芒格箴言选摘（段永平）
2012-06-20 15:29阅读：
以下内容摘自段永平网易博客。 转过来，随时读读，学习进步。
好文章，好思维。 
，谢谢。
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这是我的一个西雅图的朋友发给我的，放上来没事自己可以看看。
Charlie Munger’s Quotes =?Mungerisms
Here is my list of “Mungerisms”.Over time I have used many of them
to my advantage and the rest are in my list as reminders of ways I
could improve my condition or as cautions against folly.I hope you
too find them just as helpful as I do.
If you don’t know who Charlie Munger is , here is a small
introduction: http://wealthymatters.com/
2011/02/12/charlie-munger/
(1)”Most people are too fretful, they worry too much.Success means
being very patient, but aggressive when it’s time.”
看完这条可不要too
aggressive哈。芒格本人曾经就因为用margin给自己带来过大麻烦。我这个朋友也喜欢用margin，非常危险。
(2)”Using [a stock’s] volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk
to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk
of inadequate return. Some great businesses have very volatile
returns – for example, See’s [a candy company owned by Berkshire]
usually loses money in two quarters of each year – and some
terrible businesses can have steady results.”
(3)”I think that, every time you saw the word EBITDA [earnings],
you should substitute the word “bullshit” earnings.”
(4)“Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I’ve never seen
him do one.”?”It’s true,” replied Buffett. “If the value of a
company doesn’t just scream out at you, it’s too close.”
就是毛估估的意思？
(5)”If you buy something because it’s undervalued, then you have to
think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its
intrinsic value. That’s hard. But if you buy a few great companies,
then you can sit on your ass. That’s a good
thing.”
这条大概要花很多年才能真明白，大概就是未来现金流折现的意思。我觉得自己现在大概有点明白了。
(6)”We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a
California S&L [Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought
at a discount to liquidation value.”
(7)”For society, the Internet is wonderful, but for capitalists, it
will be a net negative. It will increase efficiency, but lots of
things increase efficiency without increasing profits. It is way
more likely to make American businesses less profitable than more
profitable. This is perfectly obvious, but very little
understood.” 我也这么认为：internet
实际上是就业杀手，需要很多年才能消化。但是，如果能看懂这个变化则会非常有收获。
(8)”Virtually every investment expert’s public assessment is that
he is above average, no matter what is the evidence to the
contrary.”
这可是芒格说的哈。
(9)”Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit
on your ass.”
(10)”Warren spends 70 hours a week thinking about investing.”
(11)”People calculate too much and think too little.”
投资上看起来确实如此。
(12)”Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your
life, it’s you. A victimization mentality is so
debilitating.”
(13)”The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find
some things you can just sit with.”
对美国人尤其如此，外国人投美股有点不同。
(14)”If you’re going to buy something which compounds for 30 years
at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way
that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum.
In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to
pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then
your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15%—or only 9.75% per year
compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5%
does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is
truly eye-opening…”
同上句。
(15)”The number one idea, is to view a stock as an ownership of the
business [and] to judge the staying quality of the business in
terms of its competitive advantage. Look for more value in terms of
discounted future cash flow than you’re paying for. Move only when
you have an advantage. It’s very basic. You have to understand the
odds and have the discipline to bet only when the odds are in your
favor.” 很稀饭这句。
(16)”Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for
people to go broke. You’ve made an enormous commitment to
something.You’ve poured effort and money in. And the more you put
in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think,”
Now it has to work. If I put in just a little more, then it ’all
work…. People go broke that way —because they can ’t
stop,rethink,and say,’ I can afford to write this one off and live
to fight again. I don’t have to pursue this thing as an obsession
—in a way that will break me .’ “
想起沉入成本。还想起老巴说的，如果是个坑就别再往下挖了。看看有多少人在给自己挖坑就明白了。
(17)”…in terms of business mistakes that I’ve seen over a long
lifetime, I would say that trying to minimize taxes too much is one
of the great standard causes of really dumb mistakes. I see
terrible mistakes from people being overly motivated by tax
considerations. Warren and I personally don’t drill oil wells. We
pay our taxes. And we’ve done pretty well, so far. Anytime somebody
offers you a tax shelter from here on in life, my advice would be
don’t buy it.”
