저자: Iwaa Management PLT · 외국인
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Berikut ini adalah versi yang sudah dirapikan dari transkrip otomatis tersebut. Catatan: transkrip asli berbahasa Inggris, bukan Indonesia, jadi saya menyusunnya dalam bahasa Inggris sesuai bahasa asalnya, dengan koreksi kesalahan pengenalan suara dan tanda baca.
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He is the chairman, CEO, and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway. He is considered one of the world's most successful investors. If you want to learn about investment strategy, you want to learn from Warren Buffett. Mentor me, Warren.
When you look at the future, there is also the argument that goes with this philosophy today: get out of cash and get into assets, because we don't know what's going to happen to the dollar. Well, cash has always been a bad investment. People said cash is king a year ago. That's crazy. Cash wasn't producing anything, and it was sure to go down in value over time.
I know you always want to be sure you have enough. You want to be sure it's around. But you don't need to have an excess. There will always be enough cash around. But any time we have surplus cash around, I'm unhappy. I would much rather have good businesses than cash. Over the last year we found opportunities we're about to deploy. We came in with something over 40 billion, and we've got about 20 billion now, and we've had some earnings, so we've put a lot of cash to work, and I like that. No, I'd much rather own a good business than have cash.
And it is a hedge against the dollar. Well, you can say all assets are a hedge against the dollar, but all you know is that the dollar is going to be worth less 10, 20, 30 years from now. I say worth less, not worthless. Almost every currency will be worth less. The question is how much it depreciates in value. But cash is not a place to be, and why is that? Well, it's always going to be worth less, because we'll print more of them in relation to the amount of goods that are moving. If we dropped a million dollars of cash into every household in the United States today, everybody would feel very good, except the people who invested in things denominated in dollars. Yes, exactly. There will be no tendency toward deflation in this country over time. It's virtually an inflation story. Inflation is absolutely the important thing.
The important thing is to decide which ones you can come to an intelligent decision on, and which ones are beyond your capacity to evaluate. You don't have to be right about thousands and thousands of companies. You only have to be right about a couple.
I met Bill Gates on July 5, 1991. We arrived in Seattle, and Bill said, "You've got to have a computer." I said, "Why?" He said, "You can do your income tax on it." I said, "I don't have any income. Berkshire doesn't pay a dividend." He said, "Well, you can keep track of your portfolio." I said, "I only have one stock." He said it's going to change everything, and I said, "Well, will it change whether people chew gum?" He said, "Well, probably not." I said, "Well, we'll change what kind of gum they chew." I said, "Well then, I'll stick to chewing gum, and you stick to computers."
I don't have to understand all kinds of businesses. There are all kinds of businesses I don't understand, but there are thousands of opportunities. I did understand Bank of America, and I'll be able to do that. I'm able to understand some given percentage.
Ted Williams wrote a book called *The Science of Hitting*. In it, he has a diagram showing him at the plate, with the strike zone divided into 77 squares, each the size of a baseball. He says if he only swings at pitches in his "sweet zone," which he shows there, his batting average would be .400. If he had to swing at low, outside pitches that are still in the strike zone, his average would be .230. He said the most important thing in hitting is waiting for the right pitch.
Now, he was at a disadvantage, because if the count was 0-and-2 or 1-and-2, and so on, even if the ball was down where he was only going to hit .230, he had to swing at it. In investing, there are no called strikes. People can throw Microsoft at you, or any stock, General Motors, and I don't have to swing. Nobody's going to call me out on strikes. I only get a strike call if I swing at a pitch and miss. So I can wait there and look at thousands of companies day after day, and only when I see something I understand, and I like the price it's selling at, do I swing. If I hit it, fine. If I miss, it's a strike. But it's an enormously advantageous game, and it's a terrible mistake to think you have to have an opinion on everything. You only have to have an opinion on a few things.
In fact, I've told students that when they got out of school, if they got a punch card with 20 punches on it, and that was all the investment decisions they were allowed to make in their entire life, they would get very rich, because they would think very hard about each one. You don't need 20 right decisions to get very rich. Four or five will probably do it over time. So I don't worry too much about the things I don't understand.
If you understand some of the businesses that are coming along and can spot the winners, that's good. Take Amazon, for example. It's a tremendous accomplishment, what Jeff Bezos has done. I tip my hat to him. He's a wonderful businessman, and a good guy too. But could I have anticipated that he would be the success, and ten others wouldn't be? I'm not good enough to do that. Fortunately, I don't have to. I don't have to form an opinion on Amazon. I did form an opinion on Bank of America, and I formed an opinion on Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola has been around since 1886. There are 1.8 billion eight-ounce servings of Coca-Cola products sold every day. Now, if you take one penny and get one penny extra per serving, that's 18 million dollars a day. 18 million times 365 is 6.57 billion dollars annually, from one penny. Do you think Coca-Cola is worth a penny more than it was? I think so, and I have about 127 years of history that would indicate it. Those are the kinds of decisions I like to make.
