Bloomberg播客：TSO创始人Alex Morris谈巴菲特芒格投资哲学

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news.

This week on the podcast, another extra special guest. [music] Alex Morris is the author of Buffett and Munger Unscripted. Fascinating story of how he put this book together by reading and watching 31 years of annual shareholder meetings.

[music]

uh thousands and thousands of questions, hundreds and hundreds of hours of video distilled into a fairly digestible um compendium. I thought the book was fascinating and the conversation was fascinating and I think you will too. With no further ado, my interview of [music] Alex Morris. [music] I'm Barry Rid Holtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Alex Morris.

He is the founder of TSO Investment Research Service launched in 2021 after 10 years as a buyside equities analyst. He is the author of Buffett and Munger unscripted, three decades of investment and business insights from the Birkshshire Hathaway annual shareholder meetings. Um, Amazon named it one of the best books of 2025. It's pretty beefy. I've been reading it over the past, I don't know, eight months. Um, it's about 500 pages and I have really, really been enjoying it.

In fact, I've been enjoying it so much that I reached out to Alex and said, "Let let's talk about um your research and the book." Uh he has been a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder since 2011, attended multiple annual meetings, including the 2026 meeting, the first of the Greg Ael era. Alex Morris, welcome to Bloomberg.

Thank you for having me. As I was saying to you before, Bloomberg headquarters is a

good place to be. I'm gonna drop my resume on the way out. [laughter]

So, so let before we get to your resume, let let's roll back to your um what led you to where you are today? Both a bachelor's and an MBA from University of Florida. Was finance always the career plan?

It was not. Um when I when I went to school, I really didn't have any idea what I was going to do. and my dad's a plumber, so at first he did building construction and took a couple physics classes and some other things that kind of threw me for a loop. And then I got my first internship working down in Miami

outside all day and uh fairly quickly realized, let let me find something a little easier. So I went to find

What were you doing working outside all day in Miami over the summers?

What were we doing? We were working on a high-rise that was being built and I spent most of the time running from the rain that came every single day at noon or one o'clock. [laughter] I spent a summer in college working with a crew, building decks, swinging a sledge, breaking up concrete of an old pool to put in a new pool. And nothing makes you want to buckle down and study more than physical labor. It's like, oh my god, this is really hard work.

Yes, I have tremendous respect for people who do that. It it really forces you to see the world in a different way, doesn't it?

Yes. It's very different work than uh sitting and writing a book, as as you and I both know. So after you get your bachelor's and MBA in finance, you take the CFA exam. It's a two-part exam. You spend a decade as a buyside equities analyst. What did you learn from those 10 years as on the buy side? Yeah. A lot. I kept my head down and learned as much as I could every single day. The first job I started at, I was brought in and basically told, "Hey, you're you're running all the research for equities and but also you're a secretary and you're doing the trading, you're doing everything else."

So, I got a lot of good experience there. But, it was a role where my boss really was like, just go do what you think makes sense to do, which works really well with my kind of disposition. Um, as time went on, I I learned a lot from making a lot of mistakes. That's a really good way to learn. Um, ton of reading, ton of writing online, and sharing stuff with people, getting good feedback. So yeah, just just time and effort.

That's one of the the big problems with everybody here. Here's what billionaires morning routine is like. You you seem to learn more all of us learn more from our errors and mistakes than we do from our our victories. Uh do these guys have anything to say about that?

Oh yeah. No, they they say learn all you can, particularly from other people's mistakes if you can, but that seems to be hard to avoid, at least for at least for me and most of us. So, so after 10 years on the buy side, you launch an independent research service in 2021. What made you take that leap? What was that initial couple of years like?

Yeah, I've been writing online going back to college. Um, and I continue to write online under a pseudonym science of hitting or TSO. Um, and again, I had built I had built a network over time. I really enjoyed the process of writing. I had started making some supplemental income through writing. And I looked around and I saw people like uh Ben Thompson Escery and other other people who had built a business online sharing their research if you want to call it that.

So uh when I saw Substack come around and it went from having to understand anything on the technical side to write in word copy paste which is more my speed for tech tech knowledge. Um I I decided to give it a shot. I said I'll give myself a year and doesn't work out I'll go find another traditional job but I want to see if I can do this and thankfully it's worked out. A and the science of hitting was a book by Ted Williams that Buffett loves to site for the whole strike zone analogy.

If if you Google image search this, there's a uh a strike zone and Ted Williams literally figured out every position a ball can be thrown. Just picture 12 by I don't know 20, however many it is, and figured out the percentage hitting average of where when a ball hit that spot where he was likely to hit it. Um, Buffett loves that analogy. Why did you name your research service after it?

Say partly luck. [laughter] I don't know if at the time I knew it was such a such an analogy that I like so much and that would be a be a good name to keep for the next uh you know coming up on 15 years now but it really spoke to the way I think about investing in terms of being patient and then also making big swings when you get the chance to

waiting for your pitch and when it finally comes don't be afraid. So So I'm going to assume you're not averse to a concentrated portfolio.

I am not.

How how many holdings do you typically have in any given time?

In the range of 10 to 15.

Oh really? That's that's very concentrated. So

big big swing after waiting for your pitch.

Yeah. I mean there's and there's names like you said. I've owned Bergkshire since 2011. I've owned Microsoft since 2011. There's most of the positions have been in there for a period of years. So you know it tends to be things that I've come to know quite well and have gotten familiar and comfortable with.

So this raises the obvious question. When did you first become enamor enamored of of Buffett and Mer? If you've been a shareholder since 2011. When when did they first show up on your radar?

Yeah, the late 2000s. Uh when I was in school and I stumbled across the letters and actually a buddy and I both became obsessed with it and we were at the University of Florida and we actually drove to one of the annual meetings which is

in Omaha. In Omaha.

So it's like a 10h hour drive.

No, it's it's like 20 or 25. [laughter]

It's a long way. Wow.

And we were college kids with no money. So we slept in the car I think uh one or two nights. [laughter]

Wow.

So yeah, we were uh we were very interested in it.

Wait, you you you're college kids. You have no money. Did you But you and you didn't own Birkshshire A or B.

I think I bought one share a B share to be clear just to be for the sake of getting in. Yeah. Right.

Uh it's open to anybody who who was a shareholder. Um w