저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
찰리 멍거가 1977년 Belridge Oil 300주를 저평가로 매수했으나 추가 1,500주를 거절한 것을 최대 실수로 회고. 이 회사는 2년 뒤 Shell에 약 35억 달러에 인수되어 약 30배 상승. 화자는 버핏의 Moody's 매뉴얼·Japan Company Handbook 방식의 저평가 기업 발굴과 '사람은 5세에 성격이 굳어진다'는 주장을 덧붙이며, 좋은 투자 기회는 늘 존재하고 얼마나 열심히 찾느냐의 문제라고 강조.
다듬은 글
Charlie Munger says that the greatest investing mistake mistake of his life was a friendly broker called him in '77, 1977, and offered him 300 shares of an obscure pink sheets company called Belridge Oil, which had a very large oil field in Bakersfield, California. And Charlie was familiar with this company.
It was very thinly traded. There wasn't much disclosure, but he knew that at the price he was being offered those shares at that time, I think the market cap of the company was something like $120 million or something. And the dividend yield was like 15%. It was very cheap. And Charlie said that without even doing much of an analysis, you knew that you were buying it for 1/5 or 1/10 or less of what the actual underlying assets were worth.
And it was quite a remarkable field, and they owned the land. It wasn't a lease. And they owned everything under the underground. And so he bought the 300 shares at $115 a share that were offered. And then 2 days later the broker called him back and offered him another 1,500 shares of Belridge Oil again at the same price.
This time Charlie didn't have the cash handy, and he would have had to sell something to buy Belridge. And he should have sold because whatever else he owned in his portfolio was not a 20 cent dollar or something. It was not that cheap. But it required him to sell something and then raise the money and then buy it.
He called the broker back and declined. And he said that so 2 years later this 100 million market cap company was bought by Shell Oil for 3 and 1/2 billion. And it was like 30x or something. 120 million or something. So it was a 30x in 2 years. And at that time in '79, Berkshire Hathaway was trading at about $300 a share or something.
Which is now approaching half a million dollars a share. So, if you think about Charlie's 30 odd thousand he put in, it became a million dollars in two years. And then from it was another probably more than a thousand X more 1,500 or 2,000 X from there was a journey from Berkshire. So, that million became something like a billion and a half today.
So, the 30,000 in effect became 1 and a half billion 35,000. The 1,500 shares that he took a pass on would be worth something like 7 and a half billion today. Which I think exceeds his total net worth today. And so now so Bell this is the kind of like a I would say or what would I call it? I would say it's the cross connect where you take a first the first company and and you get a 30 X.
And then you take the second company and in his case he got a 1,500 X. So, you end up with 45,000 X some crazy number like that. Buffett actually went through in the 1950s he went through something known as the Moody's manual which listed all these companies there were four companies on a page very thin pages big thick big thick books and I bought a couple of Moody's manual on eBay a few years back just for nostalgia sake.
And but he would go through each company and there were thousands of companies. And they just had basic balance sheet and income statement data. And he ran some classes with MBA students a few years back. And he would find a company where the earnings were 15 million dollars a year and the market cap was 25 million things like that and just things that made no sense.
And when he found these things that made no sense then he would dig into those. And he did really well. You know who we are as humans at the age of five and who we are at the age of 95. There is no change. Basically, our personality template, our traits, our likes and dislikes, who we are is pretty much hard-coded at the age of five.
And between your genetics and your experiences in the first five years of life, that die is cast. And after that, there's not going to be any change. Buffett, when he was a young teenager in Omaha, he used to go to the local racetrack, Aksarben, which is Nebraska spelled backwards. And what he'd do is after the all the races had been run, he'd collect all the tickets that people had discarded and thrown on the ground.
And he'd collect them all, he'd bring them home, and he'd go through each one carefully to see if some drunk guy had thrown away a winning ticket. And lo and behold, he would actually find a few tickets which actually were winners, but people had thrown them away. And then, because he was underage, he couldn't go to the window to cash it.
So, he would send his Aunt Alice with these tickets to cash them in. And so, the kid who was doing that at the age of 12 was the same kid who at the age of 26 or something was thumbing through the Moody's manual in 1956 or '57. And one time, my friend Guy Spier and I visited his office in in Omaha. I think this must have been like 2000 10 or 2011.
We used to go have lunch once a year with Buffett's assistant, Debbie Bosanek. And we paid a good amount of money to have lunch with Buffett, but quite frankly, the lunches with Debbie were a lot more fun. [clears throat] And I learned a lot from Debbie. And uh one one year, I think 2010 or 2011 or thereabouts, we had gone to have lunch with Debbie and when I went to the 14th floor of Kiewit Plaza with Guy Spier, Warren was standing right at the elevator like to receive us.
He didn't really have a We didn't have an appointment with him or anything and he says to us, "Would you like a tour of headquarters?" I said, "Warren, if you want to hang out with a couple of yo-yos, perfectly fine with us. You've got nothing to do twiddling your thumbs." And so, he gave us a great tour of the headquarters showing us all the momentos and different things and then he took us to his office, his private office.
And there I saw on his desk the Japan Company Handbook, which is basically just like the Moody's manual. It's like Value Line for Japan. And they have two companies on one page, list every Japanese company. And he was thumbing through it. Now, Berkshire's managing tens or hundreds of billions at that point.
And you can't be playing these Mickey Mouse games with the carbon tickets and stuff. So, I had actually been going through the Moody's manual just coincidentally and the Japan Company Handbook just coincidentally before I actually went to the office. So, I I took his copy of the Japan Company Handbook and I said, "Warren, I'm going to like dog-ear some pages that I found interesting that you might find interesting." Now, I don't know if whether he was horrified that I was taking his Japan Company Handbook and mutilating it, but I just went ahead and did that.
And and a lot of the companies that I thought were these super cheap companies statistically were towards the back of the book. He says, "Yeah, what I've found is the good stuff is always at the back." And so, the kid at 12, the kid at 26, the kid at 81 or 82, it was the same kid. No change. No change at all because and the kid today is the same, too.
So, Munger would say when you say, "Oh, this is so much work and this and that." Munger's answer would be, "Why should we It be easy to get rich? Why should it be so easy for you to find the 3 cent dollar bill. But, what I am here to tell you is the 3 cent or 2 cent or 1 cent dollar bill is sitting there.
It's there today. It's there tomorrow. It's there 5 years from now. The only question is how determined are you to find it? And how many pages are you willing to flip? How many rocks are you willing to turn over?
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