Owlgorithm

a country pulled its gold out of New York. Jamie Dimon's answer came down to three armies and 400 miles.

in the clip below the head of JPMorgan explains why they got it backwards.

he doesn't name the country. somewhere in the Middle East, and in Europe too, he says. they moved it home, away from the city where JPMorgan keeps its vaults.

"you have three armies within 400 miles who can come take your gold."

for Dimon that is the whole reason the dollar stays on top. the strongest military plus the strongest economy. with a dollar you can do whatever you want, he says. elsewhere you need permission to invest.

"you're not thinking clearly about safety."

"that gold is protected by the Atlantic, the Pacific, the United States military, the rule of law."

then the warning. lose one of those two things and the dollar's reserve status slides.

so is gold safer in New York than at home - or is that exactly what a New York banker would say?

Jamie Dimon runs the biggest bank in America. in 1998 the man he worked for over 15 years called him in and told him to resign.

in the clip below he tells a room at Harvard what happened that night at home.

he was president of Citigroup. his boss was Sandy Weill. Dimon said okay and went home to tell his wife and three daughters.

"Dad, do we have to sleep on the streets?"

that was the youngest. the middle one asked if she could still go to college. the oldest, headed to Harvard Business School, asked for his cell phone, since he wouldn't need it.

"it's my net worth, not my self worth."

a year later he called Weill, not the other way around, and took him to lunch. he told him he didn't think he did the right thing for Citigroup. then he listed his own mistakes.

two years after the firing he was running Bank One. today he runs JPMorgan.

so was getting fired the worst day of his career - or the best thing that ever happened to him?

Jeff Bezos once asked Warren Buffett why nobody copies his strategy. Buffett answered in one sentence.

in the clip below Bezos tells the story on stage in Miami.

it was the America Business Forum in November 2025. Bezos had asked the obvious question. the method isn't hard to understand in principle, so why don't more people use it?

"oh, Jeff, that's easy. my approach is a get rich slowly scheme."

"people don't like those."

Bezos says the same rule works far beyond stocks. plan in seven years instead of three. put off the reward. most of your competitors won't, so thinking long term alone puts you ahead of them.

"most people can't do that."

Buffett is worth more than $100 billion today, and he made most of it after his 50th birthday.

so is getting rich slowly the smartest strategy there is - or advice that only works if you start young?

in April 2000 a Berkshire shareholder stood up and told Warren Buffett he'd made over 100% in tech funds in 1999. enough to cover everything he lost on Berkshire that year.

in the clip below he asks Buffett and Munger to put 10% of the money into "the only play in town."

"isn't there enough left in your brain power to maybe pick a few and see what's going on?"

Buffett doesn't argue about tech. they never buy anything they can't value 10 years out, he says.

then he offers the man a booth.

if he has business cards, shareholders are free to invest with him instead. Berkshire will even set him up in the exhibitor section.

Munger finishes it.

"there are worse things in life than being left behind in possession of a lot of lovely money."

the Nasdaq had peaked a few weeks earlier. over the next two years it lost almost 80 percent.

two old men protecting the money - or two dinosaurs who just got lucky with the timing?

in 1962 Warren Buffett was a 31 year old money manager almost nobody outside Omaha knew. a local TV station asked him why the market had just crashed.

in the clip below, the earliest known footage of him, he explains what caused it.

stocks had been rising fast for years, he says, while earnings and dividends went nowhere.

"corporate profits are not any better than they were five years ago but stock prices are 50% higher thereabouts."

then the mechanics. margin calls and badly secured bank loans forced stock onto the market, and the selling fed on itself.

"maybe the stock market is really correcting a previous incorrect forecast this time rather than making a new correct one."

later that same year he started buying shares of a struggling textile company called Berkshire Hathaway.

was 31 year old Buffett already reading the market better than the pros - or does it only look that way in hindsight?