I Distilled Warren Buffett’s Most Important Investing Criteria Into a One-Page Screen.

There are a lot of “Buffett investing frameworks” online. Most of them are long. Some are twenty questions. Some are entire books.

I wanted something shorter. Not because I’m lazy, but because I’ve found that long checklists have a specific failure mode: you fill them out, spend an hour doing it, and at the end you have no clearer decision than when you started. The length creates a false sense of completeness.

The question I wanted to answer was simpler: what are the two or three criteria that Buffett himself has emphasized most consistently, across decades of shareholder letters, interviews, and public statements?

What I Looked For

I spent a few sessions working through Buffett’s own words — shareholder letters from the 1980s onward, the Berkshire annual reports, the recorded interviews. I was looking for criteria he came back to repeatedly, not criteria that analysts attributed to him after the fact.

A few things came up again and again.

Consistent earnings power. Not just good current earnings, but a track record of earnings that hold across different business environments. A company that earns well in a strong economy and collapses in a weak one isn’t demonstrating real economics — it’s benefiting from conditions.

Return on equity without excessive debt. Buffett has been direct about this: a high ROE financed by heavy borrowing isn’t impressive. The question is whether the business earns strong returns on its equity without relying on leverage to manufacture those returns.

Pricing power. Can the business raise prices without losing customers? This is his moat test in its simplest form. If a company raises prices and its customers leave, the moat is an illusion.

Understandable business. He has turned down businesses he couldn’t explain in simple terms, even when the financials looked attractive. This is a discipline, not an admission of limitation.

Management that’s honest and capable. He looks for managers who treat shareholder capital as if it were their own, and who communicate clearly about failures as well as successes.

The Screen

I turned these into a one-page screen — a focused set of questions, each tied to one of these core criteria, with a clear verdict at the end.

It’s not a comprehensive research framework. It won’t replace reading annual reports. What it will do is quickly flag whether a company clears the most fundamental tests before you spend more time on it.

I use it as a first pass. If something fails on the basic criteria — inconsistent earnings, poor ROE, no pricing power, business I can’t explain simply — I don’t proceed further regardless of what the valuation says. If it passes, I move to deeper analysis.

Why Not Just Read the Shareholder Letters

You should. But the letters span decades, and the criteria are distributed across them in conversational form. The screen is a compressed reference, not a replacement.

I also found that building the screen helped me internalize the criteria in a way that reading about them didn’t. When you have to translate a principle into a specific question with a yes/no answer, you have to understand the principle clearly enough to operationalize it. That process is useful independent of the tool.

What This Won’t Tell You

It won’t tell you if the stock is cheap. That’s a separate question — what to pay for a good business versus a bad one. The screen is about whether the business is worth your time. Valuation comes after.

Run the one-page Buffett screen on any company you’re considering: [Buffett-Style Value Screen →](https://ordinarymantrying.com/tools/buffett-value-screen.html)

Is there a Buffett criterion you find consistently hardest to evaluate from the outside? The pricing power question is the one I wrestle with most.