让我想起那些为避税而搬离加州的有钱的朋友们，为了省那些未来不属于自己的钱而搬到一个自己未必喜欢的地方好像有点滑稽。当然，搬过去
后又喜欢上了那是有智慧的表现啊，至少我还没听说哪位搬家后说新地方不好的。
(18)”I believe that we are at or near the apex of a great
civilization….In 50-100 years, if we’re a poor third to some
countries in Asia, I wouldn’t be surprised. If I had to bet, the
part of the world that will do best will be Asia.”
或许50-100年也许稍微短了一点。
(19)”To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on
what they’ve sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one
thinks a bond’s value will soar to the moon.” “Imagine if every
pension fund in America bought Rembrandts. Their value would go up
and they would create their own constituency.”
(20)”It’s crazy to assume that what’s happening in Argentina and
Japan is inconceivable here.”
(21)”REITs are way more suitable for individual shareholders than
for corporate shareholders. And Warren has enough residue from his
old cigar-butt personality that when people became disenchanted
with the REITs and the market price went down to maybe a 20%
discount from what the companies could be liquidated for, he bought
a few shares with his personal money. So it’s nice that Warren has
a few private assets with which to pick up cigar butts in memory of
old times – if that’s what keeps him amused.”
(22)”Smart people aren’t exempt from professional disasters from
overconfidence. Often, they just run aground in the more difficult
voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they
have superior talents and methods.”
(23))”The whole concept of the house advantage is an interesting
one in modern money management. The terms of the managers of the
private partnerships look a lot like the take of the croupier at
Monte Carlo, only greater.”
(24)”There are always people who will be better at some thing than
you are.You have to learn to be a follower before you become a
leader.”
(25)”We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the
time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one
of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force
yourself to consider arguments on the other side. If you can’t
state arguments against what you believe better than your
detractors, you don’t know enough.”
(26)“I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum
wage, so I’ve seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my lifetime.
Did it ruin the investment climate? I think not.”
(27)”A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what
you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage,
etc.”
就是坚持不做不对的事情的意思。
(28)”There are two types of mistakes: 1) doing nothing[We saw it,
but didn’t act on it]; what Warren calls “sucking my thumb” and 2)
buying with an eyedropper things we should be buying a lot
of.”
(29)”Checklist routines avoid a lot of errors. You should have all
of this elementary wisdom, and you should go through a mental
checklist in order to use it. There is no other procedure that will
work as well.”
还是坚持不做不对的事情的意思。
(30)”Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly
and unpredictable.”
(31)”Finding a single investment that will return 20% per year for
40 years tends to happen only in dreamland. In the real world, you
uncover an opportunity, and then you compare other opportunities
with that. And you only invest in the most attractive
opportunities. That’s your opportunity cost. That’s what you learn
in freshman economics. The game hasn’t changed at all. That’s why
Modern Portfolio Theory is so asinine.”
这游戏没变过，在哪里都一样。
(32)”The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than
through your own hard experience, the better.”
“Well, some of our success we predicted and some of it was
fortuitous.”
(33)”The general assumption is that it must be easy to sit behind a
desk and people will bring in one good opportunity after another —
this was the attitude in venture capital until a few years ago.
This was not the case at all for us — we scrounged around for
companies to buy. For 20 years, we didn’t buy more than one or two
per year. …It’s fair to say that we were rooting around. There were
no commissioned salesmen. Anytime you sit there waiting for a deal
to come by, you’re in a very dangerous seat.”
这个有点累。
(34)”Our biggest mistakes, were things we didn’t do, companies we
didn’t buy.”
(35)”You can progress only when you learn the method of
learning.”
(36)”It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us
have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of
trying to be very intelligent.”
