원문 보기
The most successful investor of all time, Warren Buffett, currently has a fortune of $121 billion. Believe it or not, Buffett wasn't born rich like most of us. He started as a young boy delivering newspapers and selling cans of Coca-Cola. In this video, Buffett reveals his three simple rules for successful stock market investing as a beginner and avoiding mistakes that could ruin you.
Warren Buffett asks you a personal question in the video that you should definitely answer before your first stock purchase: "I started investing when I was 11 years old. Before that, I was just aimlessly hanging around when I was 7, 8, and 9 years old. So unfortunately, I didn't start until I was 11.
I bought my first stock at the age of 11 and then experimented with all sorts of things: timing stocks, analyzing stock charts, and all that stuff. It was a lot of fun. I wasn't successful, but it was fun, and I experimented until I was 11." At 19, I read every book on investing at the public library.
I literally devoured them; it was fascinating. But I didn't have any fixed rules, no plan for how to invest. So I searched and searched, hoping that small changes on a chart would tell me where the stock was going. It was crazy, but everyone was doing it, so I thought, why not me? And even if you flip the stock chart, it won't help you.
Then everything changed in 1949. When I was 19, I read Benjamin Graham's book, *The Intelligent Investor*. Until then, I had never heard of him. In fact, there are only two chapters in that book that were the key to my success. These two chapters laid the foundation for everything that followed in my investments.
Indeed, there are three basic rules in these two chapters. They are so fundamental and so simple; it's hard to believe they could be so important. But even the Ten Commandments are very simple. The first rule is that a stock is A share of a company—you can't think of a share as anything other than a share of a company.
You value a company, then divide the company's value by the number of shares outstanding, and then you get the price of a share. What you really need to think about, though, is what kind of company you're getting into, what the competitors' financial situation is like, how management behaves—all these things have to do with the company itself, not with a stock symbol.
When I was 11 or 12, I knew every stock symbol of every company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The problem was that it didn't tell me anything because I knew nothing about the companies. I knew that the stock symbol X was the abbreviation for US Steel and that T represented the company ATNT, and so on, but those were just superfluous details.
So I knew nothing. I didn't know what was behind those abbreviations and those companies. So I had to train myself to see those abbreviations and those names in the newspaper as companies. I needed to know how to evaluate a company. What really matters when buying a stock? The second rule of the book is that Graham gives you a wonderful guide on how to react as an investor to stock market fluctuations.
In Chapter 8, he talks about his legendary Mr. Market, and to this day, nothing better has been written on how an investor should behave in the face of fluctuating stock prices. Most people react badly to stock price variations; I mean, they feel good when prices go up and bad when they go down. So they think the stock market is there to show them the way.
Mr. Market is this companion you have when investing, and he's an incredibly helpful character. This guy comes to your house every day and tells you how much he would pay you for your shares in a company, or he tells you which stock he would sell you more of at the same price. For private companies, nobody does that.
If you and I owned a gas station together, and I told you every day to come and make me an offer for half of the gas station, and then... I could either buy your half or sell you mine, both at the same price. If you actually did this every day, you'd be at a real disadvantage because fees apply each time, especially if you're Mr.
Market yourself. Our friend Mr. Market kindly gives you a price for your shares every day—more precisely, the prices fluctuate daily, and the morning price is different from the evening price—but he gives you a price at which you can buy or sell. And the wonderful thing about him is that he's an alcoholic and manic-depressive.
I mean, he 's so unreliable it's unimaginable. He walks around all day, constantly giving you completely insane prices, and you don't have to give him a second of your attention unless it benefits you to do so, whether it's once a year or once every five years. If it's one stock out of 3,000 stocks, all you have to do is sit back and watch.
You have no moral obligation to this guy. I mean, he gives you his prices; you don't owe him anything. He's asked, but he does it anyway. All you have to do is choose a day when he's particularly depressed, or when he's overdone it and is drunk, and the market will be better. You take advantage of those precise moments.
The peculiarity of stocks is that if you look at the high and low points of the share prices for all companies over the last year, you see in every case that the highest point is twice as high as the lowest point. And this concerns large, serious companies that are doing well, that are bluffing their employees, selling products, and so on.
If you look at farmland, there's never a chance that in one year you can get the land for half the price. That is to say, the value goes from 10 to 20 and vice versa from 20 to 10. Maybe the value changes from 10 to 11 or from 11 to 10. And if you look at residential real estate, prices probably won't fluctuate by more or less 10% in one year.
But here, where you get the best companies in the world, prices are Offers are available throughout the year, fluctuating completely irrationally up and down, and you're not obligated to play unless you want to hit the jackpot. That's what's important, and that's what Ben Graham will tell you: the stock market isn't there to guide you or give you directives; it's there for you to profit from if you want to.
That's one of the most important things to consider about stocks, and many people struggle with it because they invest all their emotions. The stock doesn't know you own it; it has no feelings for you. I mean, you have all these feelings about your shares, but they're just shares in a company. But that's exactly what isn't taught on Wall Street and in magazines.
