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good afternoon my name is martin o'leary and i'm from houston texas my question to you is this in your annual report this year from the letter to the shareholders you indicated that it was 50 years ago that you met benjamin graham and that he had a major impact in your life especially in your investment success moreover you've stated in the past that the intelligent investor is by far the greatest book ever written on investing one of the central tenets in the book was that if you bought a group of stocks say 10 or 20 that traded at two-thirds or less than net current assets that you would be assured of a margin of safety coupled with a satisfactory rate of return today if you were to find 10 or 20 stocks that traded at two-thirds of net current assets would you be inclined to purchase those stocks for your own personal portfolio not for berkshire hathaway and the second question since i've mentioned the book i was wondering which books that you and mr munger have been reading lately and would recommend thank you in respect to your first question you could probably if you found a group like that and you won't i don't think uh you'd probably do all right buying the group but not because the businesses themselves worked out that well over time but because there would probably be a reasonable amount of corporate activity in a group like that either in terms of the management's taking them private or takeovers or that sort of thing but those sub-working capital stocks are just almost impossible uh to find now and if you got into a market where a lot of them existed you'd probably find wonderful businesses selling a lot cheaper too and our inclination would be to go with a cheap wonderful business i don't think you'll get in a high market or something close to it i don't think you'll get a lot of sub-working capital stocks anymore there's just too much money around to promote deals before they they really get to that point but that was a technique it was 50 years ago and is walter schloss here still walter are you here stand up if you're here i met walter 50 years ago when i met ben graham and why i know walters came out this year but he already knows everything i've been talking about so he may have left uh walter actually has practiced in securities much closer to the original he's run a partnership now for uh 46 years i guess it is and he's he's um he's done it much more with the type of stocks that that ben was talking about in those days and he has a record that is absolutely sensational that uh far better than people who who get promoted and go on television shows and do all that sort of thing uh and he's done it in you know what i tend to call cigar but companies uh you know you get one free puff and that's about it but they don't cost anything and that's that was the sub working capital type situations wall wallers had to extend that somewhat but it's been a great great record over a considerable i mean 46 years it can very considerable period of time so i think if you found that kind of a group and did it as a group operation and ben always emphasized a group operation because when you're dealing with lousy companies but you expect a certain number to be taken over and all that you better have a group of them whereas if you deal with wonderful companies you only need a couple but i think uh i think if you see that period again we'll be we'll be very active but it won't be in those kind of securities charlie yeah and there's another change in the old days if the business stopped working you could take the working capital and stick it in the shareholders pockets and nowadays as you can tell from all the restructuring charges when things really go to hell in a bucket somebody else owns a lot of the working capital the whole culture has changed if you have a little business in france and you get tired of it as marx and spencer has the french say what the hell do you mean trying to take your capital back from france there are french workers in this business and they don't care about they don't say it's your working capital take it back when the business no longer works for you they say it's our working capital the whole culture has changed on that one not completely but a lot from ben graham's day there are a lot of reasons why the investment idiosyncrasies of one era don't translate that perfectly into another that list that was published and i i think it was published in 1951 edition of security analysis of the 49 edition of intelligent investor but there were a list of companies there was sacko lowell those marshall wells there's cleveland worcester mills there's foster wheeler and all those companies were sub-working capital companies selling three or four times earnings and there was a if you bought a group of stocks like that you were going to do well but you know i would you certainly don't see that in in companies with any any of any size uh today and i've seen a few lists of of tech companies selling below cash but but they're determined to use that cash and and uh it may not be there in a year or two it was a different breed of animals to some extent in in ben's list at that time
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