저자: WarrenBuffett&CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
벤저민 그레이엄식 '담배꽁초(저평가 순운전자본 이하) 투자'는 추종자 증가로 기회가 줄어 확장성이 없다고 설명. 버핏은 좋은 기업을 합리적 가격에 사는 방향으로 전환했다고 회고. 현재 순운전자본 이하 종목은 거의 찾기 어렵다고 언급. 기업 구조/문화 변화로 과거 방식의 적용이 제한됨. 자산 가격 방향에 대한 직접적인 1~3개월 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
Everyone tried to do the same thing, and of course, when everyone started doing it, the "low-hanging fruit" that Ben Graham had in abundance because of the Great Depression disappeared. By the way, regarding Graham, one important point: Graham's model was not scalable. The real money was in the really great companies, right?
that pulled you up and up and up and up. It is now almost impossible to find stocks trading below their working capital . In any case, what was so interesting about Ben Graham's approach was that he taught you to find a few good things and stick with them for a very long time. But "a long time" for him meant several years.
It wasn't decades. And he's been doing this for 40 or 50 years in a small investment partnership with incentives and so on. And his investors, who were generally not very wealthy, made a good profit with him , even after he took his share. They were making good profits, higher than others after deducting commissions.
So he offered a valuable product and taught that you need to invest in assets. It could have been a terrible business, but they were cheap enough. They were still acceptable if they had enough assets per share. So you were getting at least twice as many assets as you paid. And he just kept moving from one company to another among the best available options, good or bad.
Yes. This was his system. And she worked for 50 years. His clients had good profits. Well, after he became so famous, partly because of Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett's success, everyone tried to do the same thing . And of course, as everyone tried to be a little "Ben Graham," the competition became increasingly fierce.
And that's exactly what happened now. And those "low-hanging fruit" that Ben Graham had plenty of because of the Great Depression disappeared. And if you just try to jump from one undervalued bad business to another and pay all the expenses, it just doesn't work well enough for the people who are investing to even bother with it.
Here's how it works now. But in Graham's time, it was the best way possible. Well, your refinement of this approach was to simply look for good business. I saw immediately that Graham was wrong. Right. And you're looking and you understood that the real money was in the really great companies, right?
Which pulled you up and up, and up, and up, and up. Is this who it is? But I never thought we would ever have one. That would be in the hundreds of millions at Berkshire. I could not have predicted, when Warren and I started from our humble beginnings, that we would one day reach a hundred billion, let alone several hundred billion.
It was an amazing event. What happened that you didn't anticipate? What led to such success? But we became a little less crazy than most people, and a little less stupid than most people, and that really helped us. Also, we were given much more time than others because something kept us alive until we were 90, and that gave us a long way from our meager beginnings all the way to 90.
These are two things that actually happened. And, of course, over time we got smarter. We were joining better and better companies. We have become increasingly aware of the bad things that can happen and how easily they can sneak up unnoticed. And we avoided them, avoided them even more thoroughly when we were old than when we were young.
And that's it , it all worked. When you found Ben Graham, he was unconventional and very intelligent. And of course, that was very attractive to you. And then, when you realized that it worked and you could make a ton of money just sitting on your ass , you, of course, instantly became a fan. And , and, and that's why I still like it, actually.
I mean, but the world changed before he died. Bill Graham, I mean , Ben Graham, recognized that the same way of finding undervalued companies wouldn't necessarily work all the time and under all conditions, and of course that's how it worked for us. We gradually moved to buying better companies when they were undervalued, instead of buying terrible companies when they were undervalued.
And of course, it worked out pretty well for us. And, and, but Ben Graham, he, he survived that game that he played personally most of the time. He lived until most of it was gone. I mean , try to find a company that sells for a third of its working capital and realize that it can easily be liquidated and distributed $3 for every dollar of market value.
Good luck if you can find these in today's markets. And if you find them, they're so small that Berkshire won't get any benefit from them anyway . So we had to learn another game. And that's a lesson for all the young people in the room. If you are going to live a long life, you must continue to learn.
Yes. What you knew before is never enough. So if you don't learn to constantly review your previous conclusions and find better ones, why would you...I always use the same metaphor. You're like a one-legged man in a butt-kicking competition . Yes. Yes. Yes. If anyone has suggestions for another metaphor, please send them to me.
