저자: WarrenBuffett · 외국인
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버핏 인용: 현재 시장은 주가가 실적 대비 비싸(S&P 평균 PER 약 30배, 역사적 평균 16배 대비 약 2배) 주식 신규 매수에 신중해야 하며 현금 비중을 높게 유지하는 것이 합리적이다. 버크셔는 현금·단기투자 약 3000억 달러(총자산의 27%)를 보유하고 있으며 과거 평균 13% 대비 높다. 2025년 버크셔는 21개 종목을 매도(약 256억 달러)하고 29개를 매수(약 126억 달러)했다. 미국 재정적자와 국가부채(약 38조 달러) 문제를 경고하며, 소형주 탐색과 고품질 기업 선별을 권한다. 해설에 따르면 Fed 금리 인하 시작은 통상 주식에 긍정적이나 관세 정책과 높은 밸류에이션이 부담이다.
다듬은 글
I'm not recommending that people buy stocks today or tomorrow or next week or next month. I think it all depends on your circumstances, but you shouldn't buy stocks unless you expect in my view you expect to hold them for a very extended period and you are prepared financially and psychologically to hold them.
2026 is almost near and the market conditions are very unique. We have the Fed just starting to cut interest rates, which is traditionally a good sign for stocks. We have this new quite extreme tariff policy, which is traditionally not good for business and we have high stock prices. The Buffett indicator signaling red and a country with over $36 trillion in public debt.
In this video, we will look to get Buffett's opinion on three things. General investing advice for these conditions, should we be buying stocks or selling and how much cash should we have? The most perplexing thing about Warren Buffett's portfolio right now is the cash. He holds more cash than public US stocks.
Today, Berkshire holds over $300 billion in cash and short-term investments representing about 27% of total assets, a historically high figure compared to the 13% average over the last 25 years. This has also led Berkshire to effectively own nearly 5% of the entire US Treasury market. Beyond the need for liquidity to meet insurance obligations is the decision to raise cash primarily a de-risking strategy in response to high market valuations or is it also a deliberate effort to position Berkshire's balance sheet for a smooth smoother leadership transition providing Greg Abel with maximum flexibility and a clean slate for future capital allocation decisions.
Are you encouraged you may see some fat pitches coming your way? Yeah. Well, I wouldn't do anything nearly so noble as to withhold investing myself just so that Greg could look good later on. Tell me the amount of cash we have is uh we we we would spend Well, we wouldn't we came pretty close to spending 10 billion not that long ago for example I but we'd spend 100 billion.
I mean those decisions are not tough to make. Uh when something is offered that is that uh makes sense to us and that we understand and uh offers good value and where we don't worry about losing. We would rather have if we've got 335 billion now in Treasuries we would rather have conditions that have developed where we would have like 50 billion or something like that, but that that's just isn't the way the business works.
And we have made a lot of money by not wanting to be fully invested at all times. That's that's that's a treasure hunt. And every now and then you find something and occasionally very occasionally, but it'll happen again that uh I don't know when. It won't It could be next week. It could be 5 years off, but it won't be 50 years off.
You will have We will be bombarded with offerings that that uh we'll be glad we have the cash for and it'd be a lot more fun if it would happen tomorrow, but it's very unlikely to happen tomorrow. Very very unlikely to happen tomorrow, but it's not unlikely to happen in 5 years. So, that is about as straightforward as it gets.
He has so much cash at Berkshire because he can't find any reasonable opportunities to invest the cash in. He wants to invest it. He's always looking to invest, but the market right now is not offering him the value for money that he normally likes when buying stocks. To put it simply, prices are too high relative to fundamentals.
The average stock in the market is selling for 30 times the price of the earnings that it brings in. This is about double the historical average of 16 or twice as expensive. So, when stocks are so expensive, what else can you do but simply build up the cash position? And I don't mind at all under current conditions building uh the uh cash position.
I think uh when I look at the alternative of what's available in the equity markets and I look at the composition of what's going on in the world, we find it quite attractive. So, if the market is so expensive right now, the next logical question is should we sell stocks? Again, I'm going to look to what Buffett has done to try and get an answer.
In 2025, these numbers don't include Q4 because Q4 has not been released, but in 2025, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sold a total of 21 stocks. If you add all of these sales together, it amounts to 9.59% of the portfolio or around $25.6 billion worth of stock. So, that selling is by no means minimal in the latest financial year.
