저자: CharlieMunger/WarrenBuffett · 외국인
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백화점·트레이딩스탬프 등 과거 사례로 기술 변화가 사업을 파괴하거나 변형시키는 예측이 어렵다고 설명. 소액 자금은 높은 수익률이 가능하나 자금이 커질수록 기회가 급감. 시장 예측은 하지 않으며 개별 사업 가치 기준으로만 투자하고, 현재 대형주에서 매력적인 가격의 기업을 찾기 어렵다고 언급.
다듬은 글
I think it is uh tricky predicting that technological change either will or won't destroy some business. When I was young, the department stores had a bunch of sort of monopolistic advantages. A, they were downtown where the street car lines met. B, they had sort of a monopoly on extending revolving credit.
And D, they had one-stop shopping and all kinds of weather. and nobody else did. And they lost all three of those advantages. And yet they've done well, a lot of them, for many decades since. At other times, you get a change and you just get destroyed. Uh our trading stamp business was destroyed by changes in the economic world.
And our Worldbook business has been seriously hurt by the personal computer and the CDROM and so forth. Uh yeah, I agree it's a big risk but it's it's not easy to uh to make predictions in which you have great confidence. Yeah. If you go down to 16th in Farnum where the street car tracks used to cross that was that was the best real estate in town and and people signed 100 year or 50-year leases on it and it it looked like there was nothing more safe because they weren't going to move the street car lines.
The only thing was that they moved the street cars. they just took and converted it into junk. Um, and it seemed very permanent that the advantage of the big department store, the Marshall Field in Chicago or the Macy's in New York was this incredible breadth of merchandise. You could go and you could find 300 different types of spools of thread or 500 different you could see 500 different wedding dresses or whatever.
And you had these million square foot and even two million square foot downtown stores and they were these huge emporiums. And then the shopping center came along and of course the shopping center created in effect a store of many stores. And so you had millions of square feet now and and but you still had this incredible variety being offered.
The internet becomes a store in your, you know, in your computer and it has an incredible variety of of of offerings, too. Some of them don't lend themselves very well, it seems to me, to to retailing and and you know, and others do. Uh uh but Charlie's right. it it it's hard to predict exactly how it will turn out.
I would expect I would expect u you know automobile retailing to change in in some important ways and in part in very significant part influenced by the internet but I wouldn't you know I can't predict exactly how that'll happen but uh I don't think it'll look the same 10 or 15 years from now. you're confident that if you were working with a sum closer to a million dollars that you could compound that at a 50% uh rate.
For those of us who aren't saddled with the hundred billion dollar problem, uh could you talk about uh what types of investments you'd be looking at and where uh in today's market you think significant inefficiencies exist? Thank you. Yeah, I I think I may have been very slightly misqued, but I certainly said something to the effect been working.
I I think I I I talked about this group I get together every two years and how I pull that group as to what they think they could compound money at it with a 100,000, a million, 100 million, a billion, and other types of sums. And I pointed out how this group of 60 or so people that I get together with every couple years, how their expectations of return would go very rapidly down this slope.
Uh it is true. I think I I think I can name a half a dozen people that I think could compound uh a million dollars or at least they could earn 50% a year on a million dollars. Have that as an expectation if they needed it. I mean I'd have to they'd have to get their full attention to be working on the sum and those people could not compound money a h 100red million or a billion at anything remotely like that rate.
I mean there there are little tiny areas which if you follow what I said on the screen there on that Adam Smith's uh interview a few years ago. If you start with a and you go through and you just and you look at everything and you find small securities in your area of competence that you can understand the business, I think you can and and occasionally find little arbitrage situations or little wrinkles here and there in the market.
I think working with a very small sum that there is an opportunity to earn very high returns. But that that advantage disappears very rapidly as the money compounds because I you know from a million to 10 million I would say it would fall off dramatically uh uh in terms of the because there are there little you you find very very small things that that you know you can make it you're almost certain to make high returns on but returns on but you don't find very big things that in that category today.
Uh I'll leave to you the fun of finding them yourselves. I be terrible to spoil the treasure hunt. Um, and the truth is I don't look for them anymore. Every now and then I'll stumble into something just by accident, but but I'm not I'm not I'm I'm not in the business of looking for that. I'm I'm looking for things that Bergkshire could put put its money in and and that rules out all of that sort of thing.
Uh, Charlie. Well, I would agree, but I would uh I would also say that what we did 40 or so years ago was in some respects more simple than what you're going to have to do. Right. We had it very easy compared to you. It can still be done, but uh but it's it's harder now. You have to know more. I mean, just sifting through the manuals until you find something that's selling at two times earnings, that won't work for you.
It'll work. It's just you won't find any. Yeah. Uh, zone 10, please. Hello, my name's uh Tim Spear and I'm from Hertfordshire, England. I I was uh thinking in in Ben Graham's book, The Intelligence Investor, he spends uh the first couple of chapters discussing the level of the market and whether it was uh safe for investment.
I was wondering what he'd think of the market today. Well, we don't Charlie and I don't think about the market and and I and Ben didn't very much I think he made a mistake to occasionally try and place a value on it. uh we look at individual businesses and uh we don't think of stocks as as u little items that wiggle around in the paper and that uh have charts attached to them.
uh uh we think of them as parts of businesses and and it is true that currently we have great trouble finding businesses that we both like and where we like the managements and that they and find them at an attractive price. So we do not find bargains in this market among the larger companies that are that are our universe.
Um that is not a stock market forecast in any way, shape or form. We have no idea whether the market's going to go up uh today or next week or next month or next year. Uh we do know that we will only buy things that we think make sense in terms of the value that we receive for for Berkshire. And when we can't find things, the money piles up and when we find when we do find things, we pile in.
Um uh but the the stock market um I I I know of no one that has been successful at uh and and really made a lot of money predicting the actions of the market itself. I know a lot of people who have done well uh picking businesses and buying them at sensible prices. Uh and that's what we're hoping to do.
Charlie, how could you say it any better? Yeah, but the question is whether you can say it better, John, but I Okay, we'll go to zone two. That may be all you hear from him today. Get used to it.
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