You may have an entirely different field of expertise than I would have, and probably one much more up to date with the kinds of businesses we're seeing now. You can get very rich if you just understand the feel of them and understand their future. The real test of whether you'd like something as an investment is whether you would be happy if it never got quoted again, judged only by what the asset did for you.
I would say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side. For that same cube of gold, at today's market prices, it would be worth about seven trillion dollars. That's probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States. So you can choose between owning a third of all the stocks in the United States, or owning that little block of gold, which can't do anything but sit there and shine and make you feel like King Croesus or something of the sort.
For seven trillion dollars, there are roughly a billion farm acres in the United States. They're valued at about two and a half trillion dollars. That's about half the farmland of the continental United States. You could own all the farmland in the United States: about seven ExxonMobils, plus a trillion dollars of walking-around money. If you offered me the choice between looking at a 67-foot cube of gold all day, occasionally fondling it, and it doing nothing for me but standing there looking pretty, versus owning all the farmland of the country, everything from cotton to corn to soybeans, plus seven ExxonMobils, and a trillion dollars of walking-around money, they may call me crazy, but I'll take the farm, plus the ExxonMobils.
What's your advice about that? You can't constantly sit there and wait and say, "Oh, it's going to go higher, it's going to go higher." We don't even think about that. What we think about is how much it's selling for, and how much we think it's worth. When we bought it, at $35 billion effectively, I felt the company was probably worth at least a hundred billion.
How did it come to your attention? How do you find stuff like PetroChina? I sit in my office and read an annual report, which fortunately was in English, and it described a very good company. It told about the oil reserves, the refining, the chemicals, everything else. I sat there and read it, and I thought to myself, this company is worth about a hundred billion. I didn't look at the price first. I looked at the business first and tried to figure out what it was worth, because if I look at the price first, I'll be influenced by that. So I look at the company first, I try to value it, then I look at the price. If the price is way less than what I've just valued it at, I'm going to buy it.
How do you value it? Well, that's the trick, but it's essentially what I would pay for the whole business if I could buy it.
How do you know when to throw in the towel on an investment or a business? Well, you know, you usually do it too late. I got into the textile business by accident in 1965, and I threw in the towel about twenty years later, which was about twenty years too late. There's a great tendency to want to hold on and justify old decisions. It's a human trait.
When you really know you've got a bad business is when you have a good manager and you're still getting bad results. When you're getting bad results with a bad manager, you still have to examine whether you could get better results with a better manager. Usually you can't. I've said in the past that when a management with a reputation for excellence encounters a business with a reputation for bad economics, it's the reputation of the business that remains intact. I've proved that many times. There are businesses that are just plain tough. There may be too many competitors, but there are reasons they don't drop out.
We started out in textiles, and we made over half the linings for men's suits in the country. We went through World War Two, got awards, and Sears Roebuck named us their supplier of the year, and all of that sort of thing. Then we'd say we'd like to raise the price of these linings by a quarter of a cent a yard, and the service account would say, "Well, in your mind there are ten other guys who'll sell it to us at the old price." Nobody ever went into a Sears store and said, "I'd like a blue serge suit with a half-and-half lining." It didn't exist. We had no connection to the consumer. There are lots of lousy businesses, and there are lots of wonderful businesses, and my job over the years has been to figure out which is which. I've made plenty of mistakes.
I bought a company called Dexter Shoe in the early '90s. I paid over $400 million for it. It made no money before I bought it, but as soon as I bought it, they pulled some switch or something, and I immediately started losing money. It was because of foreign competition. It went to zero. The worst part was that I'd paid for it in stock, so the $400 million in stock I gave at the time is now worth about five billion. So every time Berkshire stock goes down, I feel a little better because of the opportunity I long ago lost. But when I looked at Dexter Shoe, they had a good position with retailers, they turned out good shoes, they had a great workforce, all kinds of things. I just forgot one thing: they weren't going to make shoes in the United States anymore. So you make mistakes, and you pay for them. Recognize quickly when you've made them. If you've got a good person running a business and it isn't making any money, you're in the wrong business, and you've got to face up to that.
Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talents, nobody can take that away from you. They can run up huge deficits, and the dollar can become worth far less, and all kinds of things can happen, but if you have talent and you've maximized it, you have a terrific asset.
That doesn't mean everybody should go to college, but whatever way you find to improve your communication skills is enormously important. I took a Dale Carnegie course that I paid $100 for, and it was worth a college degree, at least I thought so.
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Thank you so much for watching. I made the *Mentor Me* series because I wanted to spend a little more time with super-successful people, and I hope some of their magic pixie dust rubs off on us. I'd love to know what you thought of this video, what lessons you learned that you're going to apply to your life, and how. I'm really curious to find out. Leave it in the comments below, and I'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching, keep believing, and I'll see you soon.
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