If you compare that to the amount of stocks that he bought, he bought 29 different stocks in 2025, which is eight more than the stocks he sold. However, his buys were much smaller in size compared to the stock sold. In total, 4.72% of the portfolio was bought, which amounts to around $12.6 billion. To put simply, he sold twice as many stocks as he did in buying.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we need to sell all of our stocks, too, but we do need to be a bit conservative when managing a portfolio and perhaps prepare for if things go bad. I mean the main thing to do and you're not going to pick the bottom and you're not going to nobody else can pick it for you or anything of the sort.
You've got to be prepared when you buy a stock have it be down 50% or more. I pointed out maybe a year maybe 2 years ago in the annual report just the one before this most recent one. I pointed out that there have been three times in Berkshire's history when the price of Berkshire stock went down 50%.
Three different times. Now, if you hold it on borrowed money, you know, you could have been cleaned out. I don't know whether today is a a great day to buy stocks. I know it will work out over 20 or 30 years. I don't know whether it'll work out over 2 years at all. I have no idea whether you'll be ahead or behind on a stock you buy on Monday morning.
If you look at the stocks that Warren Buffett bought with Berkshire, spoiler alert, they were not Nvidia. They were not Palantir. They were certainly not Coinbase stock. They were these interesting out of the blue value plays that I certainly didn't see coming. United Health stock, the stock that fell 50% this year after all of the drama with its CEO and what happened.
I actually think that this is still a value play because the price has stayed down and earnings have now fully recovered from the drop. It's selling still at a P/E ratio of 16. Other interesting money bought was Google, which I don't know if this was Buffett or not, but it was a relatively large buy, which Buffett is normally the guy that does the bigger buys.
And who knows, this may be a similar play to what he did with Apple a decade or so ago where he did not see Apple as a technology business necessarily, but more a consumer-oriented business that people just were stuck in the ecosystem and had to buy from. Google has been killing it in terms of net income these past few years, basically printing money.
Sales, too, have shown a similar sort of growth. And up until a few months ago, you could have snapped up the stock for a P/E ratio around the 20 mark, which again is really cheap in the market that we are in. So, if we go by what Buffett is doing and we apply it to ourselves, be careful about buying highly speculative growth stocks in this market and look more towards the conservative ones that have been overlooked.
The beauty of stocks is they do sell at silly prices from time to time. I mean that's that's how Charlie and I have gotten rich. You know, Ben Graham writes about it in chapter 8 of of the intelligent investor. Well, chapters 8 and chapters 20 are are really all you need to do to get rich in this world and chapter 8 says that in the market you're going to have a partner named Mr.
Market and the beauty of him as your partner is that he's kind of a psychotic drunk and he will do very weird things over time and your job is to remember that he's there to serve you and not to advise you. And if you can keep that mental state that all those thousands of prices that Mr. Market is offering you every day on every major business in the world practically that he is making lots of mistakes and he makes them for all kinds of weird reasons.
And all you have to do is occasionally oblige him when he offers to either buy or sell from you at the same price on any given day on any given security. So, it's built into the system that stocks get mispriced. Right now, Mr. Market is selling most of his stocks for high prices. Nvidia, Snowflake, CrowdStrike, Shopify to name a few.
But there are opportunities here and there where he is losing his head and selling them cheaply. United Health is one Buffett type example of this, but the only reason it's relative to Buffett is because the company is so large and he can only buy large market cap companies because his investing fund is so big that only big companies move the needle.
But this is where we have an advantage. We can invest in basically any company no matter how small. And if that company goes up, we will see a noticeable benefit to our net worth. This is why Buffett says to look at everything small. We assume that there are reasonable number of opportunities as you work with smaller amounts of capital because it's always been true.
I mean it was over the years as I looked at things clearly, you run into companies that are less followed as you get smaller and and there's more chances for inefficiency when you're dealing with something where you can buy $100,000 worth of it in a month rather than 100 million. I do think if you're working with very small amounts of money that there almost always are some significant inefficiency someplace to find things.
So, basically, what this means instead of looking at Amazon or Apple or Tesla or Nvidia and expect these stocks to hold up the entire global economy, we should instead look at the stocks that no one is looking at. The small market caps. Warren Buffett, he likes simple and easy to understand businesses.
