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uh max i don't remember having a crisis of confidence of course if you buy and then the price goes down and you buy more and the price goes down further if you're not questioning and a little scared then you're immoral uh but you know i i think that one of the important things that i have realized and incorporated into my thinking is that you're never going to get it exactly right sometimes if we're lucky we know what's gonna happen we never know when so if you accept that then it kind of gets you off the hook that means you buy today at nine it goes to eight you buy more you buy at eight it goes to seven you buy more you don't say oh my god i bought it nine it went to eight i must be a and i must be wrong you understand the nature of this and you know warren buffett says i like hamburgers uh and when hamburgers go on sale i eat more hamburgers so you know if you did an analysis at nine and if the analysis was sound and it goes to eight you should buy more uh now of course in our business there's always a question of when does resolve uh turn into hubris and there's no easy answer but it always goes back to rechecking your analysis and ultimately to your analysis being correct uh which of course i mean it's your analysis you always think it's correct uh but you have to have be very vigilant and you have to believe that it's correct for good reason uh but you know i wrote a memo you probably since you know them all you know i wrote one in i think it was february of 16 called what does the market know and what happened is in 16 the market got off to its worst start in history and it was really collapsing all markets and so i wrote a memo called on the couch because i said that every once in a while the market needs a trip to the shrink and that it was really the victim of uh irrational fear so i went on bloomberg the next day usually when i put out a memo i go on bloomberg the next morning and the hosts kept peppering me and saying well if stocks are collapsing isn't that a cell signal isn't that a celsius so i went back to my office and i wrote a memo that day called what does the market know and this is really a very important concept the market is supposed to be efficient no everything we know it doesn't know everything and i believe there are times when it doesn't know anything and and uh you know i said you can't let falling prices be a sell sick because falling prices are the equivalent of investments being put on sale how can they be a sell signal if anything they're a buy signal etc so i went through this whole business on that subject and then i said and you know what however when we you know uh bought high-yield bonds in 1990 when they were collapsing and when we uh sold into the tech bubble in 99 and when we bought uh in the period you're describing etc uh i never want to give anybody the impression that we don't do it with trepidation you know you can have if you're if you have great advantages you can have a strong intellect and you can act on the basis of your uh intellectual analysis and you can control your emotion uh but that doesn't make you right and there's always the possibility that you're wrong and we must bear that in mind and and uh so you know and since we're only human when we do these things when we buy in october 008 it terrifies us but if you think about it buying at the low point has to terrify you i guess there's a sense of and i think you've said this that having raised money seeing the valuations that you saw it was a case of if not now then when yeah and then well well look a couple days lima went bankrupt on the 15th and as i recall i put out a memo on something like the 18th or 19th entitled what now or maybe it was now what but but but uh you know what i said in there by the way believe me if you weren't there it was impossible to figure out what was going to happen it was impossible to prove that the financial system of the world either would or would not collapse in general we can't prove anything about the system uh in the future and that's particularly true when we're going through an event that's never occurred before so there was nothing intelligent to say about the future of the financial system at that time so what made us buy well number one objectively speaking the things we were buying were extremely low prices we were buying the senior debt of companies that had been the subject of lbos one or two years earlier and we were buying the senior most debt at prices where if the companies turned out to be worth a third or a quarter or a fifth of what these great buyout firms had paid a year earlier we would have broken and we figured out well you know who i'm talking about but we said well sometimes like when you go to buy a car and you negotiate with the car salesman you know you say well i probably could have gotten another five percent off right i don't negotiate car prices in this country okay good so so so you sometimes you come away and you say i probably could have gotten another five percent off but did you ever say well i probably paid too high by a factor of four you know i bought that car for 60 000 if i'd only negotiated a little i probably could have paid 15.
you know so similarly we concluded that the great private equity firms who had done all that due diligence probably did not overpay by a factor of three four or five uh but then the other thing is we reached the conclusion that what i said what i wrote is if we buy today and the financial system falls apart it doesn't matter what we did but if we don't buy and the financial system doesn't fall apart then we didn't do our job so we should buy and that was it's that's about as profound as it got you
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