker friend Bob Soener, who taught the first four weeks of “Profitable Investing in Stocks.” While Soener explained to the class basics such as how to read the Wall Street Journal, Warren stood in the hallway listening for any good investment ideas. Then he took over for the next six weeks.6 Eventually he taught the whole course and gave it the more cautious name of “Sound Investing in Stocks.” In front of his classroom, he lit up, pacing the floor as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough, even though the students had to struggle not to drown in the flood of information he threw at them. But despite his deep vein of knowledge, he never promised the class they would get rich or that taking his class would give them any particular result. Nor did he brag about his own success at investing.

His students ranged from stock-market professionals to people who had no head for business—housewives, doctors, retirees. They symbolized a subtle shift: Long-absent investors were starting to come back for the first time since the 1920s—part of why Graham thought the market was overvalued. Warren adapted his teaching to the range of their knowledge and skills. He modeled his teaching style after Graham’s, using the “Company A, Company B” method and some of his mentor’s other little teaching tricks. He handed out grades with the strictest fairness. His aunt Alice took the course and sat in the classroom gazing at him with adoring eyes.7 He gave her a C.

People were always throwing out the names of stocks, asking him whether to buy or sell. He could speak from memory for five or even ten minutes about any stock they named: its financial data, price/earnings ratio, the volume of shares that traded—and from all appearances, he could do this for hundreds of stocks, as if he were quoting baseball statistics.8 Sometimes a woman in the front row would say, “My late mother gave me ABC stock, and now it’s up a little bit. What should I do?” Then he would say, “Well, I think I would sell that, and maybe buy…,” giving three or four options such as GEICO or one of a few stocks about which he was entirely confident (and already owned).9 The students remarked on his unusual conservatism when responding to their questions about how