저자: Compound Interest · 외국인
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Going back to stocks, people bring the attitude to them too often that because they are liquid and quoted minute by minute that it's an important that you develop an opinion on them minute by minute. Now, that's really foolish when you think about it and that's something Graham taught me in 1949. I mean that single thought, stocks were parts of businesses and not just little things that moved around on charts or charts were very popular in those days and whatever it may be.
Imagine for a moment that you decided to invest money now and you bought a farm and the farmland around here, let's say you bought 160 acres and [clears throat] you bought it at X per share or per acre and the farmer next to you had 160 [clears throat] identical acres, same contour, same quality of soil quality, so it was identical.
And that farmer next door to you was a very peculiar character because every day that farmer with the identical farm said, "I'll sell you my farm or I'll buy your farm at a certain price which he would name." Now, that's a very obliging neighbor. That's got to be a plus to have a fellow like that with the next farm.
You don't get that with farms. You get it with stocks. You own 100 shares of General Motors and on Monday morning somebody will buy your 100 shares or sell you another 100 shares at the exactly the same price and that goes on for 5 days a week. But just imagine if you had a farmer doing that. When you bought the farm, you looked at what the farm would produce.
That was what went through your mind. You were saying to yourself, "I'm paying X dollars per acre. I think I'll get so many bushels of corn or soybeans on average. Some years good, some years bad, some years the price will be good, some years the price will be bad, etc." But you think about the potential of the farm and now you get this idiot that buys the farm next to you and on top of that he's sort of a manic-depressive and drinks, maybe smokes a little pot.
So his numbers just go all over the place. Now, the only thing you have to do is to remember that this guy next door is there to serve you and not to instruct you. You bought the farm because you thought the farm was had the potential. You don't really need a quote on it. You know, if you bought in with John D.
Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie and there were never any Well, there were quotes later on, but basically you bought into the business and that's what you're doing when you buy stocks, but you get this added advantage that you do have this neighbor who you're not obliged to listen to at all, who is going to give you a price every day and he's going to have his ups and downs.
And maybe he'll name a suddenly price that he'll buy at in which case you sell if you want to or maybe he'll name a very low price and you'll you'll buy his farm from him, but you don't have to. And you don't want to put yourself in a position to where where you have to. So, stocks have this enormous inherent advantage of people yelling out prices all the time to you and [clears throat] many people turn that into a disadvantage and of course, many people can profit in one way or another from telling you that they can tell you what this farmer is going to yell out tomorrow week or next month.
There's huge money in it. So, people tell you that it's important and they know and that you should pay a lot of attention to their thoughts about what price changes should be or you tell yourself that there should be this great difference, but the truth is if you own the businesses you liked prior to the virus arriving, it changes prices and it changes, but nobody's forcing you to sell and if you really like the business and you like the management you're in with and the business hasn't fundamentally changed and I'll get to that a little more on report on Berkshire.
The stocks have an enormous advantage and you still can bet on America, but you can't bet unless you're willing and have an outlook to independently decide that you want to own a cross section of America because I don't think most people are in a position to pick single stocks. A few maybe, but on balance I think people are much better off buying a cross section of America and just forgetting about it.
If you'd done that, if I'd done that when I got out of college, it's all I had to do to make 100 for one and I collect dividends on top of it, which increased would increase substantially over time. The American tailwind is marvelous. American business represents and it's going to have interruptions and you're not going to foresee the interruptions and you do not want to get yourself in a position where those interruptions can affect you either because you're leveraged or because you're psychologically unable to handle looking at a bunch of numbers.
If if you really had a farm and you had this neighbor and one day he offered you $2,000 an acre and the next day he offers you $1,200 an acre and maybe the day after that he offers you $800 an acre. Are you really going to feel that that $2,000 an acre when you would have evaluated what the farm would produce?
Are you going to let this guy drive you into thinking I better sell because his number keeps coming in lower all the time? It's a very, very, very important matter to bring the right psychological approach to owning common stocks, but I will tell you if you bet on America and sustain that position for decades, you're going to do better than in my view, far better than owning Treasury securities or far better than following people who tell you that what the farmer is going to yield out next.
There's huge amounts of money that that people pay for advice they really don't need and for advice where the person giving it can be very well-meaning and it and believe their own line, but the truth is that you can't deliver superior results to everybody by just having them trade around a business.
If you bought into a business that's going to deliver what the business produces and the idea that you're going to outsmart the person next to you or that the person advising you can outsmart the person sitting next to you is well, it's really the wrong approach. So, find businesses, get a cross-section.
In [clears throat] my view, for most people the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund. People will try and sell you other things because there's more money in it for them if they do. And I'm not saying that that's a conscious act on their part. Most good sales people believe their own baloney.
I mean, that's part of being a good sales person. And sure, I've done plenty of that in my life, too. But it's very human. If you keep repeating something often, that's what lawyers get at. The witnesses keep saying things over and over again. By the time they get on the witness stand, they'll they'll believe it whether it was true in the first place or not.
You are dealing with something fundamentally advantageous, in my view, in owning a common stock. I will bet on America the rest of my life, and I hope my successors at Berkshire do, too.
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