Warren Buffett: The Easiest Way To Value Stocks

[00:00:00] Jeff Colbett: Hello, my name is Jeff Colbett, and I'm from Olathe, Kansas. I got started in investing in 1999, right before the big tech bubble. And unfortunately, I learned buy and hold and don't fret about market price fluctuations before I learned the importance of valuing a business and applying a margin of safety. So, as Charlie said, I got my feet wet with huge failure right away. [00:00:35] Speaker 2: Right in the club. [00:00:38] Jeff Colbett: Thank you. I don't feel so bad now. So that leads to my question. It seems like I've read all the Berkshire reports and all the reading I can do about you two, and I thank you for these wonderful meetings, but it seems like it boils down to some simple things. Valuing a business and applying a margin of safety. So my question is, what do you recommend for an approach to getting better and better at valuing companies? [00:01:11] Speaker 3: That was a very, very good question. And in my own case, you know, I started out without knowing anything about valuing companies. And Ben Graham taught me a way to value a certain type of company that would prove successful, except the universe of those companies dried up. But nevertheless, it was almost a guarantee against failure, but it was not a guarantee that these things would continue to be available. Charlie taught me a lot about the value of a durable competitive advantage and a really first-class business. But over time, I've learned more about various types of businesses. But you'd be amazed how many businesses I don't feel that I understand well. The biggest thing is not how big your circle of competence is, but knowing where the perimeter is. If you don't have to be an expert on 90% of the businesses or 80% or 70% or 50%, but you do have to know something about the ones that you actually put your money into. And if that's a very small part of the universe, that still is not a killer. And I think if you think about what you would pay for a McDonald's stand, what you think you would pay for, you know, think about the businesses in your own hometown of Delaphe. You know, which would you like to buy into? Which do you think you could understand their economics? Which do you think will be around 10 or 20 years from now? Which do you think it would be very tough to compete with? Just keep asking yourself questions about businesses. Talk with other people about them. You will extend your knowledge over time. And always remember that margin of safety. And I think you basically have the right attitude because you do, you recognize your limitations. And that's enormously important in this business. You will find things to do. Six or seven years ago, maybe not that long. Yeah, six or seven years ago, when I was looking at Korean stocks, for example, I never had any idea that Korean stocks would be something that I would be buying. But I looked over there and I could see that there were a number of businesses that met the margin of safety test. And there I diversified because I didn't know that much about any specific one. But I knew that a package of 20 was going to work out very well, even if a crook might run one of them and a couple might run into competition. And I didn't anticipate because they were so cheap. And that was sort of the old Graham approach. You will find opportunities from time to time. And the beauty of it is you don't have to find very many of them. Charlie? [00:03:59] Speaker 2: Well, obviously, if you want to get good at something, which is competitive, you have to think about it a lot and learn a lot and practice doing it a lot. And the way the world is constructed in this field, you have to keep learning because the world keeps changing and your competitors keep learning. So you just have to get up each morning and try and go to bed that night a little wiser than you were when you got up. And if you keep doing that for a long time and accumulate some experience, good and bad, as you try and master what you're trying to do, people that do that almost never fail utterly. They may have a bad period when luck goes against them or something, but very few people have ever failed with that. If you have the right temperament, you may rise slowly, but you're sure to rise. [00:05:10] Speaker 3: Charlie, did you take any business courses in school? None. I took accounting. And when did you start valuing businesses, and how'd you go about it? [00:05:22] Speaker 2: When I was a little boy. I can remember I would come down to the Omaha Club, and there was an old gentleman who hit the Omaha Club about 10.30 every morning. He obviously did almost no work and yet was quite prosperous. [00:05:37] Speaker 3: He became your ideal. [00:05:38] Speaker 2: Well, but he made me very curious as a little boy. I said to my father, how in the hell does he do that? And he said, Charlie, he's in a business where he enjoys practically no competition. He gathers up and renders dead horses. Well, that was an example of avoiding competition by one stratagem. And if you keep asking questions like that of reality, starting at a young age, you gradually learn. And, Warren, you were doing the same thing. Well, yeah. [00:06:12] Speaker 3: Thankfully, he went beyond his original insight there. [00:06:18] Speaker 2: But I noticed it's rather interesting. If you take the rulers of the businesses, when I was a little boy, an awful lot of those businesses in Omaha, a lot of those businesses went broke. A lot of them sold out at modest prices under distress. And some of the people who rose, like Kiewit from small beginnings, nobody thought of as the great glories of that early time. And I think that's kind of the way life is. It's hard to get anywhere near the top. And it's hard to hold any position once you've attained it. But I think you could predict that Kiewit was likely to