THEY call him the Omaha Oracle. At 77, Warren Buffett is the world’s greatest stock market investor. While giant financial institutions have trembled, his homespun investment strategy has made him $10billion profit from the credit crunch.

Even Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, said recently that the person that he learned most from in the world was fellow-billionaire Buffett. "I put him top of the list," said Gates, adding that the top lesson from Buffett was the importance of integrity.
In a year that has proved catastrophic for Wall Street, the unassuming Buffett has increased his fortune to $62billion to overtake Bill Gates as the richest individual on the planet.

Shares in his insurance-based empire soared 29 per cent last year as profits rose 20 per cent to $13.2billion.

Born the son of a stockbroker and congressman in Omaha, Nebraska, the young Buffett earned his first pocket money delivering newspapers. Today, his links with newspapers include owning a large block of shares in the Washington Post.

What is the secret of his phenomenal success?

Buffett has always preached a down-to-earth investment philosophy that is both timeless and in keeping with the times. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, invests in things he can understand.

There is value in Coca-Cola because it has existed for more than 100 years and is known by everyone on the planet. He invested in chewing gum giant Wrigley recently for similar reasons. He scorned tech stocks during the millennial boom, and warned that credit derivatives were "weapons of mass destruction" as the debt-market bubble was inflating.

About 31,000 people packed into Berkshire Hathaway’s recent annual meeting. They came from China, India, Australia, Germany and Britain, as well as all part of the U.S, to listen and learn from the Omaha Oracle.

"The big investment banks and large commercial banks have got almost too big to manage effectively," Buffett said, querying why so many Wall Street bosses relied on risk management committees to warn of the dangers of investment or business strategies when “their own DNA should be programmed against risk.” He added: “They would meet weekly in their risk committees and all the statistics would be printed in nice columns, but they didn't have the faintest idea what risks were involved."

That is not how Warren Buffett operates. And if someone had had the foresight to invest $10,000 in one of his original partnerships back in 1956, and later reinvested the proceeds in Berkshire Hathaway, that person would today be worth $200million.

And that’s after taxes and expenses...