Chandler Properties Blog

A Shameless Plug
Ok, it’s not exactly getting published, but CNBC did ask for readers to send in their opinion about whether we thought Buffett had lost his touch.  I sent in a couple lines and a photo of Dad, Warren, Charlie, and me.  Out of 2,000 submissions, about 20 or 30 got published in the “Warren Buffett Watch” blog on CNBC.  Check out my picture and comments in the attached link.  Warning the pictures of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are cardboard cutouts that were placed in the convention hall of last year’s Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder meeting.  I have yet to meet Buffett in person.  Maybe one day?

The Link to the CNBC Article
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28342496/page/3/

A Little History
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a huge Buffett fan.  Buffett has been investing the same way for the last 50 years.  He buys companies that have an intrinsic value that is greater than the current market value.  He’s recently been on a buying spree and even posted an article in the New York Times entitled, “Buy American. I Am.” In the article he talks about why he is bullish on the long-term health of the American economy.  He also says, now is a great time to buy American companies since they the stock market has declined and great companies are selling at cheap prices.   This is classic Buffett; being fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

A couple of years ago, I saw a billboard w/ Donald Trump promoting the Learning Annex in Atlanta, Georgia.  This was during the height of the Apprentice and I thought it would be a good way to see Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki in person. 

For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Learning Annex, it is a well organized program that includes many of the top “self help” gurus.  They promote everything from real estate investing to “How to be a Better Person” seminars.  The programs are high energy level and push strongly toward selling products.  The prices for the products generally range from $500 to $5,000.

After my dad and I purchased our tickets separately for about $150 a piece, we were each sent a package with a couple extra tickets enclosed.  I thought this was a little unusual since they had just charged us $300 for two tickets, that they would accidentally enclose an extra $600 of tickets.  What was really a coincidence was that my dad got extra tickets when his package arrived the next day.  A day or two later we each got a pre-recorded phone call from the Learning Annex saying they had accidentally included the tickets, but since it was an honest mistake we could go ahead and bring a couple friends for free.  (This is when I started to get a feeling this wasn’t going to a learning seminar, but a “hold onto your wallet” marketing free for all.) 

Anyway, dad and I still wanted to see Trump so we started looking through the itinerary to determine what time on the weekend he would be speaking.  We live two hours from Atlanta and were going to drive down that day and see him speak and not go to both days of the seminar.  My dad called the Learning Annex to get the time and day of his speech.  This is when the “Bologna” got real good.  They informed us due to security reasons, they could not disclose when the main speakers would be speaking over the weekend.  Not even, which day. WTF!  These guys have some serious brass to use that line. Can you imagine if you bought tickets to Game 7 of the World Series and they would only narrow down the time of the game to a 48 hour time period in the fall.  As a consolation, there will be plenty of minor league games playing that weekend for you to watch while you are waiting.  People would storm the Major League baseball office in protest.

My opinion as to why they did this was to make people show up and sit through all the extra high pressure sales gurus.  I would guess the Learning Annex gets some sort of commission off sales and they knew no one would want to listen a “no name” sale his product. 

After this incident, we decided this was probably not a learning event, but a marketing event and therefore did not go the actual event.  I am interested if anyone has been to these events and had a similar experience.  If you have a similar story, feel free to post a comment.