Investing is about putting your money to work earning more money, but as Warren Buffett notes, there are times when liquidity is paramount and at those moments cash becomes all important.
“There have been a few times in history, and there will be more times in history, where if you don’t have it, you know, you don’t get to play the next day,” Warren Buffett said at the 2022 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “I mean, it’s like oxygen, you know? It’s there all the time, but if it disappears for a few minutes, it’s all over.”
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.
American Express, Apple, Coca-Cola, what do they all have in common? They are among the myriad companies that regularly buy back their own stock. For example, Apple bought back $81 billion of its share in 2021 alone. Warren Buffet is quick to point out the incredible advantages of stock buybacks (as long as the company repurchasing its shares is doing so at a price below their intrinsic value). It’s the easiest investing there is. As a shareholder, you are gaining an ever larger stake in a company, tax free, all without doing a thing.
“We owned 150 million shares of American Express. I think we bought our last share in 1998, or something like that, and we then owned 11.2% of the American Express company. And since then, they’ve sent us a check every quarter as a dividend. And so, we’ve taken some cash a little bit as they’ve gone along. And now we own 20% of American Express. Now, that’s what’s happened because they repurchased shares,” Warren Buffett said at the 2022 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And like I say, we’ve gone from 11.2% to 20%. And if you’re using your American [Express] card, or whatever it may be, 20% of whatever earnings contribute a little to our interest that used to be 11.2%, and we’ve done it without putting up any money. Now, imagine if you owned a farm, and you had 640 acres, and you farmed it every year, and you made a little money on it, and you enjoyed farming, and somehow, twenty or so years later, it had turned into 1,100 or 1,200 acres. . . . If you do it at the right price, there’s nothing better than buying in your own business. . . . It is the simplest thing in the world, and then I read all this stuff. It is unbelievable how people can’t figure out something that, you know, if they owned a farm and the guy next to them had a farm and somehow you were getting more of his farm all the time without putting up any money, while you farmed your own farm . . . you’d feel very good about it.”
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
Warren Buffett believes firmly that the work of the investor is to find opportunities, and it makes no difference if other people agree with you or not.
“Ben Graham said long ago that you’re neither right nor wrong because people agree with you or disagree with you,” Warren Buffett noted at the 2006 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right. So all you do is you try to make sure that the facts you have are correct. . . . And then once you have the facts, you’ve got to think through what they mean. And you don’t take a public opinion survey. You don’t pay attention to things that are unimportant. I mean, what you’re looking for is something — things that are important and knowable. If something’s important but unknowable, forget it. I mean, it may be important, you know, whether somebody’s going to drop a nuclear weapon tomorrow but it’s unknowable. It may be all kinds of things. So you — and there are all kinds of things are that knowable but are unimportant. In focusing on business and investment decisions, you try to think — you narrow it down to the things that are knowable and important, and then you decide whether you have information of sufficient value that — you know, compared to price and all that, that will cause you to act. What others are doing means nothing.”
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.
While discussing what makes Berkshire Hathaway an attractive place to sell your successful business to, Warren Buffett noted that the term synergy is really just another way of saying that that a lot of people are going to get fired. And often first in line to get fired are the people that helped make a company successful in the first place.
“They would have all these ideas about synergy, and synergy would mean that the people that had helped him build the business over 30 years would all get sacked,” Warren Buffett said at the 2013 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And that the acquiring company would come in like Attila the Hun and be the conquering people, and he just didn’t want to do that to the people that helped him over the years.”
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.
If there is one piece of wisdom that Warren Buffett has shared that he believes is key to becoming a good investor it is “to read everything in sight.” It is how he got started, and it has continued throughout his life.
