Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger read constantly, but they didn’t read the same things. Buffett spent his days buried in annual reports, corporate histories, and finance books while Munger wandered into biology, physics, and the lives of great scientists.
Their sixty-year partnership still produced a short list of books both men endorsed again and again. Here are seven titles that each of them praised.
1. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
Buffett called this “By far the best book on investing ever written.“ He has pointed to Chapter 8, which introduces the Mr. Market parable, and Chapter 20, which explains the margin of safety, as the two ideas on which his entire career rests.
Graham teaches readers to see a stock as a piece of a real business. Once you accept that, a falling price stops being a verdict on your judgment and starts looking like a sale.
Munger pushed Buffett to move past Graham’s habit of buying companies that were statistically cheap, regardless of quality. However, Munger continued to tell audiences for decades that Graham’s framework was where every serious investor should start, as it teaches how to value a company correctly based on fundamentals.
2. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip A. Fisher
Buffett once described his own approach by saying, “I’m 15% Fisher and 85% Benjamin Graham.” That small percentage understates the influence, since Fisher’s ideas drove the second half of Buffett’s career.
Fisher argued that real money comes from buying excellent companies with long growth runways and holding them for years. His scuttlebutt method sends the investor out to talk with customers, suppliers, and former employees until a true picture of the business emerges.
That kind of qualitative digging suited Munger perfectly, and he put the book on his short list of required investing reads. Fisher’s fingerprints are all over Berkshire’s purchases of See’s Candies and Coca-Cola, where quality justified paying up.
3. The Outsiders by William N. Thorndike Jr.
In his 2012 shareholder letter, Buffett described this as “an outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation.” Sales jumped almost overnight.
Thorndike profiles eight unconventional chief executives, including Henry Singleton of Teledyne and Katharine Graham of The Washington Post. Each one ignored Wall Street fashion, bought back stock when it was cheap, and measured success by long-term value per share rather than empire size.
Munger admired the book for the same reason. He spent his whole career arguing that capital allocation is the most important skill in corporate management and the one business schools teach least, and Thorndike’s case studies prove the point with numbers.
4. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
Munger said, “The elementary part of psychology, the psychology of misjudgment, as I call it, is a terribly important thing to learn.” Cialdini’s book became his favorite manual on the subject. He was so grateful that he sent Cialdini a share of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock as a thank-you gift.
The book identifies the levers of human persuasion, including reciprocity, social proof, authority, and scarcity. A salesman working a car lot uses these tools on you every day, and so does a stock promoter working a crowd.
Buffett recommended the book to Berkshire shareholders alongside his partner. Both men treated the knowledge as a psychological defense, since an investor who can’t spot manipulation will eventually pay for the lesson in capital losses.
5. Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin
Munger built his thinking on ideas drawn from many fields, telling students, “You’ve got to have models in your head.” Bevelin’s book is the fullest synthesis of that approach anyone has put on paper.
The book draws on Charles Darwin, physics, mathematics, and psychology to explain why smart people make dumb mistakes. Bevelin then walks through the countermeasures, from checklists to inversion to thinking hard about incentives before trusting anyone’s advice.
Both Buffett and Munger recommended Bevelin’s work at Berkshire’s annual meetings. The book earned a spot on the meeting’s bookseller tables year after year, which was about the strongest endorsement available in Omaha.
6. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Munger explained his approach to learning this way: “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out.” Few thinkers meet that bar like Adam Smith, whose 1776 work laid out the workings of modern capitalism.
Smith showed how specialization and trade create prosperity without anyone directing the process from above. His invisible hand remains the clearest explanation of how markets coordinate millions of independent decisions, and his chapters on incentives read like a warning label for every business arrangement you’ll ever enter.
Buffett pointed to Smith as the starting point for anyone who wants to understand how capitalism actually works. Munger cited him repeatedly as one of history’s great minds, a thinker whose core principles have held up for two and a half centuries.
7. Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? by Fred Schwed Jr.
Buffett praised this 1940 classic in his 2006 shareholder letter as “the funniest book ever written about investing,” adding that it “lightly delivers many truly important messages on the subject.”
The title comes from an old story about a visitor admiring the yachts owned by Wall Street’s bankers and brokers. When he asks where the customers’ yachts are, the answer is that there aren’t any. Fees flow to the industry whether clients win or lose.
Munger shared Schwed’s low opinion of financial middlemen and backed the recommendation for years. The book’s central joke shaped Berkshire’s lifelong hostility to advisory fees, market forecasts, and anyone selling certainty for a commission.
Conclusion
Munger once observed, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time, none, zero.” These seven books cover value investing, business quality, capital allocation, psychology, and market history, which is a fair map of how he and Buffett actually thought.
Reading them won’t hand you Buffett’s experience or Munger’s judgment. It will hand you the same raw material both men started with, and that’s more than most investors ever bother to pick up.