원문 보기
Okay, Warren, you talked earlier about selling some Apple stock to increase your money supply, and I think that has made a lot of people curious about what opportunities you see, what could happen, or the market valuation. So I'll ask Foster Taylor this question. At the 1999 annual meeting, you mentioned that if you owned all 500 businesses in America, you would make $334 billion while paying $10.5 trillion.
You emphasized that this is not a very good return on investment. Today, by my calculations, the S&P 500 has a market capitalization of about $44 trillion with revenues of about $1.45 trillion . This is a very similar return on investment to the 1999 level. Do you see any similarities between the market today and the levels in 1999?
Well, one thing has changed dramatically since 1990, I misunderstood about 1999, but, uh, there were times in my life when I was overwhelmed with so many opportunities that I could invest everything by evening. And then there are other times when the year is going well, not at the beginning, but now, uh, we just didn't see anything making sense.
This is what moves the arrow. Now, we've made some small acquisitions throughout, our companies have made acquisitions, and we, you know, Greg and I may be discussing something that involves a $300 million purchase or something like that. And you know what, if it's a good enough fit, we do it. But, uh, and if our managers see things that suit them, we want to look at them, because our managers don't necessarily have the same equations in mind that we do.
But there are some managers that we will ultimately, uh, give, just say, you know, whatever you decide to do. And there are other managers who don't know how to allocate capital, and who don't necessarily have to be great allocators of capital, as long as they have great client service and understand their industry, etc.
You know they can be great managers and many of them are capital allocators and others are as well; but, uh, this is not a time when, uh, the phone will be ringing a lot . But there are moments, and Greg will know how to handle them as well or even better than, uh, I will over time. And Charlie and I, you know, we missed a lot of things, and, uh, the thing we really regretted was missing something that turned out to be very important.
We never, ever worried about missing something we didn't understand. I mean, you know , why should we be able to, you know, predict the future of every business more than we can predict, you know, what the crop yield will be in Illinois next year. Well, not wheat in Illinois, wheat in Kansas, but corn in Illinois.
Uh, so, uh, I wouldn't...I wouldn't think about whether it's like 1999, because I'm not very good at chronology, unless something really dramatic happened then. I mean, I remember events from 2008 much better than what happened in 2015, or 1987, or, well, 1987. I remember this because of October 19th.
But , uh, I...I just don't think I don't think so. I just look at what I can do every day. Perfectly. Hmm, I'll have to use that. Nothing. Sorry. There is nothing to add. Good. Well, we're going to station two, which, uh, I mean...
Comments 0