小聪明和大智慧的差别，也是坚持不做不对的事情的意思。
(37)”Berkshire’s past record has been almost ridiculous. If
Berkshire had used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch,
it would be five times its current size.”
经常有很多人用很多margin，然后去和BRK比某年的回报，但没多少人可以把30年的总回报拿来比的，30年以后可能还是如此。
(38)”It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to
accumulate $1 billion worth — equal to 7% of the company. It’s very
hard to accumulate major positions.”
(39)”All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on
earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return”
(40)”If you have only a little capital and are young today, there
are fewer opportunities than when I was young. Back then, we had
just come out of a depression. Capitalism was a bad word. There had
been abuses in the 1920s. A joke going around then was the guy who
said, ‘I bought stock for my old age and it worked — in six months,
I feel like an old man!’ “It’s tougher for you, but that doesn’t
mean you won’t do well — it just may take more time. But what the
heck, you may live longer.”
(41)”Regarding the demographic trend called Baby Boomers, it’s
peanuts compared to the trend of economic growth.? Over the last
century, [our] GNP is up seven times.? This was not caused by Baby
Boomers, but by the general success of capitalism and the march of
technology.? Those trends were so favorable that little blips in
the birth rate were not that significant.??We can keep social peace
as long as GNP rises 3% annually – this can pay for spending by
politicians.? If we ever got to stasis [no growth], then with all
the promises, you’d get real tensions between the generations.? The
Baby Boomers would exacerbate it, but the real cause would be lack
of growth.”
(42)”Practically everybody overweighs the stuff that can be
numbered, because it yields to the statistical techniques they’re
taught in academia, and doesn’t mix in the hard-to-measure stuff
that may be more important. That is a mistake I’ve tried all my
life to avoid, and I have no regrets for having done that.”
(43)”You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines, and use
them routinely — all of them, not just a few. Most people are
trained in one model — economics, for example — and try to solve
all problems in one way. You know the old saying: to the man with a
hammer, the world looks like a nail. This is a dumb way of handling
problems.”
(44)”The whole concept of dividing it up into ‘value’ and ‘growth’
strikes me as twaddle. It’s convenient for a bunch of pension fund
consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor
to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent
investing is value investing.”
(45)”In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read
all the time – none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren
reads, at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m
a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
(46)”We read a lot.? I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t
read a lot.? But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament
to grab ideas and do sensible things.? Most people don’t grab the
right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”
(47)”We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s
a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich
and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?”
(48)”It takes almost no capital to open a new See’s candy store.
We’re drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It
would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved
pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality
control”
(49)”It’s dangerous to short stocks.”
(50)”Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very
irritating. It’s not worth it to have that much irritation in your
life.”
(51)”It would be one of the most irritating experiences in the
world to do a lot of work to uncover a fraud and then at have it go
from X to 3X and and have the crooks happily partying with your
money while you’re meeting margin calls. Why would you want to go
within hailing distance of that?”
(52)”…the cost of being a publicly traded stock has gone way, way
up. It doesn’t make sense for a little company to be public
anymore. A lot of little companies are going private to be rid of
these burdensome requirements….”?
(53)”Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain
into mush: you’ve got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you
get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction
syndrome, the thing is going away… I mean it just absolutely is
designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.”
(54)”The problem with closed bid auctions is that they are
frequently won by people making a technical mistake, as in the case
with Shell paying double for Belridge Oil. You can’t pay double the
losing bid in an open outcry auction.”
(55)”We’re partial to putting out large amounts of money where we
won’t have to make another decision.”
(56)”Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better
business manager and vice versa.”
(57)”What’s fascinating . . .is that you could now have a business
that might have been selling for $10 billion where the business
itself could probably not have borrowed even $100 million. But the
owners of that business, because its public, could borrow many
billions of dollars on their little pieces of paper- because they
had these market valuations. But as a private business, the company
itself couldn’t borrow even 1/20th of what the individuals could
borrow.”
(58)”I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest
– sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning
machines; they go to bed every night a little wiser than when they
got up. And, boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have
a long run ahead of you.”
