저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏과 멍거가 항공주 투자 실패 사례(US Air 두 차례 파산, 투자 결정 과정)를 회고하며, 정량 지표보다 사업 자체의 경쟁력과 5~10년 후 미래에 대한 확신이 중요하다고 강조함. 밴크오브아메리카 투자, 자동차·애플·석유 기업에 대한 예측 불확실성, 벤저민 그레이엄식 숫자 기반 접근의 한계를 설명함. 특정 종목의 단기 가격 방향에 대한 발언은 없음.
다듬은 글
철도와 항공 산업, 왜 투자 매력이 다른가
You really couldn't create another railroad, and I hope not. And you can create another airline very easily, and people don't like it, and people love doing it. It's exciting to people, and you can sell the idea. I've had probably a dozen proposals over the last 25 or 30 years from people who want to get into the airline business, one way or another, and a number of them have.
It's sexy for some reason. If you go to the office of some big CEO and say, "I want to talk to you about this new airplane," you get in the door. If you want to talk to them about hauling coal or something, it's a little different. So it's a business that attracts people, and you can go out and raise money for a new airline.
The record has really been something. I don't know how many bankruptcies there have been in the airline field, but it's an enormous number, and some have gone bankrupt more than once. We bought US Air. I was at Gate's with Ed Kadney, and he explained to me how wonderful the airline was. He's a good guy, incidentally, and I wrote a check. By the time the check was cashed, they were having troubles. It didn't take long, and then they went bankrupt twice. We were very lucky, and we actually made quite a bit of money on it as it turned out, because there was a little blip at one point. But I think it went bankrupt twice after we bought it. Charlie and I were on the board, and we would look at these projections, and they were just ridiculous. They never came true, did they, Charlie? No, no. We were very unpopular, because we actually pointed that out a few times.
가치투자자는 숫자 이전에 '사업'을 본다
When people analyze a stock, a lot of them look at quantitative metrics such as PE ratio, return on equity, and debt-to-asset ratio. So, Mr. Buffett, when you analyze a stock for purchase, what are your top five quantitative metrics, and what's your preferred number for each metric?
Well, we look at quantitative and qualitative aspects. We aren't looking at the aspects of a stock; we're looking at the aspects of a business. It's very important to have that mindset: we are buying businesses, whether we're buying 100 shares of something or the entire company. We always think of them as businesses. So when Charlie and I leaf through Value Line, look at annual reports that come across our desk, or read the paper, we have a cumulative knowledge of a good many industries and companies, not all by a long shot. Different numbers have different importance depending on the kind of business.
If you were a basketball coach and someone who's 5'4" walked up and said you ought to sign him because you should see him handle the ball, you'd probably have a certain prejudice against it. But there might be one player out there that it made sense on. On balance, we'd say, "Good luck, son, but we're looking for seven-footers." And if we find seven-footers, we have to worry about whether we can get them halfway coordinated and keep them in school, and a few things like that. But we see certain things that shout out to us, look further, or think further.
Over the years, we've accumulated this background of knowledge on various kinds of businesses, and we've also concluded that we can't make an intelligent analysis of all kinds of businesses. Usually some little fact slips into view that causes us to rethink something.
은행 투자 아이디어는 어떻게 떠올랐나
It was mentioned how I got the idea of buying Bank of America, or making an offer to Bank of America on a preferred stock, when I was in the bathtub. That's true, but the bathtub really wasn't the key factor. The truth is I read a book more than 50 years ago called *Biography of a Bank*. It was a great book, about A.P. Giannini and the history of the bank, and I've followed Bank of America and other banks for 50 years. Charlie and I have bought banks. In the late '60s we trudged around Chicago trying to buy more banks. So we have certain things we think about in terms of a bank that are different from when we're buying Iscar. There is no one-size-fits-all. When we're buying an insurance company, we think about different things again, and what we think about depends on brands. Some brands travel very well, Coca-Cola being a terrific example, and some don't. We keep learning about things like that.
Every now and then we find an opportunity. Bank of America, whenever it was in 2011, was subject to a lot of terrible rumors. There was a lot of big short interest, morale was terrible, and everything else. It just struck me that an investment by Berkshire might be helpful to the bank and might make sense for us. I'd never met Ryan Moynihan at that point. Maybe I'd met him at some function or party, but I had no memory of it, and I didn't have his phone number. But I gave him a call. Things like that happen, and it's not because I calculate some precise PE ratio or price-to-book value ratio. It's because I have some idea of what the company might look like in five or ten years, I have a reasonable amount of confidence in that judgment, and there's a disparity between price and value, and it's big.
찰리 멍거: 재무 숫자만으로는 주식을 살 수 없다
Charlie, would you like to elaborate? We don't know how to buy stocks just by looking at financial figures and making judgments based on ratios. We may be influenced a little by that data, but we need to know more about how the company actually functions, and anything a computer could do in terms of screening. I never do it. Do you use a computer to screen anything? No, I don't know how to. Bill's still trying to explain it to me.
It's a little hard to be precise because we don't really use screens. On the other hand, we're screening everything, but it's not like we sit there and say we want to look at things that are low price-to-book or low P/Es. We look at businesses exactly as we would if somebody came in and offered us the entire business. Then we try to think: what is this place going to look like in five or ten years, and how sure are we of it? For a lot of companies, we just don't know the answer. We don't know which auto company is going to be knocking the ball out of the park ten years from now, or which one will be hanging on by its fingernails. We've watched the auto business for 50 years. It's a very interesting business, but we don't know how to foresee the future well enough in something like that.
We think Burlington Northern will have a competitive advantage fifteen years from now, and we have a high degree of confidence in that. We would never have that degree of confidence about Apple, no matter what its financial statements showed. It's just too hard. We don't know what we don't know about an oil company ten years from now, what the product will be selling for, or anything like that. But I'd say we're virtually 100% confident about a Burlington Northern or a GEICO or some other companies I won't name.
숫자 공식이 아니라 기업의 경쟁력을 이해해야 한다
People with very high IQs who are good at math naturally look for a system where they can just look at the math and know what security to buy. It's not that easy. You really have to understand the company, its competitive position, and the reasons that position is what it is. That is often not disclosed by the math. It's not what I learned from Ben Graham. The fundamentals of looking at stocks as businesses, and the attitude toward the market, are still absolutely part of the catechism. But I don't know exactly how I would manage money if I were just trying to do it by the numbers. You'd do it poorly. Yeah, that takes care of that.
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