You're listening to Book Insights, brought to you by Memoed, finding and simplifying the world's most powerful ideas to fit into your lifestyle. Each episode is a deep dive into a non-fiction bestseller that can change your life or make you think. In around 30 minutes, you'll learn all about a book that offers wisdom for your life, career, or business. So get ready to live and work smarter, better, and happier with Book Insights.
He's one of the most interviewed persons on the planet. His advice is considered a golden goose within the realms of investment and finance. When the market is involved, everybody wants to hear what he's got to say. His name is Warren Buffett. Here he is on CNBC. The own stocks like you don't farm or apartment house, you don't get a quote on those every day or every week. And I think you look at the business and the value of American business depends on how much it delivers and cash to its owners over, between now and judgment day.
Warren Buffett is arguably the most successful investor of all time. He's consistently in the top 10 richest people in the world. Countless books have been written about him, but the essays of Warren Buffett is the only edited, compendium of writings from the sage of Omaha himself. Lawrence Cunningham's 1997 book is a carefully chosen selection of Buffett's famous annual letters. He wrote these to shareholders in the annual report of Berkshire Hathaway, the fantastically profitable holding company that he's co-managed since the 70s.
Berkshire produced returns that way outpaced the rest of the market for years. Its rate of return has only normalized in recent years as it missed out on the tech stock boom. Buffett has always steered clear of tech investments, although his company has more recently taken a 4% stake in Apple. And here's his advice to Apple CEO Tim Cook when asked by Fox Business on whether to get into investing in Tesla Motors. Berkshire's the largest business is insurance. It uses the cash float of premiums to buy outstanding companies outright, some of which we'll discuss below. It also owns large stakes in many publicly listed companies, like Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, and United Airlines. Shares in the company are famously the most expensive in the world. Its Class A shares are currently over $300,000 each. The company doesn't pay out dividends and never had a share split, preferring to keep reinvesting profits in snapping upgrade companies.
Berkshire has no strategic plan, which means it's not fixed in any one direction. It owns many companies and is worth billions, but because it sits on a huge cash mountain it can move like a speedboat when it wants to, instead of an aircraft carrier. Berkshire's annual revenues from all its companies and stocks is an astonishing $242 billion as of 2018. Buffett apprenticed under Benjamin Graham, author of the Intelligent Investor in New York during his 20s. Other than that, Buffett has always lived in Omaha, Nebraska. His approach to investing is a long way from Wall Street in every sense. Shareholders eagerly anticipate his letters. They contain many simple nuggets of wisdom, often delivered through amusing anecdotes or pithy sayings. He once ruffully apologized for the expense of maintaining a private jet, which he dubbed the indefensible.
In this book insight, we'll learn three key lessons that emerge from Buffett's writings. First, look for underlying value. Second, markets are risky, good businesses are not, and finally, buying for keeps. We'll also look at some lessons for the small investor that come from Buffett's experience before assessing his overall legacy.
The key to winning in the stock market is not in predicting the market's direction, but in knowing the value of businesses, irrespective of their current quoted price. Buffett criticizes investment advisors who waste their time making forecasts about the economy. You can never see into the future. It's more important to find good businesses that remain good for years to come. He also dismisses efficient market theory, which says there's no point in analyzing and calculating the value of a business, because the stock market, working with perfect efficiency, always reveals a company's value through its share price. Buffett says prices only reflect value most of the time.
Having total faith in them prevents people from actually trying to understand businesses. Buffett's mentor Ben Graham once said, in the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it's a value-weighing machine. Graham referred to the stock market as Mr. Market. Mr. Market has incurable emotional problems. This causes his estimation of the business's values to go up and down all the time, but you could take advantage of Mr. Market's depressions and euphoria. Stock market prices for companies are driven by emotion, not truth. The truth about a company lies in its operating results, rather than its current stock price or its glossy forecasts.
Berkshire often makes its best acquisitions when fear is at its highest, or when sentiment about the market is at its lowest. For the investor in fundamentals, these are the times to buy.
Many of Buffett's family and close friends have invested in the majority of their net worth and Berkshire. He says, I never believed in risking what my family and friends have, and need in order to pursue what they don't have and don't need. There's no point in losing a night's sleep over a stock play just to gain a bit more money. Better to be very sure about an investment, so sure that the ups and downs of its stock price won't worry you. You know the company's intrinsic worth, and that the market will sooner or later recognize this. This is the essence of value investing.
Buying stocks is generally considered risky, but Buffett's method reduces risk to a bear minimum. Buffett famously doesn't invest in industries he doesn't fully understand. People criticize him for not getting into the technology stock's boom of the late 1990s. Instead, he bought companies that produce boring things like paint, bricks, and carpets. His golden rule is to invest in your circle of competence. This means your areas you know something about, and where you understand how the companies make their money. IBM's Thomas Watson once said, I'm no genius, I'm smart in spots, but I stay around those spots. That pretty much sums up Buffett's philosophy.
