Warren Buffett ‘Blew It’: What We Learned This Week

1) Buffett’s Costly Mistake
People flock to Omaha, Neb., for Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder meeting in search of ideas. The big lesson this year? Buffett seems frustrated. The Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chief executive officer spoke at length about his failure to pounce on opportunities in tech stocks, the challenge of finding big deals, and his frustration with a cash pile that’s approaching $100 billion, Noah Buhayar and Katherine Chiglinsky wrote. With thousands watching live (and many more streaming video online), Buffett and Vice Chairman Charles Munger took questions for five hours. Buffett said that, in hindsight, he could have been quicker to understand Google—its founders consulted him around the time they were taking the company public. “I had plenty of ways to ask questions, or anything of the sort, and educate myself,” Buffett said. “But I blew it.”

2) Think Before You Send That Email
The old warning still applies: Never put in an email something you wouldn’t want to see on the internet. A five-word message to a rival banker was enough to cost former Citigroup Inc. trader David Madaras his job, Patrick Gower reported. Citigroup’s Timothy Gately disclosed the message on the first day of Madaras’s employment lawsuit in London Tuesday. The executive said the April 2011 chat constituted gross misconduct, and firing Madaras was the only appropriate sanction. “he’s a seller/fking a,” Madaras wrote to a rival trader who had just disclosed the identity of a client, Gately said in a filing prepared ahead of the hearing. That chatroom message “validated an external trader’s disclosure of a client name,” Gately said in the filing. The lawsuit comes as the bank seeks to appease regulators probing a foreign-exchange scandal engulfing the industry.