Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

Griffin organises Munger's publicly stated views into a structured treatment of the Graham value investing system as Munger practises it. Munger did not write or authorise it, and the material comes from speeches, Berkshire and Wesco meeting transcripts and published interviews.

The book's organising claim is that Munger's approach reduces to four principles from Graham, which are treating a share as a claim on a business, requiring a margin of safety, treating the market as a servant rather than a guide, and being rational. Griffin then adds the elements Munger contributed, which are the multidisciplinary latticework of mental models, the psychology of misjudgment, and the shift toward paying fair prices for high-quality businesses.

The most useful chapters cover the worldly wisdom framework and the treatment of moats. Griffin sets out the categories of competitive advantage Munger looks for, including supply-side and demand-side economies of scale, brand, regulatory position and network effects, and connects them to the requirement that a business earn high returns on capital over long periods.

Griffin is a technology executive and investor rather than a professional investor, and the book is a synthesis rather than original research. Readers who have read Poor Charlie's Almanack will find most of the content familiar and better stated in Munger's own words. The advantage of Griffin's version is organisation, since the Almanack is a collection of speeches with heavy repetition. The book adds a useful appendix of Munger quotations by topic. It does not engage with any criticism of the approach or with cases where Munger was wrong.