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So, uh you like what you call super durable companies. Yes. What you see as super durable. Well, the value of a financial asset is the present value of the cash it generates over its life. How can you build a DCF model unless you can predict those cash flows? So, the business has to endure. And we try to find things we never need to sell, and we try to find businesses that can grow forever.
There aren't that many of them. Uh so, that's why we own such few companies. Say you only get one good idea a year. One or two. If we're lucky, yes. But, that's enough. And uh find your royalty concept. So, the best business, I believe, is one that doesn't have to put up invest capital, but earns a perpetuity growth uh annuity.
Right? Asset management's a great business if you can invest the assets well, and you can get paid a fee, you know, off a base of assets of other people's money. But, there are other businesses that meet that model. So, Tim Hortons is a franchise restaurant They have a brand, they have a system, uh and then the franchisees put up the capital, and they get a royalty on every, you know, uh coffee and donuts uh that's sold at uh at Tim Hortons.
Uh Universal Music is a royalty on people listening to music. Hilton is a royalty on people staying in hotels. They own a brand. Other people put up the capital. So, most of the companies we invest in can be thought of as annuities or growth royalties, and the key is which, you know, it's predicting which of these royalties will endure.
And that's a more complicated question. When you think of a company like Uber, you don't think of an annuity or Amazon annuity, but I think you I think Uber is precisely that, right? They don't They don't pay for the cars, and they don't do the driving, right? They have a system, they've got a platform, they've got a user interface, and they aggregate all that demand, and then they get a royalty.
Let's call it 20% of the ride in exchange for delivering the demand. That's an amazing business. Again, if you can have confidence that the Uber platform will be the platform a decade from now and two decades from now. So, you've made the point these are things that aren't easy to replicate. Yes. No one's going to reinvent Amazon anytime soon.
That's right. And sometimes you don't buy what uh cheap. You think it's a good value, but it doesn't look cheap. Chipotle Now, so Chipotle didn't look cheap. People use kind of a rubric for valuing businesses, right? The PE ratio. It's kind of a very simple way to think about a business, but a stock can be expensive at 10 times earnings and it can be cheap at 50 times earnings.
What matters is not next year's earnings. What matters is the present value of the cash over the life of the business. At the time we watched Chipotle, they had a food safety crisis, sales were getting crushed, people thought the company was going out of business, and on it didn't look cheap. But, if you could if you believed you could change the course of Chipotle's history, we fixed the food safety issues, it was extremely cheap.
And the stock is up, you know, probably ninefold from the time we bought it. It's amazing. Chipotle's now going into Mexico. Everyone sort of assumes it was from Mexico, but anyway. Bad images. Yes. And what does it take now to be a successful value investor? I think the most important thing we can learn from Mr.
Buffett is owning super high quality businesses and trying to pick businesses where it doesn't matter what's going on in the world, the business will still survive our through, whether it's a tariff, whether it's a pandemic, whether it's the Fed raising rates, lowering rates. Find the business that's relatively immune and put yourself in a position where you're never forced to sell, so don't borrow a bunch of money, don't be investing your last dollar.
But, if you own the great business, you know, uh it it doesn't matter much. So, you know, what we try to do is find what we think of as the truly great durable uh franchise. So, read Michael Porter's book, Competitive Advantage. It's got this five forces framework. It's a very good way to think about the forces that impact a business, and then try to contemplate um Yeah, this is the most important thing.
People focus too much on P/E ratio, trying to build a model. It's more about what is the company's durable competitive advantage, how much cash will it generate over time, how capital intensive is it, uh you know, how protected is it from you know, a couple of students leaving uh an elite university, renting a garage.
It has to be a garage. And And And from there, building something that can displace you. It's about pre- you know, the hardest thing is figuring out what might disrupt in a world of AI, in a world of what will be a massive acceleration in uh I would say idea and company and software creation. If you think about software, it used to be you had to be a software engineer to write software.
That's changing. And so, the the degree of creativity, there are a lot of super creative people who come up with great ideas, but don't have the first clue on how to write a piece of software to address whatever the issue is. So, we're going to have a lot more disruption, and trying to be able to predict that is sort of the key.
And then, I would say, you know, to Ryan's point, on the margin, volatility then becomes your friend. You learn about a bunch of great businesses, a lot of other people often figure out they're great, and then every once in a while, uh nothing to do with the business, but it's a it's a Trump tweet, it's a it's a real something that has significant economic effect, and the entire market goes down, your company goes down about the same amount, but but the enduring business value protects it, that's a great opportunity for you.
Bill Ackman believes that successful investing is about buying high-quality businesses that generate predictable cash flows and can grow for decades. He prefers companies with strong competitive advantages, durable business models, and minimal capital requirements. After all, a business that generates $100 million in free cash flow, but needs $10 million to maintain and grow its operations has far more financial flexibility than one that needs $80 million.
Like Buffett, Ackman also believes in quality over quantity. Instead of buying 20 or 30 average stocks, he would rather wait for one or two exceptional opportunities each year. But here's the interesting part. A stock trading at 10 times earnings can be expensive while another trading at 50 times earnings can be cheap.
Because imagine one company whose earnings decline by 5% annually and another whose earnings grow by 25%. Over 5 years, their earnings could fall around 77% of the original level for the first company while growing to more than three times the original level of the second. But of course, growth does not alone justify any price.
You need to consider the expectations already built into the valuation. But the ultimate goal is to find businesses with powerful moats such as strong brands, switching costs, and cost advantages that competitors struggle to overcome. If a business can compound its earnings by 15% annually for 10 years, its earnings could grow approximately fourfold.
That's the power of long-term compounding and Bill Ackman believes in that. His philosophy is simple. Buy exceptional businesses at reasonable prices. Invest only when you understand what you own. Trade less and think like a long-term business owner because the goal isn't to predict every market move. It's to own businesses that can keep creating value for years to come.
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