(59)”The basic concept of value to a private owner and being
motivated when you’re buying and selling securities by reference to
intrinsic value instead of price momentum – I don’t think that will
ever be outdated.”
(60)”Warren and I have not made our way in life by making
successful macroeconomic predictions and betting on our
conclusions.”
(61)”Well, the questioner came from Singapore which has perhaps the
best economic record in the history of any developing economy and
therefore he referred to 15% per annum as modest. It’s not
modest–it’s arrogant. Only someone from Singapore would call it
modest.”
(62)”I don’t spend much time? regretting the past, once I’ve taken
my lesson from it. I don’t dwell on it.”
(63)”If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty
average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of
patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came
along, you pounce on them with vigor.”
(64)”We just throw some decisions into the ‘too hard’ file and go
onto the others.”
(65)”Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying
to improve your cognition.”
(66)”In the 1930s, there as a stretch here you could borrow more
against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that’s
hat’s going on in today’s private-equity?world”?
(67)”Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.”
(68)”A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due
to some temporary inefficiency… For each of us, really good
investment opportunities aren’t going to come along too often and
won’t last too long, so you’ve got to be ready to act and have a
prepared mind.”
(69)”Everywhere there is a large commission, there is a high
probability of a ripoff.”
(70)”Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of
wisdom.”
(71)”Recognize reality even when you don’t like it – especially
when you don’t like it.”
(72)”We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than
from grasping the esoteric.”
(73)?“Over the long term, it’s hard for a stock to earn a much
better return that the business which underlies it earns. If the
business earns six percent on capital over forty years and you hold
it for that forty years, you’re not going to make much different
than a six percent return – even if you originally buy it at a huge
discount. Conversely, if a business earns eighteen percent on
capital over twenty or thirty years, even if you pay an expensive
looking price, you’ll end up with one hell of a result.”
(74)”Just as a man working with his tools should know its
limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know
its limitations.”
(75)”Many markets get down to two or three big competitors—or five
or six. And in some of those markets, nobody makes any money to
speak of. But in others, everybody does very well.? Over the years,
we’ve tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets
sort of rational from the investor’s point of view so that the
shareholders do well, and in other markets, there’s destructive
competition that destroys shareholder wealth.? If it’s a pure
commodity like airline seats, you can understand why no one makes
any money. As we sit here, just think of what airlines have given
to the world—safe travel, greater experience, time with your loved
ones, you name it. Yet, the net amount of money that’s been made by
the shareholders of airlines since Kitty Hawk, is now a negative
figure—a substantial negative figure. Competition was so intense
that, once it was unleashed by deregulation, it ravaged shareholder
wealth in the airline business.? Yet, in other fields—like cereals,
for example—almost all the big boys make out. If you’re some kind
of a medium grade cereal maker, you might make 15% on your capital.
And if you’re really good, you might make 40%. But why are cereals
so profitable—despite the fact that it looks to me like they’re
competing like crazy with promotions, coupons and everything else?
I don’t fully understand it.? Obviously, there’s a brand identity
factor in cereals that doesn’t exist in airlines. That must be the
main factor that accounts for it.And maybe the cereal makers by and
large have learned to be less crazy about fighting for market
share—because if you get even one person who’s hell-bent on gaining
market share…. For example, if I were Kellogg and I decided that I
had to have 60% of the market, I think I could take most of the
profit out of cereals. I’d ruin Kellogg in the process. But I think
I could do it.”
“You must have the confidence to override people with more
credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by
incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is
obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to
recognize that you have no wisdom to add – and that your best
course is to trust some expert.”
(76)”In business we often find that the winning system goes almost
ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few
variables — like the discount warehouses of Costco.”
(77)”There are worse situations than drowning in cash and sitting,
sitting, sitting. I remember when I wasn’t awash in cash — and I
don’t want to go back.”
(78)”If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better,
they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to
comply.”
(79)”Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it
into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to
something. This is such a no-brainer.”
(80)”I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer
questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.”