Graham , by the way, one important point. Graham's method was not scalable. That is, you couldn't work with really big money. And when I worked at Graham Newman Corp, he was the meter among all the analysts, you know... his intelligence was higher than anyone else at the time. But our investment fund had $6 million , and the partnership working in tandem with the investment company also had about $6 million.
So we had $12 million to work with. You can adjust for inflation and all that, but it was a pittance. It did n't scale, and the truth is, Graham didn't care because he wasn't really looking to make a lot of money for himself. So he had no reason to look for something that could last forever and get bigger and bigger, and therefore the usefulness of Chapter 8 in terms of looking at stocks as a business is of immense value.
The usefulness of Chapter 20 on safety margin is of immense value. My name is Martin Olrey, and I'm from Houston, Texas. My question to you is this . In your annual report this year, in your letter to shareholders, you mentioned that 50 years ago you met Benjamin Graham and that he had a significant influence on your life, especially on your investment success.
Moreover, you have previously stated that The Intelligent Investor is by far the best book ever written about investing. One of the central tenets of the book was that if you bought a group of stocks, say 10 or 20, that were trading at 2/3 or less of their net current assets, you would be provided with a margin of safety along with a satisfactory rate of return.
Today, if you found 10 or 20 stocks trading at 2/3 of their net current assets, would you be inclined to buy those stocks for your own portfolio rather than for Berkshire Hathaway? And second question: since I mentioned the book, I was wondering what books you and Mr. Munger have been reading recently that you could recommend.
Thank you. Well, regarding your first question, if you found such a group—and I don't think you will—you would probably make a pretty penny buying it. But not because the companies themselves have performed so well over time , but because there would probably be a lot of corporate activity in such a group: either management would take them off the stock exchange, or there would be acquisitions or something similar.
But such stocks priced below working capital are now almost impossible to find. And if you were to enter a market where there were a lot of them, you would probably find great companies that are also selling for much less. And we would prefer a cheap but great business. I don't think you'll find anything like this on the market with high prices or anything like that.
I don't think you'll find many stocks priced below working capital. There is too much money now to stimulate deals before they really get to that point. But it was a method. That was 50 years ago. Is Walter Schloss still here? Walter, are you here? Stand up if you are here. I met Walter 50 years ago when I met Ben Graham.
And even though I know Walter came this year, he already knows everything I talked about, so he could have left. Walter actually practiced securities investment much closer to the original. He has been running the partnership for what seems like 46 years. And he did it mostly with the types of stocks that Ben was talking about back then.
And he has results that are absolutely sensational, much better than those of people who are advertised, who go on TV shows and do all that. He did this, as I often call it, with " stubborn" companies. You know, you get one free puff —that's all, but they do n't cost anything. These were the situations with a price below working capital.
Walter had to expand his approach a bit, but this is a great result over a long period of time— 46 years is a very significant period of time. So I think if you found a group like that and you operated as a group—and Ben always emphasized group operations, because when you're dealing with mediocre companies but you expect a certain portion of them to be absorbed, you're better off having a whole group of them.
Whereas if you are dealing with great companies, you only need a few. But I think if we see that period again, we will be very active, but it will not be in these kinds of securities. Charlie . Yes. And there is another change. Once upon a time, if a business stopped working , you could take the working capital and put it in the pockets of the shareholders.
Uh , and now, as you can see from all the restructuring costs, when things are going really badly, a significant portion of the working capital belongs to someone else. The whole culture has changed. If you have a small business in France and you're tired of it, like Marks and Spencer, the French will say, "What made you decide to take your capital out of France?" French workers work in this business .
And they don't care, they don't say it's your working capital. Take it away when the business is no longer profitable for you. They say this is our working capital. The whole culture of attitude towards this has changed. Not completely, but significantly compared to Ben Graham's time. There are many reasons why the investment, er, let's say, characteristics of one era do not transfer perfectly to another.
The list that was published—I forget whether it was in the 1951 edition of Securities Analysis or the 1949 edition of The Intelligent Investor—there was a list of companies. There was Sack Lol, Marshall Wells, Cleveland Worst Mills, Foster Wheeler, and all of these companies were working capital companies, selling at three to four times their earnings.
And you know, if you bought a group of such stocks, you would make a good profit. But, you know, you definitely don't see that in companies of any size today. And I've seen several lists of tech companies that are selling below cash, but they're set on spending that cash, and in a year or two it might be gone. This was a slightly different type of company on Ben's list at the time.
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