All you hear are price targets, but you don't see anyone writing about the company's characteristics and its business model for the next 20 years, what the company's value should be, or what the fair price is. So forget the price at which it's currently trading. In the stock market, one of the things I like to do when looking at potential investments is to look at companies without knowing the price because as soon as you see the price, it automatically influences you.
The third rule of Gram's book is the margin of safety. If you come to a bridge and there's a sign saying maximum weight 10,000 kg, and you're driving a 9,800 kg truck, you'd better keep going and look for another bridge. I mean, nobody really knows how much the bridge can support. If the sign is 34 years old, you always maintain a margin of safety.
You make sure you never take too much risk, whether the bridge will hold or collapse. You look for an extremely strong bridge. And for the stock market, this means waiting for a stock to practically scream at you to buy because its price is so low. Based on these three principles, you can develop all the other rules for your investments.
These three rules are fundamental, and once you've assimilated them, I haven't found anything that has helped me as much. The three rules are important, and if you Remove one, and your whole structure collapses. I would say that the most important thing in the long term, and when you're working with a lot of money, is that you have to understand the company you're investing in.
Let's say you receive a million dollars and you have one week to invest in three companies in your region or wherever you live— private, unlisted companies. You have one week, otherwise you have to return the money. What would you do during that week? Probably you would examine all the companies around you.
You would know some of them well, others less so, some only because of their good reputation. You would know the managers of some, but not others. You would know the competitive situation of the companies. What are you thinking during those seven days? How will you ultimately filter these companies to find the three best for you?
And what's important is that you won't be able to resell them once you buy them; you'll own them for life. That's why you'll look for companies with a sustainable competitive advantage. You wouldn't want to buy a Burger King franchise just because there aren't any others. Fast food within a 15 km radius, because sooner or later McDonald's will be there too, is essential.
Therefore, even if other competitors appear, your business maintains its advantage because it has a sustainable competitive edge. For this, you need a business with a defensive barrier because, by definition, capitalism is a system where every business, every castle, is under attack. It's the nature of things.
You open a successful restaurant in your town, and some guy copies your menu, poaches your chef, offers a lower price, or provides more parking spaces. In capitalism, it's common for your castle to be attacked, and if that's the case, you'd want a castle with a large rocket all around it. There are many ways to create this rocket, for example, through patents or a unique location.
If you own something that remains etched in people's minds, like Coca-Cola—I mean, almost 8 billion people in the world know Coca-Cola, and most associate it with something positive—very few of them know the generic cola from your supermarket, but everyone knows Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola, and even if this no-name cola spent a billion dollars on advertising, almost no one would know it because Coca-Cola wants to be associated with positive emotions in people.
That's why you see Coke everywhere people are experiencing positive moments: at festivals, at Disneyland, at the theater, at the movies, at the Super Bowl. Coca-Cola wants you to drink it every time you're happy, and if they succeed, they'll sell a lot of Coca-Cola. And that's exactly the sustainable, almost unfair, competitive advantage.
What you want is for your company to be run by honest and competent people. You don't want a crook in charge. And the best companies you can buy are the ones where it doesn't matter who runs them. Peter Lynch says, "Buy a company so good that a fool could run it because sooner or later it will." And I just received this question from a student a few days ago: "What happens to Mr.
Buffett if you go crazy and are no longer mentally capable of running Berkshire?" And I have He replied that Berkshire is so solid I could go crazy, maybe I already am. These are the companies you should own, but you want honest and competent management and a fair price. That's exactly what you're looking for in your area.
So you have a week to choose three companies, and immediately some will come to mind as completely unsuitable. If someone told me my life depended on my ability to select the 10 best stocks from the Grand Jones, composed of 30 stocks, then I would dedicate all my time to eliminating the worst stocks.
I would therefore sort through the companies, and that's a simpler way to approach this problem than choosing the 10 best companies out of 30. And if you think about the area where you live, there will certainly be sectors in which you don't feel capable of devaluing. Let's say you find car dealerships too complicated.
In this sector, the competition will always be fierce, so the question is which manufacturer will sell more cars in 5 years than today, and if you bet on the right brand. And especially if you still have the right to sell large cars with internal combustion engines, etc., so you decide to give up on car dealerships and look for companies in other sectors.
This approach is the same one you want to adopt in the stock market. There are 8,000 stocks in the world that are easily traded, and each has a price. Tomorrow the price will be different. Remember, you don't need to rush; you can wait. If you only make good investment decisions, you will be very rich in your entire life.
Sometimes I tell students that it would be better to have a stamp card once they leave school, and on this card there are only 20 boxes, one box for each investment decision. So instead of listening to others at a cocktail party about which stocks they should buy, they would think for themselves. They would really have to think about each of the 20 boxes.
20 boxes represent all the decisions you have, and 20 is more than enough, but something is still missing, isn't it? To start investing in stocks, you need a brokerage account. In the video description below, you'll find my recommendation for stock market beginners: Trade Republic. I use this brokerage account for long-term stock investments, and as a long-time investor and Warren Buffett fan, I highly recommend it to everyone.
In the top left corner, you'll also find a video that might interest you. Thank you so much for watching! See you in the next video. Bye!
댓글 0