(81)”I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other
people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down
and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart…”
(82)”I know someone who lives next door to what you would actually
call a fairly modest house that just sold for $17 million. There
are some very extreme housing price bubbles going on .”
(83)”Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being
prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in
scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often
dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few
major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually
come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious
mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then
all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds
are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of
prudence and patience in the past.”
(84)”The present era has no comparable referent in the past history
of capitalism. We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia
engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading
activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me
of Sodom and Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and
imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad
consequences.”
(85)”Our investment style has been given a name – focus investing –
which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The
idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a
few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment
world does not think this way. It’s been good for us.”
(86)”You want to be very careful with intense ideology. It presents
a big danger for the only mind you’re ever going to get.”
(87)”Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich. “Not
because I wanted Ferraris– I wanted the independence. I desperately
wanted it.”
(88)”Anyone with an engineering frame of mind will look at
[accounting standards] and want to throw up.”
(89)”You can progress only when you learn the method of
learning.”
(90)”It’s a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about
your successes.”
(91)”In effect about half our spare cash was stashed in currencies
other than the dollar. I consider that a non-event. As it happens
it’s been a very profitable non-event.”
(92)”As for what we like least, we don’t want kleptocracies. We
need a rule of law. If people are stealing from the companies, we
don’t need that.”
(93)”I agree with Peter Drucker that the culture and legal systems
of the United States are especially favorable to shareholder
interests, compared to other interests and compared to most other
countries. Indeed, there are many other countries where any good
going to public shareholders has a very low priority and almost
every other constituency stands higher in line.”
(94)”Berkshire in its history has made money betting on sure
things.”
(95)”I don’t think there’s any business that we’ve bought that
would have sold itself to a hedge fund. There’s a class of
businesses that doesn’t want to deal with private-equity and hedge
funds…thank God”
(96)”We’re guessing at our future opportunity cost. Warren is
guessing that he’ll have the opportunity to put capital out at high
rates of return, so he’s not willing to put it out at less than 10%
now. But if we knew interest rates would stay at 1%, we’d change.
Our hurdles reflect our estimate of future opportunity
costs.”
(97)”Our ideas are so simple that people keep asking us for
mysteries when all we have are the most elementary ideas.”
(98)”The idea of a margin of safety, a Graham precept, will never
be obsolete. The idea of making the market your servant will never
be obsolete. The idea of being objective and dispassionate will
never be obsolete. So Graham had a lot of wonderful ideas.”
(99)”Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus
from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their
working capital per share and so on….? But he was, by and large,
operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which
was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about
600 years. Wheat in Liverpool, I believe, got down to something
like a 600-year low, adjusted for inflation. the classic Ben Graham
concept is that gradually the world wised up and those real obvious
bargains disappeared. You could run your Geiger counter over the
rubble and it wouldn’t click. … Ben Graham followers responded by
changing the calibration on their Geiger counters. In effect, they
started defining a bargain in a different way. And they kept
changing the definition so that they could keep doing what they’d
always done. And it still worked pretty well.”
(100)”Warren and I don’t feel like we have any great advantage in
the high-tech sector. In fact, we feel like we’re at a big
disadvantage in trying to understand the nature of technical
developments in software, computer chips or what have you. So we
tend to avoid that stuff, based on our personal inadequacies.
Again, that is a very, very powerful idea. Every person is going to
have a circle of competence. And it’s going to be very hard to
advance that circle. If I had to make my living as a musician…. I
can’t even think of a level low enough to describe where I would be
sorted out to if music were the measuring standard of the
civilization.? So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes
are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and
you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as
any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where
you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle
of competence.? If you want to be the best tennis player in the
world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it’s
hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want
to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably
doable by two-thirds of you. It takes a will. It takes the
intelligence. But after a while, you’d gradually know all about the
plumbing business in Bemidji and master the art. That is an
attainable objective, given enough discipline. And people who could
never win a chess tournament or stand in center court in a
respectable tennis tournament can rise quite high in life by slowly
developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what
they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop
through work.”
