저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
기업 투자는 시장 가격이 아니라 자산(사업)의 본질과 미래 현금흐름에 근거해야 한다. 재무제표만으로 판단하려면 사업 성격을 이해해야 하며, 현금을 창출하는 사업이 선호된다. 좋은 사업은 팔 필요가 없고, 가격이 합리적일 때만 매수하며 '가격 불문' 매수는 하지 않는다는 원칙을 강조한다. 이 영상은 특정 자산의 단기 가격 방향에 대한 예측을 제시하지 않는다.
다듬은 글
What metric would you look at to help you determine whether you should buy a company? Well, what we're doing in investment and what everybody is doing investment is they're laying out money now to get more money back later on. Now, let's leave the market aspect of the asset out. I mean, when you buy a farm, you really aren't thinking about what the market on it's going to be tomorrow or next week or next month.
you're thinking about how many what the how many bushels of of beans per acre can you get or corn per acre and what the price is likely to be. You're looking to the asset itself. And in the case you lay out the first question you'd have to make is do I understand enough about this business so that the financial statements will tell me the information that's useful to me in making a judgment about the what the future financial statements are going to look like.
And in many cases the answer would be no. probably in a great majority of the cases it would be no. But I've actually bought stocks the way you're describing uh uh many times and they were in businesses that I thought I understood where if I knew enough about the financial past, it would tell me enough about the financial future that I could buy.
And now I couldn't say the stock was worth X or 105% of X or 95% of X. But if I could buy it at 40% of X, I would feel that I had a this margin of safety that Graham would talk about and I could make a decision. Most times I wouldn't be able to make it. I wouldn't know. If you hand me a bunch of financial statements, you don't tell me what the business is.
There's no way I can make a judgment as to what's going to happen. It could have been a hula hoop business. It could have been a pet rock business. You know, on the other hand, it could have been Microsoft early on. So unless I know the nature of the business, the financial statements aren't going to tell me much.
Now if I know the nature of the businesses business and I see the financial statements, you know, if I see the financial statements on Wrigley, I know something about the business, you know, now I have to know something about the product before I can make that judgment. Uh but I we've bought lots and lots of securities, Charlie.
The majority of the securities Charlie and I have bought, we've never met the management and never talked to them. Uh but we have primarily worked off financial statements. our general understanding of business and some specific understanding of the industry and the business uh we're buying. Charlie,
yeah, I think there's one metric that catches a lot of people. We tend to prefer the business which drowns in cash. It just makes so much money that the main one of the main principles of owning it is you have all this cash coming in. There are other businesses like the construction equipment business of my old friend John Anderson and he used to say about his business, you work hard all year and at the end of the year there's your profit sitting in the yard.
There was never any cash, just more used construction equipment. We tend to hate businesses like that. Yeah, it's a lot easier to understand a business is mailing you a check every month that um but that's what an apartment house, you know, if you if you own an you can probably value an apartment property pretty well if you know anything about you know the city in which it's in and if and if you have the financial statements uh you could you can make a reasonable guess as to the what the future earnings are likely to be but that's because it is a business that gives you cash.
you know, you can there could be surprises in that arena as well. But but I I've bought a lot of things off financial statements. Uh there are a lot of things that I wouldn't buy, you know, if I knew that actually there are a lot of business I wouldn't buy if I thought the management was the most wonderful in the world because they they were in the wrong business.
It really doesn't make much difference. The question is in whether you want to have a company with high profitability but okay growth versus a company going global but lower profits. What are your considerations? It really makes no difference to us. We evaluate all kinds of businesses and what we do want is we want a business with a durable competitive advantage which both of the companies you named do and we want something we understand and we want a management that we like and trust and then we want a price that makes sense and we try to look at we probably looked at every confectionary business you know for 20 years that publicly owned where we get the figures and sometimes we find something where it's where we can take action and and and most of the time we don't when they're private businesses we don't determine uh you know a really good private business I always tell the manager the best thing to do if you got a wonderful private business is just keep it you know it's going to be worth more next year and the year after so there there's no reason to sell a wonderful business except for kind of extraneous factors it may be family situations it may be taxes it may be that there isn't another potential error or whatever it may be, but there's no need.
If you got a business worth a billion dollars, you don't need the billion dollars. You've got a business that's worth a billion dollars anymore than if you got a farm that's worth a million dollars. You already got the million dollars. You just happen to have it in the farm. And if you like farming, you keep it.
So, we never urge people [clears throat] to sell good businesses. We urge them to keep them. But there comes times when they do want to sell uh for one reason or another, maybe once every 20 or 50 years. And we do think if they have a business that they're enormously proud of, it's a really fine business, that they can keep more of the attributes that they love in that business by selling it to Bergkshire uh than they can by far selling it to anyone else.
So, we are the logical buyer. As you mentioned, I'm going to Europe. Eton has been wonderful about setting this up and we're going to make presentations not to try and get anybody to sell us their business. now because most people shouldn't sell us their business now. But we do want them to think of us when the time comes when an event occurs that does cause them to think about selling.
And we want to be on their radar screen. And we're more on the radar screen in the United States than we are in Europe. And we're going to try to correct that. But if you take a take a firm like you name and lint, you know, there's a price at which we would buy stock in lint. There's a price at which we would buy the whole business.
But it's unlikely to be selling there. You know, the if you think about hundreds and hundreds of wonderful companies, I get all these managers that just got a CEO yesterday who called me and you know, they want to tell me about their business and they imply their businesses or they think their business is the most attractive investment in the world.
It isn't the most attractive investment in the world. There are thousands of possible investments. And you know, the idea that all these managers are saying our stock is the most wonderful in the world is crazy. Uh but it's our job to look at hundreds of things and and in terms of marketable securities, buy what we think are the most attractive ones among the ones we understand and like as businesses and then occasionally we get the chance to buy an entire business.
We never do that at a bargain price. It just doesn't happen. People don't do that. The stock market gives you bargain prices. Individual owners won't. But when we get a chance to do that at a fair price, we like doing it. We love building Bergkshire with a bunch of businesses with favorable long-term economic characteristics, but the chance that any one of them, you know, we aren't going to look for a given confectionary company and say regardless of price, we're going to do this because we don't do anything when the phrase regardless of price enters into the sentence.
Charlie. Yeah. I uh watched a man build up a business in Southern California, which was a wonderful business, and the time came to sell it, and he devoted his whole life to creating it. He sold it to a known crook who was obviously going to ruin the business just because he could get a slightly higher price.
I think that's an insane way to live a life if you own a prosperous business. I think the better course is to sell to somebody you know is going to be a good steward of what you've created. Let's go to number nine, please.
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