Here is Buffett's opinion on the cryptocurrency boom from an interview with CMBC. And when you buy nonproductive assets, all you're counting on is whether the next person is going to pay you more because they're even more excited about another next person coming along, but the asset itself is creating nothing. Buffett seeks as much certainty as possible. This generally rules out fast moving industries where there's greater uncertainty. He appreciates the growth to the economy that new ideas and technologies bring, but he takes a different view as an investor. In one letter he wrote, our reaction to a fermenting industry is much like our attitude towards space exploration. We applaud the endeavor, but prefer to skip the ride.
Buffett is also critical of mergers. Most Wall Street deals seem to happen simply because many people are paid to make deals. Do the companies involve, often having been lovingly built over many decades benefit? Despite the rosy prediction when the marriage is made, they often don't. Buffett quotes Peter Drucker talking to Time magazine. Deal making is exciting and fun, and working is grubby. Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work. Deal making is romantic, sexy. That's why you have deals that make no sense. Instead of art of the deal, follow the art of the real.
In this part, we've started our discussion on the essays of Warren Buffett, edited by Lawrence Cunningham. These are letters Buffett wrote to his shareholders at Berkshire, the company He-Co-Manages. We've learned that in investing, the most important thing is to find out the underlying value of a company. It beats trying to predict market growth, the economy, and various other unpredictable measures. We also learned to invest in your inner circle of competence where you understand something of the field and how businesses in it make their money. It discourages interest in experimental or new fields and mergers, which are sexy but usually pointless.
Next time, we'll look at Buffett's method of buying for keeps. Then we'll hear some of Buffett's advice to small-time investors and reflect on his legacy. Enjoying this episode of Book Insights? If so, keep listening and learning. Use the collection of over 100 titles you can read or listen to now at memodeapp.com-insights. That's m-e-m-o-d-a-p-p.com-slashinsights.
Warren Buffett is one of the most influential investors in history. Yet, if you ask him, he's very modest about what he does. Here he is in an interview on CNBC. You are buying when you buy it, and it's in general owners or Berkshire House and Warranty. You are buying something that over time is going to return cash to you. Maybe a long time in terms of Berkshire, but it will be bigger numbers. And those are the coupons and it's up to you. Your job is an investor to decide what you think those coupons will be.
Until the essays of Warren Buffett, the wit and wisdom of the sage of Omaha has never appeared in Book Form. His annual letters to shareholders of Berkshire are compiled and edited by Lawrence Cunningham. Today, we're continuing describing the three major takeaways. Last time we went over the importance of the underlying value of a company. Then we learned to invest within your understanding of a company and market. Today, we'll go over how Buffett encourages buying for keeps. Then we'll reflect on what Buffett's legacy truly reveals to us.
Berkshire buys many smaller companies outright along with its investments in large corporation stocks. Firms such as Borishine's Fine Jewelry, Nebraska Furniture Mart and Seize Candies are often family enterprises lovingly built up over many years. The owners wish to realize some gains for all their hard work, yet won't just sell to anyone. When Berkshire steps in, everyone wins.
Berkshire gets a fantastic business that will keep growing indefinitely. The owners usually stay to keep running it, doing what they love. They receive guarantees that the business won't be merged, sold off, broken up, or moved from its home base. Buffett wants owners to have a strong emotional attachment to their company. It suggests that company has honest accounting, respect for customers, pride in product, and loyal and effective management in place. In short, they have integrity.
It remarks that after some mistakes, I learn to go into business only with people whom I like, trust and admire. The strategy is a remarkably good filter for making investment decisions. He said it also ensures an extraordinarily good time. Working with people you don't like is like marrying for money. Probably a bad idea under any circumstance, but absolute madness if you're rich.
Buffett intends to keep companies he buys. He'll weather the company's rough patches and low returns in Berkshire's bottom line. The company then tries to get the problems fixed. In his 1985 annual report, Buffett wrote, no matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. This outlook runs counter to the approach of most other investment companies. They usually quickly ditch underperforming assets.
Buffett tells the CEOs of each company he buys to run the business under three major points. First, as if they owned 100% of it. Second, it's the only asset their family owns or will ever own. And third, it can't be sold or merged for at least 100 years. Imagine the long-term productivity of such an outlook.
Buffett wrote, we like to do business with someone who loves their company, not just the money that a sale will bring him, though we certainly understand why they like that as well. When this emotional attachment exists, its signals important qualities will likely be found within the business.