(101)”Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like – none of it
makes any sense to me.”
(102)”Today, it seems to be regarded as the duty of CEOs to make
the stock go up. This leads to all sorts of foolish behavior. We
want to tell it like it is.”
(103)”Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with
a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that
works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are
telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions
or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming
more and more popular, by and large it’s not the individual
investors that are doing it. It’s the institutions.”
(104)”closet indexing….you’re paying a manager a fortune and he has
85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have
such a system, you’re being played for a sucker.”
(105)”Black-Scholes is a know-nothing system. If you know nothing
about value — only price — then Black-Scholes is a pretty good
guess at what a 90-day option might be worth. But the minute you
get into longer periods of time, it’s crazy to get into
Black-Scholes.”
(106)”Black-Scholes works for short-term options, but if it’s a
long-term option and you think you know something [about the
underlying asset], it’s insane to use Black-Scholes.”
(107)”It’s hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a
market.? Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and
sometimes they’ll pound each other.? I know of no way to predict
whether they’ll compete moderately or to the death.? If you could
figure it out, you could make a lot of money.”
(108)”We’ve really made the money out of high quality businesses.
In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we
just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what
happened, the big money’s been made in the high quality businesses.
And most of the other people who’ve made a lot of money have done
so in high quality businesses.”
(109)”A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to
prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very
profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their
own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was
worth.”
(110)”There are two kinds of businesses: The first earns 12%, and
you can take it out at the end of the year. The second earns 12%,
but all the excess cash must be reinvested — there’s never any
cash. It reminds me of the guy who looks at all of his equipment
and says, “There’s all of my profit.” We hate that kind of
business. “
(111)”There are actually businesses, that you will find a few times
in a lifetime, where any manager could raise the return enormously
just by raising prices—and yet they haven’t done it. So they have
huge untapped pricing power that they’re not using. That is the
ultimate no-brainer. … Disney found that it could raise those
prices a lot and the attendance stayed right up.? So a lot of the
great record of Eisner and Wells … came from just raising prices at
Disneyland and Disneyworld and through video cassette sales of
classic animated movies… At Berkshire Hathaway, Warren and I raised
the prices of See’s Candy a little faster than others might have.
And, of course, we invested in Coca-Cola—which had some untapped
pricing power. And it also had brilliant management. So a Goizueta
and Keough could do much more than raise prices. It was
perfect.”
(112)”At Berkshire Hathaway we do not like to compete against
Chinese manufacturers.”
(113)”Berkshire is in the business of making easy predictions ?If a
deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it.”
(114)”We’re the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose
the easy predictions.”
(115)”'Warren and I avoid doing anything that someone else at
Berkshire can do better. You don’t really have a competency if you
don’t know the edge of it.”
(116)”Understanding both the power of compound return and the
difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a
lot of things.”?
(117)”Generally speaking, it can’t be good to be running a big
current account deficit and a big fiscal deficit and have them both
growing. You would be thinking the end there would be a
comeuppance.” “[But] it isn’t as though all the other options look
wonderful compared to the US. It gives me some feeling that what I
regard as fiscal misbehavior on our part could go on some time
without paying the price.”
(118)”We started from such a strong position. It’s not as if the
alternatives are all so great. I can understand why people would
rather invest in the? U.S. Do you want to be in Europe, where
12-13% of people are unemployed and most 28-year-olds are living at
home and being paid by state to do it? Or be in Brazil or Venezuela
with the political instability that you fear? It’s not totally
irrational that? people still like the U.S., despite its faults.
Whatever misbehavior there is could go on quite a long time without
a price being paid.”
(119)”Almost all good businesses engage in ‘pain today, gain
tomorrow’ activities.”
(120)”No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is
going on.”
