An Analysis Of Warren Buffett’s Very Early Investments: Interview With Brett Gardner

The 2025 Sohn London conference is over, but we caught up with some of the most exciting managers who spoke at this year’s conference. Brett Gardner is an analyst at Discerene Group LP, a private investment partnership based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Discerene Group is a global value fund that invests in businesses protected by either structural barriers to entry or hard assets when they are out of favor, at prices offering significant margins of safety.

In an interview with Hedge Fund Alpha, Gardner shared details on his book, Buffett’s Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns (Harriman House: November 2024)

The early investments

The book includes 10 case studies about Warren Buffett’s early career, spanning the 1950s and 1960s. The first half of the book covers the years he was a college student at Columbia, a stockbroker at his father’s firm, and then the period when he worked for Benjamin Graham at Graham-Newman.

“He was 20 to 25, when he made these investments,” Gardner explained. “I think he starts learning these interesting lessons on the value of activism and the value of capital allocation, and he used these lessons and applied them to the partnership, which is the second half of the book. And during the partnership, he compounded capital at 30% over about 13 years. It's the start of the best professional investment track record ever.”

Also see: Brett Gardner (correctly) predicts Berkshire Hathaway's next purchase

The Partnership investments

The second half of the book covers the partnership investments, including an arbitrage opportunity, which Buffett described as a workout. Gardner said these studies included some cheap stocks and very interesting businesses like Walt Disney and American Express.

“We kind of see Buffett start to evolve as an investor,” Gardner said. “So very early in his career, he was pretty much a balance sheet investor where he was just buying stocks below the asset value, typically below net current asset value. And then in the second half of his career, he starts really focusing on the quality of the business, how the business can generate cash flows and generate positive returns on invested capital over time. And you start to see him kind of dipping his toe in the water into this field in the ‘60s with Disney and Amex. And then he goes full bore in the ‘70s with The Washington Post and some other investments.”

Background on Brett Gardner

Born on Long Island in New York, Gardner’s family moved to Florida when he was 13. He returned to New York for college, attending St. John’s University in Queens.

This period was very formative for Gardner, as he was graduating high school and entering college in the middle of a financial crisis. He observed how investors became over-levered and misvalued assets, which made him want to enter the investment field. As a junior and senior in high school, Gardner read up on Buffett and took in The Intelligent Investor, Security Analysis, and Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. Eventually, he read Alice Schroeder's The Snowball.

“It's kind of interesting reading about value investing and then seeing what was going on in the world around me,” Gardner said. “And it made me not want to be in a position where I had to struggle with my finances. And it was really the catalyst to get me into the investing business.”

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Gardner’s first stock: Citigroup

Gardner quickly learned some lessons the hard way, picking up shares in Citigroup in 2008 “for the worst reason.”