저자: Investors Club · 외국인
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But 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. It uh 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 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 you bought it at X per share or per acre.
And the farmer next to you had 160 identical acres, same contour, you know, same same quality of soil quality. So, it was 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.
I mean, 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 want a 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 uh 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 uh 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 and there there were never any quotes Well, there were quotes later on, but but basically uh 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 silly 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. Uh but, you don't have to. And you don't want to put yourself in a position to where you where you have to. So, stocks have this enormous inherent advantage of people yelling out prices all the time to you. And many people turn that into a disadvantage.
And of course, many people can profit in one way or another from telling telling you that they can tell you what this farmer is going to yell out tomorrow or next your neighboring farmer is going to yell out tomorrow or next 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, uh 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 when I report on Berkshire, uh which I will soon, I promise.
Uh the uh uh 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 the position to pick single stocks. A few maybe, but 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 a hundred for one and I collect dividends on top of it, uh 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 can affect you either because you're leveraged or because you're psychologically unable to handle uh looking at a bunch of numbers.
If if you really had a farm and you had this neighbor and Monday 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 at $2,000 an acre when you had 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 uh It's a very, very, very important uh matter to bring the right psychological approach to owning common stocks, but I will tell you if you uh 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's going to yield out next uh uh 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 a can can be very well meaning in it and believe their own uh line, but the truth is that that you can't have You can't deliver superior results to everybody by just having them trade around a business if you bought into uh a business that's going to deliver what the business produces and and the idea that you're going to outsmart the person next to you or that the person advising you can outsmart the next the person sitting next to you is is uh Well, it's really the wrong approach.
So, find businesses, get a cross-section. In 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 uh act on their part. That most most good sales people believe their own baloney.
I mean, that's part of being a good salesperson and uh I'm sure I've done plenty of that in my life, too, but it's it's very human. If you keep repeating something often enough, that's why lawyers get have the witnesses keep saying things over and over again that uh by the time they get on the witness stand, they'll they'll uh they'll believe it whether it was true in the first place or not.
But, you are dealing with something fundamentally advantageous, in my view, in owning Goldman Sachs. I will bet on America the rest of my life, and I hope my successors at Berkshire do it. Now, we do it in two different ways. We do it by buying entire businesses, and we buy parts of businesses. I would like to uh emphasize that Well, I'd like to give you a few figures that will tie in from our uh activities in the first quarter, and also what we've done in April.
We are not right about We do try to pick the businesses that we think we understand. We don't buy the S&P 500. But, uh and we like to buy the entire businesses when we buy them, but we don't get a chance to do that very often. Most of the best businesses uh are not available for sale in their entirety.
But, we don't mind in the least buying partial interests in businesses, and we would rather own 6% or 8% in a wonderful company and regard it as a partnership interest essentially in that company, and that we get an opportunity to do that through marketable securities, and sometimes we get more opportunities than others.
And with that, I I I've convinced you to uh to bet on America. I'm not saying that this is the right time to buy stocks. If you mean by right that they're going to go up instead of down, I don't know what they're going to go in the next day or week or month or year. But I hope I know enough to know Well, I I I think I can buy a cross-section and do fine over 20 or 30 years.
And you think that's kind of a guy 89 optimistic viewpoint. I hope that really everybody would buy stocks with the idea that they're buying partnerships in businesses and they wouldn't look at them as chips to move around up or down.
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