Category: Lessons From Warren Buffett

Some sectors seem to excite investors more than others, but Warren Buffett is quick to remind investors that no matter the source all dollars are equal.

“A dollar earned from a horseshoe company is the same as a dollar earned from an internet company” Buffett said at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “It is not worth more, based on whether it comes from somebody named dot-com, you know, or somebody that named, you know, the Old-Fashioned Horseshoe Company. The dollars are equal.”

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© 20223David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Stock prices can become disassociated from the underlying value of companies, especially in times when extreme speculation grips the market, but in the long run they more closely align. It is something that Benjamin Graham noted years ago in The Intelligent Investor, and Warren Buffett firmly agrees.

“Ben Graham was right when he said that in the short run it’s a voting machine, and the long run it’s a weighing machine,” Buffett said at the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “Sooner or later, the amount of cash that a business can disgorge in the future governs the value it has, that the stock commands in the market. But it can take a long time.”

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© 2022 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Leverage, the use of borrowed money to increase your return, may be tempting, but Warren Buffett warns against it. Even, rich, successful investors can be ruined when circustances turn against them.

“Whenever a bright person, a really bright person, goes broke that has a lot of money, it’s because of leverage,” Buffett said at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “It would be almost impossible to go broke without borrowed money being in the equation.”

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© 2022 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Warren Buffett cites hockey legend Wayne Gretzky for an important principal in investing when it comes to looking at formulas, such as P/E ratios.

“It’s the future that counts,” Buffett said at the 1995 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “It’s like what I wrote there, what Wayne Gretzky says, to go where the puck is going to be, not where it is.”

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© 2022 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Disciplined investors are often trying to find the key investing principals that they can apply that will tell them when to make an investment. However, Warren Buffett points out that it is not that simple.

“People always want a formula. They go to The Intelligent Investor and they think, you know, somewhere they’re going to give me a little formula and then I can plug this in and I know I’ll make lots of money. And it really doesn’t work that way,” Warren Buffett said at the 2002 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “What you’re trying to do is look at all the cash a business will produce between now and judgment day, and discount it back at a rate that’s appropriate, and then buy it a lot cheaper than that…So, I wouldn’t want to have a single yardstick, or a, you know, relative P/E that I went by.”

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© 2022 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Beta, a measure of a stock’s historical volatility, is of no relevance to Warren Buffett when making an investment decision.

“We don’t pay any attention to beta or any of that sort of thing. It just doesn’t mean anything to us,” Warren Buffett said at the 1998 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “We’re only interested in price and value. And that’s what we’re focusing on all the time, and any kind of market movements or anything don’t mean anything.”

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© 2022 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Having an invincible fortress of a business run by great management is the ideal situation for an investor, but forced to choose between the two, Warren Buffett would take the moat over the management. “If you have a big enough moat, you don’t need as much management,” Buffett notes.

“It gets back to Peter Lynch’s remark that he likes to buy a business that’s so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will,” Buffett said at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “He was saying that what he really likes is a business with a terrific moat where nothing can happen to the moat, and there aren’t very many businesses like that.”

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© 2022 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.