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Others with a more secular approach have also been very successful. Take Warren Buffett of Omaha, Nebraska. If he had invested $10,000 in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, in 1965, he would have a million today. Warren was a chapter in my 1972 book, Supermoney, so I've known him for a long time. He learned his trade from Ben Graham, the original dean of securities analysis at Columbia University.
I do n't believe Warren had ever been on television until this interview, and he certainly never sought publicity , but he recently gained a lot when he emerged as the key figure in Capital Cities' acquisition of ABC. Warren will be the largest shareholder in the new company, and his own net worth now far exceeds $500 million.
But when I spoke with him last fall in his Omaha office, he made his investment style seem, very characteristically, perfectly simple. The first rule of investing is not to lose. And the second rule of investing is not to forget the first rule. And those are all the rules that exist. I mean, if you buy things for much less than they're worth and you buy a bunch of them, you basically do n't lose money.
Warren, what do you consider to be the most important quality for an investment manager? It is a temperamental quality, not an intellectual one. You don't need tons of IQ in this business. I mean, you have to have a high enough IQ to get from here to downtown Omaha, but you don't have to be able to play three-dimensional chess or be in the big leagues of bridge or anything like that.
You need a stable personality. You need a temperament that derives neither great pleasure from being with the crowd nor from being against it. Because this is not a business where surveys are conducted. It's a business where you think. And Ben Graham would say that you are neither right nor wrong just because a thousand people agree with you.
And you're not right or wrong just because a thousand people disagree with you. You are right because your facts and your reasoning are correct. Warren, what do you do that's different from 90% of the money managers in the market? Certainly, most professional investors focus on what the stock is likely to do in the next year or two.
And they have all sorts of, you know, arcane methods for dealing with that, but they do n't really think of themselves as owning a part of a business. business. The real test of whether you 're investing from a value perspective or not is whether you care if the stock market opens tomorrow. If you're making a good investment in a stock, you shouldn't be bothered if the stock market were to close for 5 years.
The ticket only tells me the price. Yes. I might occasionally check the price to see if it's ridiculously low or ridiculously high, but prices don't tell me anything about a business. The figures for the business itself tell me something about the business, but the price of a share tells me nothing.
I prefer to value a stock or a business first without even knowing the price, so that it does n't influence my valuation, and then look at the price later to see if it's too far off from my valuation. So Buffett chose to stay in this world, Omaha, Nebraska, where corn grows just minutes from downtown.
Now, Omaha is a nice city, but nobody claims it's a global financial center. And here, the only noisy herd actually walks on all fours. Don't you think Omaha is a bit out of the ordinary for the world of investing? Well, believe it or not, we receive mail here, we receive posts, and we get all the data necessary to make decisions.
And unlike Wall Street, you'll notice we don't have 50 people whispering in our ear that we should do this or that this afternoon. You appreciate the lack of stimulation here. I like the lack of stimulation. Here we receive data, not stimulation . It's true. How can he stay away from Wall Street? Well, if I were on Wall Street, I'd probably be much poorer; One gets overstimulated on Wall Street, hears many things, and can short- sighted, and a short-sighted approach does not lead to long-term gains.
And here I can simply focus on what businesses are worth. I don't need to be in Washington to determine the value of the Washington Post newspaper, and I don't need to be in New York to determine the value of another company. It is simply an intellectual process. And the less static there is in that intellectual process, the better for you.
What is that intellectual process? The intellectual process consists of defining your level, defining your area of competence when valuing companies and, within that area, finding what is sold at the cheapest price in relation to its value. And there are all sorts of things that I'm not qualified to judge.
But there are some that I am competent to assess. Have you ever bought a technology company? No, the truth is no. In 30 years of investment, not one? I did n't understand any of them. So he's never owned, for example, IBM? Right? A wonderful company. I mean, it's a fantastic company, but I haven't owned IBM.
And so, here is a technological revolution underway and you're not going to be a part of it. It has walked right past me. Does that sound good to you? That seems fine to me. Are there any games where I don't have to earn money? In other words, I don't know what's going to happen to the cocoa beans. I don't know, there are all sorts of things I know nothing about.
And it might be a shame, but, you know, why should I know everything about them? I haven't worked that hard on it. In the stock market, you are literally offered thousands of shares from major U.S. corporations every day at a price that changes daily. And you don't have to make any decisions. He has to take it...he's not being forced to do anything.
So, there are no strikes called in this business. The pitcher just stands there and throws balls at you. And if you were playing real baseball and the ball passes between your knees and shoulders, you either hit it or they call a strike. If too many people sing to you, you're out. In the stock business, you sit there and they throw you US Steel at 25, and they throw you General Motors at 60, and you don't have to hit either of them .
They may be wonderful pitches, but if you don't know enough, you shouldn't hit. And you can sit and watch thousands of pitches, and finally you get one right where you want it, something you understand, and then you hit it. And uh... So, I might not hit for 6 months . He might not hit a bat for 2 years.
Isn't that boring? It would bore most people, and boredom is certainly a problem for most professional money managers . If they, if they, if they try to sit down for an inning or two, not only do they get a little restless, but their customers will start yelling, they'll start yelling, "Hit, bum!", you know, from the stands, and that's a very difficult thing for people to do .
Warren, your approach seems very simple. Why doesn't everyone do it ? Well, I think it's partly because it's so simple that academics, for example, focus on all sorts of variables, and partly because... By academics do you mean finance professors? Yes, the data is there. In business schools? Sure, and the data is there.
So they focus on whether buying stocks on Tuesday and selling them on Friday is better, or whether buying them in election years and selling them in other years is better, or whether buying small companies is better. All these variables exist because the data is there and they have learned to manipulate it.
And as a friend of mine says, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail, and once you have these skills, you're dying to use them somehow, but they're not important. If I were asked to participate in a business opportunity, would it make any difference to me if I bought it on a Tuesday, a Saturday, in an election year, or something like that ?
That's not what a businessman thinks about when buying businesses. So why think about it when buying stocks? Because shares are just parts of businesses.
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