“I just read a lot. I probably took every book in the Omaha Public Library, every book they had on investing, or the stock market, basically,” Warren Buffett said at the 2005 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “. . . . I took all the books out. I read them. And finally, when I was 11, I bought three shares of stock and I didn’t know, I was fascinated by the subject. My dad got elected to Congress, so now the library became even bigger, and I took all the books I could out of there on markets. And I used a chart and do all that sort of thing. And then, finally, I read [Benjamin] Graham’s book when I was at the University of Nebraska, The Intelligent Investor, when I was 19, and that just changed my whole framework. But the advice I would give is to read everything in sight.”
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.
One thing Warren Buffett thinks CEOs would benefit from is if they better understood investing. And one thing that confounds him is when managers aren’t confident enough to manage their own personal portfolio, yet they still think they should be the ones to make the decisions on enormous acquisitions and mergers. It is like being too scared to fly a Cessna but still thinking you can pilot a 747 jumbo jet.
“I will have friends who are CEOs of companies and they’ll have somebody else handle their money. If you say to them, you know, should you buy Coca-Cola or Gillette or something like that, they’ll say that’s much too tough. I don’t understand that sort of thing. What do I know about investing?” Warren Buffett said at the 2005 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And then some investment banker walks in the next day with the idea they buy a $3 billion company, which is just buying a lot of shares of stock in one company, and they’ll run through some little two-hour presentation and turn it over to a strategic planning group and think that they are then the ones that should make that decision as to whether to buy multibillion-dollar businesses when they really don’t feel they’re qualified to make $10,000 decisions with their own money.”
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.
While many mutual funds and ETFs limit themselves to a particular area, this is not Warren Buffett’s approach. He wants the maximum flexibility to take advantage of opportunities, and he also doesn’t want to be forced to do any particular thing.
“I would say that we think the most logical fund is the one we have at Berkshire where, essentially, we can do anything that makes sense and are not compelled to do anything that we don’t think makes sense,” Warren Buffett said at the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “So any entity that is devoted to a limited segment of the financial market we would regard as being at a disadvantage to one that has total authority if you have the right person in charge… So we would not want to devote our funds to something that was only going to buy bonds, something that was only going to buy futures, or anything of the sort.”
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.
Risk and the amount of time you intend to hold a stock are inextricably linked, according to Warren Buffett. That linkage is what makes day trading stocks so risky, as the shorter the holding period, the more likely that short term price movements will sink you.
“Well, we do define risk as the possibility of harm or injury. And in that respect we think it’s inextricably wound up in your time horizon for holding an asset,” Warren Buffett said at the 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “If you intend to buy XYZ Corporation at 11:30 this morning and sell it out before the close today, I mean, that is, in our view, that is a very risky transaction. Because we think 50 percent of the time you’re going to suffer some harm or injury. If you have a time horizon on a business, we think the risk of buying something like Coca-Cola at the price we bought it at a few years ago is essentially, is so close to nil, in terms of our perspective holding period. But if you asked me the risk of buying Coca-Cola this morning and you’re going to sell it tomorrow morning, I say that is a very risky transaction.”
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’s such a legendary investor that you might think that he has found the ultimate way to get rich, but that’s not what Buffett himself believes. His comment on the differences between his approach and Peter Lynch’s shows just that.
“I’ve said in investing, in the past, that there’s more than one way to get to heaven,” Warren Buffett said at the 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And there isn’t a true religion in this, but there’s some very useful religions.”
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.
How a company weathers adversity tells you interesting things about a business, according to Warren Buffett. Among the things it shows you is not only the resiliency of a company, but also how wide its moat truly is.
“If you see a business take a lot of adversity and still do well, that tells you something about the underlying strength of the business,” Warren Buffett said at the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “So, occasionally, you will find that an interesting test of the strength of a business. Coca-Cola had some problems, you know, in Europe. But it comes back stronger than ever. They certainly had problems with New Coke, and they came back stronger than ever. So you do see that underlying strength. And that’s very impressive as a way of evaluating the depth and impenetrability of the moat that we talked about earlier.”
Buffett’s full explanation on adversity and how it tests a business