win. They cared more about doing it right. They cared more about avoiding trouble. They put more discipline on themselves. [00:07:15] Speaker 3: Well, if you knew the individual well, you would have bet, right? What? If you knew the individual, Pete himself. [00:07:22] Speaker 2: I would not have bet on any of the people I knew who were already wealthy. But I would have bet on Pete Kiewit. His sister taught me math. And, no, half Dutch, half German. You know, this is a tough culture. [00:07:40] Speaker 3: And... There's your... You've just heard it, folks. Half Dutch, half German. Well, but... Go out looking for them. [00:07:48] Speaker 2: Well, the man that's recommending this is named Munger. Anyway, the... No, I don't think it's that... But if you're... I was just automatically doing that. What was working? What was failing? Why was it working? Why was it failing? If you have that temperament, you are gradually going to learn. And if you don't have that temperament, I can't help you. [00:08:21] Speaker 3: If you'd followed Pete Kiewit around for 10 years, you never would have seen him do anything dumb, right? Oh, yeah. And so... It's avoiding the dumb thing. You really don't have to be brilliant. But, you know, you have to avoid just sort of what almost seem the obvious mistakes. But I would say that you're on the right track back there in terms of having the basic fundamentals, knowing your limitations, but still seeking to learn more about various kinds of businesses. Charlie, I think when he practiced law, any client that came in, Charlie was thinking about that business as if he owned the place, and he probably generally felt he knew more about the place than the guy that actually owned it, who was his client, who was the client. But I remember talking to him, you know, 50 years ago, and he would start talking about caterpillar dealerships in Bakersfield or something of the sort. He was incapable of looking at a business without thinking about the fundamental economics of it. [00:09:26] Speaker 2: How'd that guy do what the caterpillar did? Well, he sold it for a perfectly ridiculous price to a dumb oil company. It wasn't worth half what he got for it. [00:09:43] Speaker 3: But they had a concept and a strategy. [00:09:44] Speaker 2: They had a concept and a strategy, and no doubt they had consultants. [00:09:52] Speaker 4: Becky? This question comes from Carson Mitchell in Aberdeen, South Dakota, who asks both of you, what business has had the best return on capital for Berkshire, and what business of any on earth has had the best return on capital? And he adds, P.S., I would have come by rail, but there are no seats in the grain rail cars. [00:10:17] Speaker 3: There's two ways of looking at it. If you talk about the capital necessary to run the business, as opposed to what we might have paid for the business. I mean, if we buy a wonderful business, you could run the Coca-Cola company, assuming you had the bottling system separate. You could run it with no capital. Now, if you buy it for $100 billion, I mean, you can look at that as your capital, or you can look at the basic capital. When we look at what's a good business, we're defining it in terms of the capital actually needed in the business. Whether it's a good investment for us depends on how much we pay for that in the end. There are a number of businesses that operate on negative capital. Carol's with Fortune magazine. You know, any of the great magazines operate with negative capital. I mean, the subscribers pay in advance. There are no fixed assets to speak of, and the receivables are not that much. The inventory is nothing. So, a magazine business, my guess is that People magazine operates, or Sports Illustrated operate with negative capital, and particularly people make a lot of money. So, there are certain businesses — well, we had a company called Blue Chip Stamps, where we got the float ahead of time, and operated with really substantial negative capital. But there are a lot of great businesses that need very, very little capital. Apple doesn't need that much capital. You know, the best ones, of course, are the ones that get very large while needing no capital. C's is a wonderful business, needs very little capital. But we can't get people eating 10 pounds of boxed chocolates every day. Except beer. We want to. Generally, the great consumer businesses need relatively little capital. The businesses where people pay you in advance — you know, magazines of Christians being a case, insurance being a case — you know, you're using — you're using your customers' capital. And we like those kind of businesses, but, of course, so does the rest of the world, so they can become very competitive in buying them. We have a business, for example, that's run wonderfully by Kathy Barron-Tamraz called BusinessWire. BusinessWire does not require a lot of capital. It has receivables and everything, but it is a service-type business. And many of the service-type businesses and consumer-type businesses require a little capital. And when they get to be successful, you know, they can really be something. Charlie? [00:13:20] Speaker 2: I've got nothing to add, but at any rate, the formula never changes. [00:13:31] Speaker 3: If you could own — if you could own one business in the world, what would it be, Charlie? I hope I already own them myself. [00:13:44] Speaker 2: You know, you and I got in trouble by addressing such a subject many decades ago. That's right. And I don't think I'll come back to it. Okay. Number 13. You know, if you name some business that has incredible pricing power, you're talking about a business that's a monopoly or a near monopoly? Sure. And I don't think it's very smart for us to sit up here naming our most admired business as something that other people regard as a monopoly. Okay. [00:14:13] Speaker 3: We'll move right along.