So, if he had tinier amounts of money today, he would perhaps be looking at the likes of Douglas Dynamics, the snow plow equipment manufacturer, strong and consistent sales, same with net income, or Park National Corporation, a conservatively run community bank with a long dividend history, or Ennis, Inc., a microcap that generates steady free cash flow and has minimal debt.
All three of these companies have low market caps. They're around the billion-dollar market cap we'll take, and most importantly, have a low price relative to fundamentals. If you use Forecaster, who are the sponsor of today's video, and you click on fundamentals and go to raw data, you'll be able to get a deep history of a company's fundamentals, and you can map it out with a graph.
So, in the case of Ennis, Inc., you can see with their net income, they have been pretty consistent for the past 20 years. Obviously, they had the two periods where they made negative, but other than that, pretty good. Or, look at Douglas Dynamics. They're actually growing their revenue at around the 15% mark yearly.
So, that's pretty good for a stock that has a P/E ratio of under 20. Net income has also been pretty consistent, obviously apart from that year where they had that big loss. And I'm not saying go and buy these stocks, but I also just wanted to give you some examples to get you started on the treasure hunt for some small-cap gems.
So, what you should do is look at 100 stocks, and then you buy one. Remember that those who turn over the most rocks win. So, start looking. But, there is one thing that we do need to be careful about when it comes to America and American stocks. We're operating heavy fiscal deficit now that is unsustainable over a very long period of time.
We don't know whether that means 2 years or 20 years, because there's never been a country like the United States. But, you know that if something can't go on forever, it will end, according to Herb Stein, the famous economist. And we are doing something that is unsustainable. This is a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Louis. Over the past 100 years, the USA has run a surplus only eight times, and every other year they have had a deficit. And what you'll notice that as time has gone on, the deficit has just kept getting worse. And today, we're at a point where the deficit is 1.7 trillion. The problem if you constantly rack up deficits is the debt pile for your country keeps on growing.
The US national debt has surpassed 38 trillion now, and the figure amounts to roughly $111,000 of debt for every person in the country. This girl at Berkshire's shareholder meeting a few years ago shows us the problem with high debt. As you know, the US national debt is currently at an estimated $31 trillion, making up about 125% of the US GDP.
In the meantime, over the past few years, the Federal Reserve has telegraphed that they intend to monetize the debt by printing trillions of dollars, even as they insist that they're fighting inflation. My question is, are we likely to face a time in the future when the US dollar is no longer the global reserve currency?
I mean, we are the reserve currency, and I see no option for any other currency to be the reserve currency. And nobody knows how far you can go with a paper currency before it gets out of control. If And particularly if you're the reserve world's reserve currency, nobody knows the answer to that. And you don't want to try and pick out the point at where it does become a problem, because then it's all over.
And I think we should be very careful. I mean, you know, we all learned Keynesianism, and we applied it in World War II to the advantage of the country. And we did everything we couldn't we could to prevent inflation during the war, and then war ended in August of '45, and I think in January '46, and I'm not giving you exact figures at all now, but in January '46, I think the rate of inflation was at, you know, something like 1% or thereabouts.
And by the end of the year, I think it was at like 15%. And again, I'm doing this from long memories, but it's easy for America to do it's a lot, but if we do too much, it's very hard to see how you recover once you let the genie out of the bottle, and people lose faith in the currency, and they behave in an entirely different manner than they do when they feel with a they put some money in the bank or have a pension plan, or whatever it may be, that they're going to get to have something with roughly equal purchasing power.
And it just changes the economy, and all kinds of things can happen then. I can't predict them, and nobody else can predict them, but I do know they aren't good. Again, the Warren Buffett way to prepare for if something like this does happen is pretty simple. Buy high-quality companies at a fair price with good managers.
Those three things are so simple, but if you do this, you don't need to really worry too much if the Fed will monetize the debt and bring about inflation, because your company can just raise prices with inflation. Also, another thing, you want to avoid companies with high debt, because debt adds risk, and you don't need this added risk in today's market.
If you can start looking small, hold a bit of cash, avoid overvalued stocks, and stick to basic investing principles like these, then you'll be ready for what is to come in 2026. Thank you, Forecaster, for sponsoring this video. If you want access to their deep history of raw data and be able to use their software to graph it all out, then click the link in the description for 10% off.
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