저자: CharlieMunger/발언맥락상WarrenBuffett과의대담으로추정되나자막상명시없음 · 외국인
요약 보기
버크셔는 좋은 아이디어에 집중 투자하는 방식을 택하며 소액 분산을 선호하지 않는다. 과거 가격이 오르자 매도해 기회비용을 잃은 실수를 인정한다. 본질가치는 기업이 미래에 창출할 현금흐름을 할인한 값이며, 버크셔는 보고서로 주주가 이를 계산하도록 돕는다고 주장한다. 아이오와주의 주식투자 기금 제안에는 부정적이다. 캘리포니아의 산재·소송 사기 문제를 비판하며 기업 부담과 일자리 이탈을 지적한다.
다듬은 글
Well, we ordinarily don't like small positions. Yeah. We we like to go in heavy. I mean, it if if if we want to invest in a business through the stock market, we want to put a lot of money in. You know, we we do not believe in a little of this and a little of that. So uh at our present size, we're limited primarily by the availability of the quantity we want rather than than restricting ourselves based on some percentage of of uh a total portfolio.
Uh, I can't, it's very hard for me to think of a stock we quit on in terms of buying except because we were going to run into some 10% limit where we would get liable for short swing profits or become insiders or that sort of thing. But we almost never want to quit. Isn't that right, Charlie? Well, not unless the price goes up.
Yeah. And of course, that's where we've made our big mistakes. I mean, we have or I've made the big mistakes actually. Uh I there have been a couple of things that we knew enough to buy that were in our circle of competence where we could have bought lots of stock except it went up a little bit and then we we faded because of the price but we didn't fade because we didn't want to put more than an X dollars in.
Uh if we find an idea that we want to put $500 million in, we probably would be even happier if we could put three or four billion in. uh you know we we good ideas are too scarce to be parsimmonious with once you find them. Yeah. Having narrowly averted the mistake of being unwilling to pay up at seas capital.
We've gone on and made the same damn mistake several times with respect to marketable securities. We evidently learn very slowly. It cost us many many many billions of dollars too. Now those are opportunity cost billions. They don't show up in the financial statements. But the amount of money that's been blown by dumb decisions at headquarters at Bergshire Haway is awesome.
Well said. Yeah. Is the state of Iowa literally creating a a billion dollar fund to invest in equities on behalf of the That's what's being proposed. Is that right? Charlie, what do you think about that? That's a new one to me. I think it's a pretty dumb idea. Yeah, he lives in California. That's why I had a mansion.
I live right on the border here. So I Yeah, I would I mean uh I guess I guess Iowa doesn't have any bonded debt. So So I'm not sure what they probably wouldn't be creating a margin account, but but I I would think that most states or municipalities would want to let the citizenry invest on its own and would not want to be taxing people in order to set up an equity fund.
Uh uh so I that strikes me as a pretty novel idea. Charlie in California certainly the of the investment management partnerships use all kinds of political contributions to finagle their way into managing state pension funds etc etc. It's not a pretty scene. To the extent that Iowa can dampen it down I think they're better off.
The question on intrinsic value, you know, we we've written about it in reports. I don't think there's much additional to say. I mean, the the intrinsic value of any financial asset, you know, is the stream of cash that it will produce between now and judgment day discounted by uh an interest rate that equates between all the different possible assets.
That's true. an oil royalty, a farm, an apartment house, an equity, a business operation, you know, a lemonade stand. And uh that you have to decide what sort of businesses that you think you can understand well enough to make a some kind of reasonable calculation. It it's not scientific. Uh but it is it it it it is the intrinsic value.
I mean, the fact that it's it's fuzzy to calculate doesn't mean doesn't mean that it's not the proper way to think about it. And at Bergkshire, you've got two questions. You've got the question of what the businesses we own now are worth. And then since we redeploy all the capital they generate, you have to figure out what you're willing to assume about what we do with the capital.
And you can look back and say that 35 years ago or so that people perhaps underestimated what would be done with the capital that was generated. So that it looks very cheap if you look back on it now. But we're in a whole different game now with huge amounts of capital. And uh you have to you have to make a decision as to whether the billions and billions and billions of dollars we generate will be deployed in a in a way that creates lots more cash later on.
And it's what Charlie and I think about but we can't give any prediction on it. Charlie. Yeah. I think our reporting considering the complexity of the enterprise has now constituted is better than that of any similar enterprise I know in terms of enabling a shareholder to calculate intrinsic value. So, I think we've done better than anybody else.
And we do it conscientiously. And if you ask, will we improve from here? I don't think so. We've worked we we we've worked hard at at at doing what you're talking about. And uh it but even working hard at it, I mean, we we we've given you the data we would want ourselves. We don't know the answer. Uh but we do know it's what you have to think about and and we do it when we when we buy uh Mlanes, when we buy Clayton homes, when we buy anything, we are attempting to look out into the economic future and say what kind of cash can this business generate over time?
How sure do we feel about it? And how does the purchase price compare with that? And if we feel we're getting a if we we have to feel fairly good about our projections, won't feel perfect because we no one knows the answer precisely, but we have to feel pretty good about our projections. And then we have to have a purchase price that's rational in relation to those.
And we get some surprises in both directions. Actually, if you go way back, we had more pleasant surprises than when we would have expected, but we won't get them from this point because mostly because of size and also because the world's a little more competitive. Charlie, nothing more. California has instit in institutionalized fraud, fraudulent chiropractors, fraudulent lawyers, fraudulent what have you.
and they put this enormous burden on on on business and of course eventually the jobs will will leave. Uh I had a friend who took a plant away from uh Texas where he had workman's compensation expense of 30 odd percent and took it to Ogden, Utah where it went to 2%. So fraud allowed to run builds on itself.
And then you got all these lawyers and lobbyists who like the fraud and uh and chiropractors and god knows what. And and so it's a it's a major problem. And in California, it's gotten so bad that my guess is there will be some reform even with the twothirds Democratic legislature. What would change in terms of the shareholder situation?
Well, that's harder because if you take the worst of the plaintiff's lawyers, half the time they're suing somebody that's behaved terribly. Now, they're suing in a process where a lot of money is paid out, as you say, on a socialized basis and doesn't really go to the people who were hurt. So, they're like uh a public scold that gets paid an enormous sum out of the public.
But uh but certainly a lot of the defendants in these cases that are screaming about the plaintiff's bar uh have done some very regrettable things. So I think that gets very hard to figure out what should be done. The present system is crazy and uh I don't know how I'd improve it. You could easily improve it if you could count on government being rational and fair. But how do you do that?
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