(121)”Generally speaking, if you’re counting on outside directors
to act [forcefully to protect your interests as a shareholder, then
you’re crazy].? As a general rule in? America, boards act only if
there’s been a severe disgrace. My friend Joe was asked to be on
the board of Northwestern Bell and he jokes that ‘it was the last
thing they ever asked me.’?I think you get better directors when
you get directors who don’t need the money. ?When it’s half your
income and all your retirement, you’re not likely to be very
independent.? But when you have money and an existing reputation
that you don’t want to lose, then you’ll act more
independently.”
(122)”If mutual fund directors are independent, then I’m the lead
character in the Bolshoi Ballet.”
(123)”Of course I’m troubled by huge consumer debt levels – we’ve
pushed consumer credit very hard in the US.? Eventually, if it
keeps growing, it will stop growing. As Herb Stein said, “If
something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”? When it stops, it
may be unpleasant.? Other than Herb Stein’s quote, I have no
comment.”
(124)”?I think it would be a great improvement if there were no
D&O insurance . The counter-argument is that no-one with any
money would serve on a board. But I think net net you’d be better
off.”
(125)”We don’t care about quarterly earnings (though obviously we
care about how the business is doing over time) and are unwilling
to manipulate in any way to make some quarter look better.”
(126)”What we don’t like in modern capitalism is the expectations
game. It’s not the kissing cousin of evil; it’s the blood
brother.”
(127)”There are a lot of things we pass on. We have three baskets:
in, out, and too tough…We have to have a special insight, or we’ll
put it in the ‘too tough’ basket. All of you have to look for a
special area of competency and focus on that.”
(128)”We have a history when things are really horrible of wading
in when no one else will.”
(129)”We have monetized houses in this country in a way that’s
never occurred before. Ask Joe how he bought a new Cadillac [and
he’ll say] from borrowing on his house. We are awash in capital.
[Being] awash is leading to very terrible behavior by credit cards
and subprime lenders -a very dirty business, luring people into a
disadvantageous position. It’s a new way of getting serfs, and it’s
a dirty business. We have financial institutions, including those
with big names, extending high-cost credit to the least able
people. I find a lot of it revolting. Just because it’s a free
market doesn’t mean it’s honorable.”
(130)”We don’t believe that markets are totally efficient and we
don’t believe that widespread diversification will yield a good
result.? We believe almost all good investments will involve
relatively low diversification. Maybe 2% of people will come into
our corner of the tent and the rest of the 98% will believe what
they’ve been told.”
(131)”Efficient market theory [is]? a wonderful economic doctrine
that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire
Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won — he shared a Nobel
Prize — and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year,
which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market
isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a
two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And
then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to
six sigmas — better to add a sigma than change a theory, just
because the evidence comes in differently.And, of course, when this
share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank
like a stone.”
(132)”I know just enough about? thermodynamics to understand that
if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that’s a
very stupid way to solve an energy problem.”
(133)”It is entirely possible that you could use our mental models
to find good IPOs to buy. There are countless IPOs every year, and
I’m sure that there are a few cinches that you could jump on. But
the average person is going to get creamed. So if you’re talented,
good luck. IPOs are too small for us, or too high tech, so we won’t
understand them. So, if Warren’s looking at them, I don’t know
about it.”
我对刚刚IPO的公司也不感兴趣，主要是没足够时间和资料去搞懂。
(134)”Well envy/jealousy made, what, two out of the ten
commandments? Those of you who have raised siblings you know about
envy, or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a
faculty? I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not
greed that drives the world, but envy.”
(135)”Suppose, any one of you knew of a wonderful thing right now
that you were overwhelmingly confident- and correctly so- would
produce about 12% per annum compounded as far as you could see.
Now, if you actually had that available, and by going into it you
were forfeiting all opportunities to make money faster- there’re a
lot of you who wouldn’t like that. But a lot of you would think,
“What the hell do I care if somebody else makes money faster?”
There’s always going to be somebody who is making money faster,
running the mile faster or what have you. So in a human sense, once
you get something that works fine in your life, the idea of caring
terribly that somebody else is making money faster strikes me as
insane.”
这里我看到两点：1.平常心地呆在自己能力圈内; 2. 12%是个可接受的年复合回报率。
