Greed and Fear: How the Great Salad Oil Swindle Led to One of Warren Buffett’s Greatest Investments

After a Swindler Almost Destroyed American Express, Buffett Saw the Importance of Long-Term Value Versus Short-Term Profit

Stephen Foerster
23 min readSep 12, 2022

photos of salad oil and Warren Buffett
Photos by Roberta Sorge on Unsplash and from Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/9887729@N03/4395157720/ (cropped), Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

The story of the Great Salad Oil Swindle can be traced to June 1960, when an anonymous…

Stephen Foerster

I’m a Finance prof, CFA, and author of In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio (with Andrew Lo). I write stories about investing. (I don’t give financial advice.)