Why there will never be another Warren Buffett

There's only one Warren Buffett, and there will never be another.

- Jason Zweig

On May 3, Buffett announced that he will step down as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate he has built into one of the most successful investments in history.

There are three reasons why he has no equal and never will: the person, the period and the package.

Let's start with the person. Buffett is not only brilliant, but he has also spent nearly his entire long lifetime obsessed with the stock market. Especially in his early years as an investor, his unparalleled success depended on an unbearable sacrifice: forgoing a normal social and family life.

A later writer called the great 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza "the god-intoxicated man." Buffett is the stock-intoxicated man.

Ever since 1942, when he bought his first stock at age 11, he has devoured information about companies, reading corporate reports the way most people listen to music.

As a young investment manager, Buffett would wander through his house with his nose in a corporate annual report, practically bumping into the furniture, oblivious to the comings and goings of family and friends. While his kids played at an amusement park, he would sit on a bench and read financial statements. Buffett was there physically, but mentally and emotionally he was in a world of his own, fixated on tax-loss carryforwards and amortization schedules.

Imagine being that obsessed. Imagine enjoying it.

Now imagine enjoying it almost every waking moment ever since Harry Truman was in the White House. That's how unusual Buffett is.

Expertise is rooted in pattern recognition, and Buffett has seen every conceivable pattern. Given what I know about his work habits, I estimate conservatively, I believe that Buffett has read more than 100,000 financial statements in his more-than-seven-decade career.