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others with a more secular approach who have also been very successful let's take Warren Buffett of Omaha Nebraska if you would put $10,000 in 1965 into his company Berkshire Hathaway you would have 1 million today Warren was a chapter in my 1972 book super money so I've known him a long time he learned his trade with Ben Graham the original dean of security analysis at Columbia University I don't think Warren has ever been on television until this interview and he has certainly never courted publicity but recently he got a lot of it when he emerged as the key figure in the takeover of ABC by capital cities Warren will be the largest shareholder of the new company and his own net worth is now far in excess of 500 million dollars but when I spoke with him last fall in his office in Omaha he very characteristically made his investment style seem so perfectly simple the first hold on investment is don't lose and the second hold on investment is don't forget the first rule and that's all the rules there are I mean that if you buy things for far below what they're worth and you buy a group of them you basically don't lose money or on what do you consider the most important quality for an investment manager it's the temperamental quality not an intellectual quality you don't need tons of IQ in this business I mean you have to have enough IQ to get from here to downtown or mall but but you do not have to be able to play three-dimensional chess or be in the top leagues in terms of bridge playing or something of a sort you need a stable personality you need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd because this is not a business where you take polls it's a business where you think and Ben Graham would say that you're not right or wrong because a thousand people agree with you and you're not right or wrong because a thousand people disagree with you you're right because your facts in your reasoning or right one what do you do that's different than 90% of the many managers who are in the market certainly most of the professional investors focus on what the stock is likely to do in the next year to avail all kinds of all kinds of arcane methods of approaching that but they do not really think of themselves as owning a piece of a business that the real test of whether you're investing from a value standpoint or not is whether you care whether the stock market is open tomorrow if you're making a good investment in a security it shouldn't bother you if they close down the stock market for five years all the ticker tells me is the price and I can look at the price occasionally to see whether the price is outlandish ly cheaper outlandish lehigh but what prices don't tell me anything about a business business business figures themselves tell me something about a business but the price of a stock doesn't tell me anything about a business I would rather value a stock or a business first and not even know the price so that I'm not influenced by the price in establishing my valuation and then look at the price later to see whether it's way out of line with what my value is so Buffett chose to stay in this world Omaha Nebraska where corn grows just minutes from downtown now Omaha is a nice town but nobody claims it's a world financial center here the only thundering herd is actually on four feet don't you five home aha a little bit to beat the track for the investment world well believe it or not we get mail here and we get periodicals and we get all the facts needed to make decisions and unlike Wall Street you'll notice we don't have 50 people coming up and whispering in our ears that we should be doing this or that this afternoon you appreciate the lack of stimulation i hear i like the lack of stimulation we get facts not stimulation here how can you stay away from Wall Street well if I were in Wall Street I'd probably be a lot poor at you get over stimulated in Wall Street and you hear lots of things and and you may you may shorten your focus and a short focus is not conducive to to long profits and here I can just focus on what businesses are worth and I don't need to be in Washington to figure out what the Washington Post newspaper is worth and I don't need to be in New York to figure out what some other company is worth it's it's it's simply it's an intellectual process and unless the most static there is in that an intellectual process really the better off you are what is the intellectual process intellectual processes is defining your level defining your area of competence and valuing businesses and then within that area of competence finding whatever sells that the at the cheapest price in relation to value and there are all kinds of things I'm not competent to value well there are few that I am competent to value have you ever bought a technology company no I really haven't in 30 years of investing not one I haven't understood any of my so you haven't ever owned for example IBM we're never owned I believe Marvin's company I made a sensational company but I haven't known IBM and so here is this technological revolution going on and you're not gonna be a participant right past me is that all right with you it's okay with me well I don't have to make money in every game I mean I don't know what cocoa beans are gonna do I don't you know I I there are all kinds of things I don't know about and that may be too bad but you know why should I know all about them having worked that hard on them in securities business you literally every day have thousands of the major American corporations offered you at a price and a price that changes daily and you don't have to make any decisions you have to make that nothing is forced upon you so you there are no called strikes in the business the pitcher just stands there and throws balls at you and if you're playing real baseball and it's between the knees and the shoulders you either swing or you got a strike call I need to get too many called I knew you're out in the securities business you sit there and they throw us steal a 25 and they throw General Motors at 68 you don't have to swing at any of them they may be wonderful pitches to swing at but if you don't know enough you don't have to swing and you can sit there and watch thousands of pitches and finally you get water right there where you want it something that you understand and then you swing and so you might not swing for six months you might not swing for two years it's net boring it would it would bore most people and and certainly boredom is is a problem with most professional money managers if they if they if they stray sit to sit out an inning or two not only do they get somewhat antsy but their clients are starting yelling to start yelling swing you bum you know from the from the stands and that's very tough for people to do when you're your approach seems so simple why doesn't everybody do it well I think partly because it is so simple that the academics for example focus on on all kinds of variables partly make a cadet Exuma professors right yeah the data and business school sure that and the data is there so they focus on whether if you buy stocks on Tuesday and sell them on Friday your better offer people I'm in election years and sell them in other years you're better off or if you buy small companies there are all these variables because the data are there and and they learn how to manipulate data 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 just are dying to to utilize them in some way but they aren't important if I were being asked to participate in a business opportunity with a make any difference to me whether I bought it on a Tuesday or Saturday or an election year or something it's not what a businessman thinks about and buying businesses so when I think about it when buying stocks because stocks are just pieces a business system
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