원문 보기
Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talents. Nobody can take it away from you. They can run up huge deficits and the dollar can become worth far less. You can have all kinds of things happen, but if you've got talent yourself, uh, and you've maximized your talent, uh, you've got a terrific asset.
And that doesn't mean everybody should go to college, but it it does mean that any way you find to improve, communication skills are enormously important. I mean, I took the Dale Carnegie course that I paid $100 for, and it was worth a college degree. Well, cash is always a bad investment. Uh I mean, when people said cash is king a year ago, I mean, that's crazy.
I mean, cash wasn't producing anything and it was sure to go down in value over time. And then you always want to be sure you have enough. I mean, it's like oxygen. You want to be sure it's around, you know, but you don't need to have you don't need to have excessive amounts of it around. And cash uh we will always have enough cash around, but anytime we have surplus cash around, I'm unhappy.
I mean, I would much rather have good businesses than cash. And and uh we found a chance in the last year thereabouts to deploy. We we came in with something over 40 billion of cash and we've got about 20 billion now. And we've had some earnings. So we we put a lot of cash to work and I like that. No, I'd much rather own a good business uh than have cash.
Uh and it is a hedge against the dollar. Well, you can say all assets are a hedge against the dollar. I mean, but the all you know is that the dollar is going to be worth less 10, 20, 30 years from now. I say worth less, not worthless, right? You want to watch that? But it will be, you know, and that's that's true of almost every currency that I can think of.
Uh the question is how much uh it depreciates in value. The real test of whether you would like it as an investment is whether you would be happy if it never got quoted again and just in terms of what the asset did for you. Uh uh but that doesn't I would I will say this about gold. Uh if you took all of the gold in the world, it would it would roughly make a cube 67 ft on a side.
So if you took all the gold in the world, we could have a cube that went down there 67 ft 67 ft high and that would be the whole thing. Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today's market prices about $7 trillion. That's probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States.
So you can have a choice of owning a third of all the stocks in the United States or you can have a choice of owning that little block of gold which can't do anything but kind of shine there and make you feel like Midas or Greas or something of the sort. Now for $7 trillion there are roughly a billion far acres of farmland in the United States.
They're valued at about $2.5 trillion dollars. It's about half the continental United States is farmland. uh you could have all of the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobiles, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking around money. And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot uh cube of gold and looking at it all day, you know, maybe touching it, font fondling it occasionally, you know, and then saying, you know, do something for me.
And it says, I don't do anything. I just stand here and look pretty. and and and the alternative to that was to have all the farmland of the country, everything, cotton, corn, soybeans, seven Exxon Mobile, just think of that. And a trillion dollars of walking around money. I I you know, maybe call me crazy, but I'll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobile.
How did it come to your attention? How do you find a stuff like ProChina? I sit there in my office and I read an annual report which fortunately was in English and it described a very good company and uh told about the oil reserves told about the refining told about the chemicals everything else and I sat there and read it and I thought to myself this company is worth about 100 billion now I didn't look at the price first I look at the business first and try and figure out what it's worth because if I look at the price first I'll get influenced by that.
So I look at the I look at the company first. I try to value it and then I look at the price and if the price is way less than what I've just valued it at, I'm going to buy it. Important thing is to decide is to be able to define which ones you can come to an intelligent decision on and which ones are beyond your capacity to evaluate.
You don't have to be right about thousands and thousands and thousands of companies. You only have to be right about a company couple. I I met Bill Gates on July 5th, 1991. We were at Seattle and Bill said, "You've got to have a computer." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well," he said, "you can do your income tax on it." I said, "I don't have any income.
Virture doesn't pay a dividend." And he said, "Well, you can keep track of your portfolio." And I said, "I only have one stock." I said, "I I mean," and he says, "It's going to change everything." And I said, "Well, will it change whether people chew gum?" And he said, 'Well, probably not.' And I said, 'Well, we'll change what kind of gum they chew and not.
I said, 'Well, then I'll stick to chewing gum and you stick to computers. You know, I I don't have to understand all kinds of there's all kinds of business I don't understand, but there's thousands of opportunities there. I don't worry too much about the things I don't understand. If you understand some of these businesses that are coming along and can spot things on if you if you can spot on Amazon for example, I mean it's a tremendous accomplishment what Jeff Bezos has done.
And I tip my hat to him. He's a wonderful businessman. He's a good guy too. But could I have anticipated that he would be the success and 10 others wouldn't be? I'm not good enough to do that. But I don't fortunately I don't have to. You know, I don't have to form an opinion on on Amazon. And I did I did form an opinion on the Bank of America and I formed an opinion on Coca-Cola.
I mean, Coca-Cola's been around since 1886. There's 1.8 billion 1.8 billion 8 o servings of Coca-Cola products sold every day. Now, if you take one penny and get one penny extra, that's $18 million a day. and $18 million times 365 is 7 billion3 less 730 billion or or or 6 bill570 million. So annually 6 bill570 million from one penny.
Do you think Coca-Cola is worth a penny more than you know Joe's cola? I think so. So uh you know and I've got about 127 years of history that would indicate it. So those are the kind of decisions I like to make. And you may have an entirely different field of expertise than I would have and probably much more upto-date in terms of the kind of businesses that we're seeing evolve.
And you can get very rich if you just understand a few of them and and and understand their future.
Comments 0