저자: CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
복리의 핵심은 조기 시작과 긴 시간 축적에 있으며, 첫 10만 달러 모으기가 가장 어렵다고 주장. 합리성·기회주의·과소지출이 초기 자본 형성에 도움. 투자는 좋은 사업의 지분을 매력적 가격에 사는 것이 본질이며 이 원칙은 100년 뒤에도 같다고 강조. 가치평가는 국채금리를 기준으로 하되 해자와 경영진 품질로 현금흐름의 확실성을 판단하고, 공식보다 사업 이해가 중요하다고 주장. 코카콜라 사례를 들어 브랜드 해자를 설명.
다듬은 글
The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people. And I would argue that the people who get there relatively quickly are helped if they're passionate about being rational, very eager and opportunistic, and steadily underspend their income grossly.
I think those three factors are very helpful. But that's the only way to do it. I mean, you have to buy or little pieces of businesses called stocks, and you have to buy them at attractive prices, and and you have to buy them you have to buy into good businesses, and that advice will be the same 100 years from now in terms of investing.
That's That's what it's all about. And you can't expect anybody else to do it for you. People will not tell you about wonderful little investments. There's It's not the way the investment business is set up. If you were starting out again today in your early 30s, what would you do differently or the same in today's environment to replicate your success?
In short, Mr. Buffett, how can I make $30 billion? Start young. Charlie's always said that the big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill. So, we started a very early age in rolling the snowball down, and of course, the snowball nature of compound interest is it behaves like a snowball of sticky snow, and the trick is to have a very long hill, which means either starting very young or living very to be very old.
I know, I would do it exactly the same way if I were doing it in the investment world. I mean, if I were getting out of school today and I had $10,000 to invest, I'd I'd start with the A's. I would start going right through companies, and I I probably would focus on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller sums, and there's more chance that something is overlooked in that arena.
And as Charlie has said earlier, it won't be like doing that in 1951 when you could leaf through and find all kinds of things that just leapt off the page at you. But that's the only way to do it. I mean, you have to buy businesses or little pieces of businesses called stocks and you have to buy them at attractive prices and and you have to buy them and you have to buy into good businesses and that advice will be the same 100 years from now in terms of investing.
That's That's what it's all about. And you can't expect anybody else to do it for you. People will not tell you about uh wonderful little investments. There's It's not the way the investment business is set up. When I first visited GEICO in January of 1951 and I subsequently went down to Blyth & Company, actually the one other firm that was a leading Guyer & Company that was a leading analyst in insurance and I discovered this wonderful thing and I see what these great investment houses that specialized in insurance stocks said and they said I I didn't know what I was talking about.
You know, they they wasn't of any interest to them. You've got to follow your own You've got to learn what you what you know and what you don't know and within the arena of what you know, you have to just pursue it very vigorously and and act on it when you find it and you can't look around for people to agree with you.
You can't look around for people to even know what you're talking about. You know, you have to think for yourself. And if you do, you'll find things. The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people.
And I would argue that the people who get there relatively quickly are helped if they're passionate about being rational, very eager and opportunistic and steadily underspend their income grossly. I think those three factors are very helpful. Anyone who's read your writings knows that you look for great management and economic moats, as you call them, that enable companies to raise prices and margins.
I'd like you to drill down with us and tell us what to you are the signs of great management and economic moats. Furthermore, do you try to put a dollar value on those management and moats and other intangibles when you value companies? And if so, can you guide us through your thinking there? And lastly, I'm interested in how you pick your discount rate.
I read that you just assign the Treasury rate, and not sure if that's right, but I'd love you to talk about your discount rate, and I'd really appreciate as much detail about your thinking as you can give us. We do we think in terms of the Treasury rate, but as I said earlier, that doesn't mean we think once we've discounted something of the Treasury rate that that's the right price to pay.
We use the Treasury rate just to get comparability across time and across companies. But a dollar earned from a horseshoe company is the same as a dollar earned from an internet company in terms of the dollar. And so, it is not worth more based on the whether somebody's it comes from somebody named dot com in or or somebody that named, you know, the old-fashioned horseshoe company.
The dollars are equal, and our discount rates may reflect different experience different expectations about future streams of income, but they don't reflect any difference in in terms of whether it comes from something that the market is all enthused about or otherwise. The moat and the management are part of the valuation process in that they they enter into our thinking as to the degree of certainty that we attribute to the stream of income, stream of cash actually, that we expect in the future, and the amount of it.
I mean, it is it's an art in terms of valuation of businesses. The the formulas get simple at the end, but if you and I were each looking at the chewing gum business, we all know Wrigley, so I use Wrigley's fairly often in class. Pick a figure that you would expect unit growth of chewing gum, you know, to grow in the next 10 or 20 years.
Give me your expectations on how much pricing flexibility you have, how much danger there is that Wrigley's share of market is dramatically reduced. You can go through all of that. That's what we go through. That is In that case, we are evaluating the moat. We are evaluating the price elasticity, which interacts with the moat in certain ways.
We're evaluating the likelihood of unit demand changing in the future. We're evaluating the likelihood of the management being either very bright with the cash that they develop or being very stupid with it. And all of that gets into our evaluation of what that stream of money looks like over the years.
But the value of how the investment will works out depends on how that stream develops [clears throat] over the next 10 or 20 years. We had a question earlier today that made certain suppositions about what could happen at Berkshire and the formulation was was exactly right. The question of what numbers to use is another question, but the formulation was proper.
And that formulation the moat enters into that. If you have a big enough moat, you don't need as much management. You know, it gets back to Peter Lynch's remark that he likes to buy a business that's so good that an idiot can run it because sooner or later one will. Well, I mean, he was saying the same thing.
I mean, he was saying that what he really likes is a business with a terrific moat where nothing can happen to the moat. And there aren't very many businesses like that. But then so you get a you get involved in evaluating all these shavings. This, not the cherry version, but the regular version, this one has a terrific moat around it.
There's a moat even in this in the container. There was some study made as to what percentage of the people could identify blindfolded what product they were holding just by grabbing the container. And there aren't many that could score like Coca-Cola in that respect. So, here you've got a case where that product [clears throat] has a share of mind.
There's 6 billion people in the world. I don't know what percentage of them have something in their mind that's favorable about Coca-Cola, but it would be a huge number. And the question is 10 years from now is that number even larger? And is the impression just a slight bit more favorable on average billions of people that have it.
And that's what the business is all about. If that develops in that manner, you've got a great business. I think it's very likely to develop in that manner, but that's that's my own judgment. I think it is a huge moat at Coca-Cola. I think it varies by different parts of the world and all of that. And I think on top of it it has a terrific management.
But that there's no formula that gives you that precisely, you know, that says that the moat is 28 ft wide and 16 ft deep, you know, or anything of the sort. You have to understand the businesses. And that's what drives the academics crazy because they know how to calculate standard deviations and all kinds of things, but that doesn't tell them anything.
And what really tells you something is if you know how to figure out how wide the moat is and whether it's likely to widen further or or shrink on you. Charlie? Well, you aren't sufficiently critical of the academic approach.
Comments 0