'Chinese Warren Buffett' Li Lu Once Revealed Three Things That Changed His Life After Attending A Lecture By The Oracle Of Omaha

Li Lu, the Chinese-born investor often dubbed the "Chinese Warren Buffett," says three simple ideas Warren Buffett shared in a 1993 Columbia University lecture completely rewired how he saw markets and his own life.

Buffett's Three Ideas That Changed Everything

Li, now founder and chair of Seattle-based Himalaya Capital, recalled that Buffett told students that "a stock is not a piece of paper, it is a piece of ownership in a company," that "you need a margin of safety so if you are wrong you don't lose much," and that most market participants think short term, creating a framework for long-term investors to handle volatility.

Li Lu on the points that changed his life after he attended a Warren Buffett lecture. pic.twitter.com/7OdO6NiEGg

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He later wrote in the foreword to the Chinese edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack that Buffett's explanation of stock-market investing was "concise, logical and convincing," prompting him to spend two years studying Buffett before buying his first stock.

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Value Investing Grounded In Circle Of Competence

Those principles still anchor Li's approach three decades later. He argues that investors should behave like owners of a family business, focus first on downside risk and insist on a margin of safety, classic value-investing tenets that he says remain valid even as markets globalize and technology reshapes industries.

In an essay on value investing in China and subsequent Columbia talks, Li has stressed the importance of knowing the boundaries of one's knowledge, saying the most important trait in investing is "intellectual honesty" and recognizing that "you don't know that you don't know," a formulation that closely mirrors Buffett and Charlie Munger's "circle of competence" framework.

From Student Activist To Munger's Chosen Manager

That discipline helped turn him from a Tiananmen student leader into one of the most closely watched value investors in Asia. Li founded Himalaya Capital in 1997 and later drew the attention of Munger, who in the early 2000s entrusted about $88 million of his family's fortune to Li. This stake is estimated to have grown to roughly $400 million in 2024.

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