[Ads-l] Request Charlie Munger quotation in 1989 Annual Report of Wesco

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Many thanks to Stephen Goranson and another list member for searching
the ProQuest Historical Annual Reports database. It appears that the
ProQuest database only has the Wesco reports from 1999–2004.

Happily, I have now found a copy of Charlie Munger's letter to Wesco
shareholders for 1989. The letter was dated March 5, 1990. It
discussed events from the previous year. Munger's letter does contain
the target quotation.

The text of the online PDF containing Munger's letter was not
searchable. The PDF had no OCR (optical character recognition) layer.
Hence, the text did not appear in the Google Search engine index. That
is why it was hard for me to find.

If you are a researcher and desire additional details, please contact
me off-list.
Garson

On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 3:25 PM Stephen Goranson
<00001dd3d6fc15d3-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> I did not find the quote in ProQuest Historical Annual Reports searches, in
> various tries, but may have missed it.
> Though unfamiliar territory for me, I would not have guessed that it sounds
> like a passage from a corporate report.
> sg
>
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 2:39 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <
> 00001aa1be50b751-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > Famous U.S. investor Charlie Munger wrote about strategies for
> > achieving wealth. The key was not concocting brilliant strategies;
> > instead, the successful long-term investor triumphed by being
> > "consistently not stupid".
> >
> > [Begin quotation]
> > It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have
> > gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be
> > very intelligent.
> > [End quotation]
> >
> > Apparently, the statement from Munger appeared in the Wesco Financial
> > Corporation Annual Report of 1989, but I have not been able to access
> > this document. This report might be in the ProQuest Historical Annual
> > Reports database. If someone can find and share an instance of this
> > quotation before 1994 that would be very helpful.
> >
> > Here are details for the earliest match I could find in 1994:
> >
> > [ref] 1994 Copyright, Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett
> > by Andrew Kilpatrick, Chapter 35: Wesco: "A tourist-class ticket",
> > Quote Page 228, AKPE, Birmingham, Alabama. (Verified with scans)
> > [/ref]
> >
> > [Begin excerpt]
> > Munger also makes the following point: "Wesco continues to try more to
> > profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the
> > esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us
> > have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying
> > to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying,
> > 'It's the strong swimmers who drown.'"
> > [End excerpt]
> >
> > Thanks for any help you can provide
> > Garson O'Toole
> > QuoteInvestigator.com
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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