원문 보기
to invest your life savings in and run as a business you think about the same sort of things you think about the competitive position and what it would look like five or ten years from now and how you were going to run it who was going to run it for you and how much you had to pay and that's exactly what we think of as when we look at a stock because the stock is nothing other than a piece of a business could you explain the criteria you look at when selecting your stocks well we look at and i'm glad you came i i hope there's a large group i got a note i think from your teacher on that the uh we look at it the criteria for selecting a stock is really the criteria for looking at a business uh we are looking for a business we can understand that means they sell a product that we think we understand and we understand the nature of their competition what could go wrong with it over time and then when we find that business we try to figure out whether the economics of it means the earning power over the next 5 or 10 or 15 years is likely to be good and getting better or poor and getting worse but we try to evaluate that future stream and then we try to decide whether we're getting in with some people that we feel comfortable being in with and then we try to decide what's an appropriate price for what we've seen up to that point and as i've said last year what we do is simple but not necessarily easy uh the uh what the checklist that is going through our mind is not not very complicated uh knowing what you don't know is important and sometimes that's not easy and knowing the future is definitely uh it's impossible in many cases in our view and and it's difficult in others and sometimes it's relatively easy and we're looking for the ones that are relatively easy and then we and then when you get all through you have to find it at a price that that's interesting to you and that's very difficult for us now although there have been periods in the past where it's been a total cinch uh and that's what goes through our mind if you were thinking of buying a service station or a dry cleaning establishment or a convenience store in omaha to invest your life savings in and run as a business you think about the same sort of things you think about the competitive position and what it would look like five or ten years from now and how you were going to run it who was going to run it for you and how much you had to pay and that's exactly what we think of as when we look at a stock because the stock is nothing other than a piece of a business charlie yeah if if finance were when finance is properly taught uh it should be taught from cases where the investment decision is easy and the one i always cite is the early history of national cash register company and that was created by a fanatic who who bought all the patents and had the best sales force and the best production plants and he was a very intelligent man and passionately dedicated to the cash register business and of course the cash register business was a godsend to do retailing when it when cash registers were invented so that was the pharmaceuticals of of a former age if you read the an early annual report prepared by patterson who was ceo of national cash register an idiot could see that this was a talented fanatic very favorably located and that therefore the investment decision was was easy if i were teaching finance i would collect a hundred cases like that and that's the way i would teach the students we have that annual report what was that 1904 or something charlie but it's a really a classic report because patterson not only tells you why his cash register is worth about 20 times what he's selling to for the people but he also tells you that you're an idiot if you want to go in competition with him but it's a classic it is just a talk but but no intelligent person can read this report and not realize that this guy can't lose
Comments 0