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my dad reading the paper one day and he was looking at the financial Pages which have a different aspect from the comics or the sports pages I said what what is that and he said well that's the financial pages I said what is it he said well these are companies and I said what do those numbers mean and he said well he said you see that plus one quarter he said that means that if you owned that company yesterday and he said you can see 10 that's the that's the price so $10 to own one share of that company and if you had it you have 25 cents more today than you had yesterday and so you made money and I thought a second I said well what do you have to do to make it go up like that and he said nothing it does it by itself and I said well this is this is something I need to know about because I've been out mowing the grass for three hours for 25 cents and I figure if I can go to sleep and wake up and have the same money then that's something I need to understand and so I said I said this is what I want to do I said you can make money without doing any work and I only realized a lot later that you can get the market rate of return without doing any work but actually an excess rate of return does require work came to Lake Mason in 1981 after his stin as a treasurer for steel and company made Refractories for the steel and cement industry and that's where I be that's where I began actually managing portfolios uh we had a we had a portfolio we also had uh that we managed internally and then we hired money managers as well externally so I got a chance to evaluate money managers and also run some internal money we're value investors we we always have been and that's part of the reason I came to Lake Mason it was one of the very few Regional brokerage firms didn't have a money management division when I got here that um that actually had an investment philosophy that was valuation driven I read about Warren Buffett in the uh in the Adam Smith book The Super investor uh uh super money and um was immediately attracted to that style read about Ben Graham read the intelligent investor and that's what I was doing at the at the company I was with as well using that kind of an investment style so that fit naturally and um you know I agree with I agree with Warren that when you explain value investing to somebody they get it or they don't if they don't understand the principles of buying something at a lot less than it's worth you're not going to convince them of the of the merits of that approach because it's psychologically very hard to do so you're typically going against the going against the crowd where we I think have have parted ways uh at least initially from other value managers was in our ability to look at technology names so in the mid1 1990s um when uh the market was under a lot of pressure we took a look at at Tech and we did it because you could look at something like Dell was trading at five times earnings the 25% return on Equity most value guys were buying steel and paper companies and cement companies at the time it was unclear to why you know unless unless these were really shaky businesses why I wasn't better off doing doing that which led us into the study of the economics of technology and that's I think what really um where things really changed for us we got involved with the Santa Fe Institute out in Santa Fe which uh was in uh guy named Brian Arthur there who's a focused on the economics of technology and he pointed out that that the nature of technology is such that um uh that while he agreed with Buffett that Technologies change a lot Intel has new Chips every you know couple of years IBM or somebody has new computers uh that the that the market shares of technology companies are remarkably stable and so whereas Buffett you know Marvel's correctly at G U at um Nike 47% market share K's 48% market share gillette's you know 65 or 70% market share Microsoft's market share is 85 or 90% Intel is 85 or 90% Cisco in their addressal markets 85 Plus per.
so and if you if you think about if you think about uh antitrust actions ever since the Sherman Act they've all been directed at what were then technology companies so that let us to understand that you could actually invest in these things if you if you understood the economics of the business as well and that's what we started doing in the mid1 1990s and that then led us into the internet companies which have even more remarkable abilities to ear High Returns on Capital and even more remarkably stable market shares so that's uh that's been a competitive advantage of ours I think since then now many of many other value investors now followed us into those things Mason Hawkins just buying a lot of eBay Chris Davis buying Amazon and uh Google and so but I think that it's come about that that I think many value investors have understood that these businesses can be analyzed and um and they don't change so fast that you can't get your arms around them
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