저자: CharlieMunger/WarrenBuffett · 외국인
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버핏·멍거 주주총회 Q&A 발췌. S&P500의 향후 10년 수익률은 과거 10년보다 낮을 수 있다고 보며(연 4% 가능성 언급), 이는 폭락 예측이 아니라고 선을 그음. 밸류에이션은 ROE와 금리에 따라 달라지며 지속 가능성을 알 수 없다고 함. 대형 재해(허리케인·지진)나 시장 급락 시 유동성·옵션을 활용해 저가 증권을 매수할 수 있다는 입장. 구체적 자산 방향 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
But Warren, you would expect average returns from stock market index type investing to regress somewhat down. Oh, I don't think the average what they've been the last few years. I don't think you'll get the investment result from owning the S&P over the next 10 years that you've gotten over the past 10 years.
I would I would if someone wanted to put some real money on that uh they would find a taker with me. uh that that's very unlikely to happen. That's not predicting a crash. It's just saying that the guaranteed result from the next 10 years is almost certain to be less than Yeah. Yeah. The last it wouldn't s I mean this is in no way predictable but I mean it wouldn't surprise us in the least if stocks average 4% a year you know for the next 10 years.
That doesn't mean they will or we don't we don't know the number, but that that is that would not be a surprising outcome and it wouldn't bother us particularly either with the historical returns on common stocks dating back to the 1800s coming in at about 7%. Uh pair that together with the concept of regression to the mean and statistics.
Um, do you not think that we're in a very dangerous period? Well, the the answer we never know. I mean, we we in terms of what markets will do. We I don't think that the Coca-Cola company's in a dangerous position, you know, dangerous era or or Gillette is in a dangerous era or McDonald's or Wells Fargo or whatever.
But uh or seize candy or the businesses we own in their entire Kirby whatever it may be. Uh whether valuations are too high gets back to the question that we we said we talked about earlier. If if for businesses in aggregate they keep earning very high returns on equity and interest rates stay where they are we are not in an overvalued period.
If it turns out that these returns are not sustainable or interest rates go higher, it will we will look back and say this was a high point but for at least for a while but we have no notion on that and and we really don't think about it. Basically we because we don't know you know our job is to focus on things that we can know and that make a difference and if something can't make a difference or we can't know it, you know, we write that one off.
Well, we're looking for the the interesting thing for me is to watch Buffett, the former protege. And by the way, Buffett was the best student Graham had in 30 years of teaching at Colombia. And uh but what happened and and since I knew both men was that Buffett became way better than Graham. That is a natural outcome.
It's it's what Newton said. He said, "If I've seen a little farther than other men, it's by standing on the shoulder of giants." And uh so Warren may have stood on Ben's shoulders, but he ended up seeing seeing farther. And no doubt somebody will come along and do course and do a lot better than we have.
I enjoyed making money more than Ben. I mean, candidly, I with Ben, it just it it really was incidental. At least by the time I knew him. It may have been different when he was younger, but it just didn't it the process didn't enjoy of the whole game did not interest him more than a dozen other things may have interested him.
With me, I just find it interesting and and uh and therefore, you know, I've spent I've spent way more a way higher percentage of my time thinking about investing and thinking about businesses. I I probably thought way more about businesses than Ben ever did. he had he had other things that interested him.
So I've pursued the game a little quite a bit differently than he did. And therefore uh measuring the record is really the two records not it's not a proper measurement. I mean he he was he was uh he was doing victory laps while I still thought I was out there running against you know the whole field.
But Graham had some blind spots partly of sort of an ethical professorial nature. He was looking for things to teach that would work for every man that any intelligent layman could learn and do well. Well, if that's the limitation of what you're looking for, there'll be a lot of reality you won't go into because it's too hard to figure out and too hard to explain.
