원문 보기
If you invest like people gamble in casinos, you won't do very well. What really works is long-term investment. But if what you enjoy is the thrill of investing, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, like someone gambling in a casino, then you're not my type of person. I like investors who think long-term, who study deeply, find something with real potential, and buy patiently.
The sooner the Chinese people stop gambling and start investing patiently for the long term, the better their performance will be. The world is full of foolish gamblers, and they will never fare as well as patient investors. This can be learned to a certain extent, but some of it comes from upbringing.
In the United States, we use the expression "prolonged attention." It's when someone is able to maintain focus on a game or activity for a long enough time to find the solution. And the Chinese have this prolonged attention span. This is an extremely valuable quality, because you are more likely to arrive at the right answer if you think deeply and diligently for a long time.
It's curious that a people with such a capacity for focus enjoys gambling so much, which is quite inefficient. Many people believe that there is a truth in the market, as if the market reveals something simply through its movements. But that's not how Berkshire Haw or I invest. We have a vision about the intrinsic value of what is being traded, and we only buy when we believe it is worth more than we are paying.
Our goal is to make a long-term investment, and we do n't care at all about gamblers who speculate in the market. It's a huge waste of time. If you really want to get rich. If something becomes more valuable over time, at some point someone smart will realize it and start buying it. Therefore, it is natural that something becomes more valued as its actual value increases.
If you want to buy a new car, a Chevrolet, it costs X. If it's a used one that's 10 years old, it costs maybe 1/3 of X. Everyone understands that new is worth more than old. People recognize the value over time. Speculators may make mistakes in the short term, but over time value prevails. Let's imagine that at Berkshire we had only done one thing: invest the money year after year.
We started with $0.00 and after a while we accumulated 10 million. People would notice this growth. They would see that the company now has 10 million and naturally the value of the shares would rise. Why? Because over time, the market recognizes the true value of things. Or as Ben Graham said, in the short term, the market is like a voting machine driven by opinions and emotions, but in the long term it behaves like a scale and weighs true value.
And the beauty of it is that it continues to work even when you're not doing anything. A large company will continue to profit while you simply wait. A mediocre company doesn't do that. You are essentially leveraging a long-term force that is working in your favor. Average companies end up giving you headaches and modest profits.
You buy, the price goes up a little, you sell, you look for another one—it's a lot of work. But if you buy an excellent company for the right price, you just stand there . My Berkshire Hathaway shares cost me 16 each. Today they are worth almost 300,000 per share. It was a great investment. It took time, but it was worth it.
And it was a long-term investment, with people I trusted, in companies I admired, and I simply waited for over 50 years. And look, it worked out really well . There are many stories like this. Lilu and I invested together in China about 15 years ago. We bought a lot of paper and sold very little . Basically, the Manger family owns three stocks.
Berkshire, Costco, and the bottom of Lilu's. I am 95 years old and I only keep these three. I was once offered 300 shares of Bell Ridge Oil. I bought it, I had the money on hand, then they offered me another 100 at the same price, but I would have had to sell something or borrow money . So I only bought the 300.
That decision cost me about 5 billion dollars. I would be 5 billion richer if I had bought all 1500. The problem is the comparison. Buying the first few was easy, buying the rest would be a hassle. This contrast distorted my judgment. It was one of the dumbest decisions of my life as an investor. The stock price wasn't expensive.
It wasn't expensive just because it was a little more work for me to buy it. But that small inconvenience was the trigger that made my mind make the wrong decision. Furthermore, the company owner was eccentric and drank excessively, but the oil field didn't drink. In other words, I allowed two psychological factors to get in the way.
I thought too much about how much the owner drank and too little about the quality of the asset. I thought too much about my own difficulty in paying and too little about the opportunity. Even so, you see, you can make a huge mistake and still move forward. Some people experience a terrible marriage and then have a wonderful one later.
Many things can be fixed. The Chinese market will continue to generate many successful investors. Look at Hong Kong, full of Chinese people living in a capitalist system, with a developed capital market . This will spread throughout China. With more respect, size, and maturity, there will be fluctuations, of course, but the long-term trend will be towards more progress, more prestige, and higher prices.
The Chinese who got rich in Hong Kong weren't the gamblers. It was the long-term investors who found good assets and held them for many years. And this will also work in mainland China. It's not the gamble that brings results, it's identifying a good investment and holding onto it with conviction. That's curious.
The New York Times asked me why the Chinese are so interested in Berkshire and in me. Part of it was the book. But why did the Chinese like the book? Because it recalls the teachings of Confucius, and China takes that very seriously. They value modesty, even among the rich and powerful. They value continuous learning, dignity, reason, and progress with age.
And these values don't belong only to China. It turns out that Buffet and I seem to take confusionism seriously. That's why they like us . Another reason for our popularity in China is simple. We really like the Chinese, and everyone likes those who like them. Now you might wonder, why did the Chinese become so popular with two guys from OmaHa?
This is a question that many Chinese people don't understand. If you look at China from the perspective of an American citizen, this is what you see. When the Chinese first arrived here, we were trying to build the transcontinental railroad, crossing the Sierra Nevada in winter, along terrible paths through the steep mountains.
And nobody could do that. It was impossible. People were dying. It was simply too difficult. So they brought in about 50,000 Chinese workers, the so-called culis, who at the time were practically treated as slaves. They took these workers up the mountain in the winter and said, "Build the railroad." And they built it.
The Americans alone could n't do it. It's clear that this made a very positive impression. Now, cut to the present day. There was a huge influx of Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and so on . And what did these Asians do in America? They entered and quickly became doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and achieved enormous success.
If you go to a symphony orchestra, for example, which in the past had no Chinese musicians, today, on almost every difficult instrument that requires years of practice, you look at the musician and see a Chinese face. Of course, these people become popular. They are excelling in our country and not causing problems, they are simply winning.
That's why, naturally, we like the Chinese. And I think that many Chinese people living in China don't realize the image of success that China has in the United States, precisely because Chinese-Americans have done so well here. Now, the most surprising thing, something that nobody expected and that nobody talks about, but you should write about it in your magazine, was this: due to extreme poverty and overpopulation in China, American couples who couldn't have biological children started going there to adopt Chinese girls from very poor families in all the major cities.
from the United States. People soon realized they were getting better babies by adopting these rejected girls from remote farms in China. These children, on average, fared even better than the biological children of these couples. So, everyone wanted to adopt a child, and they didn't want an American child; they wanted a Chinese girl.
And what happened? These girls did well. Most Chinese people have no idea how far this has gone. This happened in every American city. Almost all private schools are full of these Chinese girls who were left behind in rural China and who are now getting top marks and winning awards. And they are doing incredibly well, even though they come from backgrounds of extreme poverty.
And it's all over the Americas. You go to northern Minnesota and guess what? They are playing the most difficult instruments in the orchestra. เฮ
Comments 0