Berkshire has the longest investment horizon to be found in the public company universe. Investors in the company are expected to hold onto their stock for many years, even passing it onto relatives after their death. In Berkshire's owner's manual, Buffett writes, we hope you visualize yourself as part owner of a business that you expect to stay with indefinitely.
The company's annual meeting in Omaha is designed for the faithful. It's part information and part entertainment, and attracts tens of thousands of stockholders from all around the world. The small investor can pick up many lessons from Buffett's essays, here are a few.
Invest only in a company whose business you understand. Invest only in companies whose earnings will surely be higher in the future than now. Look for companies that have a durable competitive advantage, like a newspaper that's the only newspaper in a city. Even if their stock price fluctuates, this advantage will naturally outperform other stocks.
When you buy a stock, buy it for the long haul. If you aren't willing to own a stock for 10 years, don't even think about owning it for 10 minutes. Always follow Benjamin Graham's three-word investing mantra, margin of safety. Don't invest in debt-laden companies. The smallest hiccup and earnings can crash it to the ground.
Buffett instead likes to invest in what he calls the inevitable. There are companies whose products will still be bought 10, 20, 30 years from now, and whose brand is so famous it gives them the lion's share of the market. For example, Berkshire Hathaway has had large holdings in Coca-Cola and Gillette for many years. Though distribution, manufacturing processes, and product innovation will evolve, people will still be drinking coke and needing to shave for our investment lifetimes, and they'll turn to the trusted names.
Seize Candies has been operating since the 1920s. Though the company has changed, the basic reason why people buy boxed chocolate has not. People come back to the name they know and trust. If you find a small number of companies with a strong competitive advantage, they're selling for reasonable prices, why diversify? Put more money into a smaller number of carefully chosen stocks, means you can relax.
Berkshire Hathaway may make only a handful of investments in the stock market in a year. Sometimes, none at all. Often, the smartest investment move, Buffett has always said, is inactivity. Berkshire Hathaway has no strategic plan. Makes no promises to its investors and doesn't produce any forecasts about the economy or the markets.
At the end of each year, investors are told how the company fared, and Buffett can be disarmingly honest. In the past he has happily admitted mistakes, like buying US air before deregulation caused profits to slide. He'll also point out that many of his greatest investment mistakes have been purchases he didn't make. He once said, for Berkshire's shareholders, myself included, the cost of this thumb sucking has been huge.
Though most of the essays in the book are a few years old now, their lessons have indated. Buffett established his investing style decades ago, and though it underwent refinements, the philosophy remains. This message that if you work with people you like and trust, and the financial fundamentals are sound, prosperity will take care of itself. This is an eccentric view to hold in the financial industry, and yet Berkshire's astounding success proves its wisdom.
We tend to think that anything related to business or money requires us to be hard-nosed, but Berkshire developed a system for finding people who care. Buffett is known for disagreeing with other tycoons who want to lower corporate taxes. He's quite happy to pay a tax rate of 35%. He feels that, in a capitalist society, that rewards financial success above all others. It's fair that he has to give a fair amount of it back. This redistributed wealth goes to people whose success is not related to money, like nurses and teachers.
What will happen when Buffett dies? His vast personal fortune is already being divested into Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But this doesn't include Berkshire itself. He and Munger created a set of business genes. These are philosophies and practices that will outlive them no matter who's running the company. Their greatest legacy? Demonstrating a way of investing that anyone can follow to their profit.
We're concluding our discussion on the essays of Warren Buffett, edited by Lawrence Cunningham. These pages are from Buffett's much anticipated letters to his shareholders. He puts out every year. As we've learned, there's never a dull moment.
We've gone over three key insights. Last time, we went over how to look for the underlying value. Then we discussed how you can minimize risk by gambling on good businesses rather than unpredictable ones. This time, we've gone over how you can buy for keeps. Never investing in something you wouldn't care to keep in the near or distant future. And how Buffett invests in caring business owners. We've also explored how Buffett's greatest legacy may be as easy to adopt methods that achieve so much success.
We'll finish with a look at the man describing what makes him different from everybody else. People would rather gamble. I mean, the idea that you can double your money in six months, that's just going to, it's why people go to the raises, why they go to Vegas, you know, whatever it may be. They even know the odds are against them and they still do it. I mean, it's a strong instinct to want to get rich fast. And I don't know how to do it.
In short, gambling will make you poor. Only investing in a nation's prosperity and a good businesses can make you rich. Thank you for listening to Book Insights. Check out the rest of our content at memo.com.
Please keep in mind that the information provided in or through our book insights episodes is for educational and informational purposes only. It's not intended to be a substitute for advice given by qualified professionals and should not be relied upon to disregard or delay seeking professional advice.