Buffett, if there was money in it, had no such restriction. Yeah, Ben Ben sort of thought it was cheating if we went out and talked to the management because he just he just felt that the person who read his book, you know, living in Pocutello, Idaho, could not go out and meet the management. So, he he didn't he and we didn't do it.
I mean, when I worked for Graham Newman, he I don't think I ever visited a management in in the 21 months I was there. he just but you know he wasn't sure whether it'd be useful anyway but if it was be useful you know that that meant that his book was not uh all that was needed that you had to add something to it I I found it fun to go out and and talk about their businesses with people or to check with competitors or suppliers or customers and all that but u Ben didn't Ben didn't think there was anything wrong with that he just he just felt that if if you had to do that then his book was not the complete answer and uh uh he didn't really want to do anything that the reader of his book couldn't do if he was on a desert island, you know, basically with just one line to a broker.
But if you stop to think about it, uh Graham was trying to play the game of pin the donkey wearing very dark glasses and Warren of course would use the biggest search light he could find. And we still can't find any donkeys these days. Okay, Ariela one, for those of us on the other side of the table, we get barrageed with information and I'm wondering how how do you both do you just read annuals 10ks and talk to people and ignore everything else and how do you keep track of everything intellectually?
Well, we don't keep track of everything but but the beauty of to some extent of valuating businesses, large businesses, is that it is all cumulative. I mean, if you if you started doing it 40 or so years ago, you really have got a working knowledge of an awful lot of businesses, but there aren't that many to start with that are, you know, and and you you you can get a fix, you know, how what are there 75 maybe or so important industries and you get to understand how they operate and you don't have to start over again every day and you don't have to consult a computer for it or anything like that.
So it has the advantage of of uh accumulation of useful information over time and you know you just add the incremental bit at some point. You know why did we decide to buy Coca-Cola in 1988? Well it may have been you know just a couple small incremental bits of information but that came into a mass that had been accumulated over over decades.
And uh it's a very it's a great business that way. It's why we like businesses that don't change too much because the past is useful to us. Charlie, I can't add a thing to that. If you both live as long as I believe you will. It could happen that there'll be a year when you write two big checks for supercat claims when the market is throwing away things at really silly prices.
Could you share your thinking about uh how much debt you would consider taking on to buy great businesses is cheap in that kind of a situation? Well, if we if we had both a big hurricane in the Northeast or in Florida and we had a big quake in California in the same year and we had a financial market uh the financial markets tanked perhaps because of those events but perhaps for other reasons.
Um, we would uh we would be thinking about ways. It might not be borrowing money directly, but we would be thinking about ways to uh to buy um uh securities if they got cheap enough. I mean, anytime securities get cheap. Charlie, you're thumping again here. Uh anytime securities get cheap, uh you know, we don't like to go to the office and not write a ticket.
I mean that so uh we we certainly would have the ability to borrow some money. We we would never borrow a ton of money relative to to uh capital. We're just not set out that way. We don't want to disappoint anybody in this world. We don't even want to worry about disappointing anybody in this world.
So we're not going to do that. But we've got a lot we have a lot of extra firepower overall. And uh I would say under almost any conditions that cause securities to get very cheap, we would find a way to buy some of them at Charlie. The beauty of our situation is that it has enormous flexibility built into it.
If something were large enough and cheap enough, we could stop writing super cats. it we're measuring opportunities one against the other and we understand the way the numbers enter play and uh so we have a lot of different options and that's a huge advantage. There's so many places in business life where you have practically no options at all.
You're just in a channel that you have to waltz down the channel and you don't have any options to do anything else. We have enormous options. We may not exercise them, but we have enormous flexibility. Yeah, we know they're there. And yeah, and there's no reason to push on anything now. At least we don't see we don't have any reason to push ourselves, but it if if it ever became advantageous to push somewhat, we would push.
although never to a degree that in any way cause us to lose a minute of sleep about fulfilling every obligation we had. It's 3:30. I thank you all for coming. I look forward to seeing you next year and so on.
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