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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: Ignore Macro Noise and Focus on Long-Term Investments

Negative economic news seems to be dominating headlines on a daily basis. As investors grapple with the question of whether to factor in macroeconomic trends into their investment strategies, Warren Buffett offers a resounding “no.”

During the 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, Buffett emphasized that his investment philosophy doesn’t hinge on reacting to macroeconomic indicators. “We don’t really pay attention to that sort of thing,” he stated firmly. Using the example of the tumultuous year of 1974, when stocks were undervalued, Buffett illustrated that even during times of apparent crisis, it’s unwise to let negative news dictate investment decisions.

Buffett pointed out, “You could’ve sat down in 1974, when stocks were screaming bargains, and you could’ve written down all kinds of things that would have caused you to say, you know, the future is going to be terrible.” Despite the challenges, the stock market has weathered wars, pandemics, and various adversities over the years.

Over the course of the 20th century, the Dow Jones Industrial Average demonstrated remarkable resilience, climbing from 66 to over 10,000. Buffett highlighted the enduring truth that “there’s always problems in the future, there’s always opportunities in the future.” In the context of the United States, historical evidence suggests that opportunities have consistently triumphed over problems in the long run.

Buffett’s timeless advice boils down to not allowing macroeconomic uncertainties, such as the size of the federal deficit, to dissuade investors from pursuing well-researched opportunities in individual stocks. While challenges persist, Buffett’s perspective reminds us that focusing on the long-term potential of investments can yield favorable results, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable economic headwinds.

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: Balancing Perfection with Pragmatism in Investing

Warren Buffett often draws parallels between investing and baseball, emphasizing the importance of waiting for the right opportunities. His analogy compares an investor to a baseball batter with the advantage of not facing called strikes, allowing them to patiently wait for the perfect pitch. This concept underscores the significance of discipline and patience in making investment decisions.

However, in the pursuit of the ideal investment, Buffett warned against a common pitfall at the 2011 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. He cautioned against the tendency to measure every investment against the best deal one has ever made. This mindset, he emphasized, can lead investors to set unrealistically high standards for every transaction, potentially causing them to miss out on valuable opportunities.

Buffett highlighted the error of expecting each investment to be an absolute home run, stating, “One of the errors people make in business is that they try and measure every deal against the best deal they’ve ever made.” He pointed out that individuals may remove themselves from the investment game by holding out for deals that match or exceed their past successes, ultimately hindering their ability to capitalize on current opportunities.

The key lesson from Buffett is to recognize that not every investment needs to surpass previous achievements. Instead, he advocates for making satisfactory deals that align with the opportunities available at the time. According to Buffett, the goal is not to replicate the best deal one has ever made but to secure the best possible deal under the prevailing circumstances.

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: We Have No Master Plan

With all of Warren Buffett’s success in building Berkshire Hathaway, you might think that he knew where he was going from the start, but that’s not the case.

“We didn’t know, twenty-five, thirty years ago, we didn’t know we would be in the insurance business,” Warren Buffett pointed out at the 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “I mean, Berkshire, we have no master plan. And Charlie and I did not sit down in 1960, early ’65, and say, ‘We’re going to do this and that,’ and all that.”

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: Beware Projecting High Growth Rates for an Extended Time

Warren Buffett points out that no matter how successful a company is, and how good its future prospects look to be, you can get into a lot of trouble as an investor projecting too high a future growth rate for an extended period of time. “There are a lot of managements around who like to think their stocks are worth infinity, but we haven’t found one yet,” Buffett wryly notes.

“The idea of projecting out extremely high growth rates for very long periods of time has caused investors to lose, you know, very, very large sums of money,” Warren Buffett pointed out at the 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “There aren’t many companies, just take a look at the Fortune 500, go back 50 years… and look at the companies that were there and how many have really maintained rates much above 10 percent. It’s not an easy hurdle. And when you get up to 15, you know, you’re in the atmosphere and rarified atmosphere…There’s a real danger in projecting out high growth rates. And Charlie and I will very seldom, virtually never, get up into high digits. You can lose a lot of money doing that.”

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: The Biggest Risk to a Company is the One They Never List

There are a lot of risks that businesses list in their prospectuses and annual reports, but Warren Buffett points out that the number one risk factor to a business is the one that they never list. And that risk is bad management.

“The number one risk factor, you never see it, the number one risk factor is that this business gets the wrong management. And you get a guy or a woman in charge of it that are — they’re personable, the directors like them. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they know how to put on an appearance,” Warren Buffett said at the 2021 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “That’s the biggest single danger that a business — and that that person stays and runs it for ten or fifteen years, and either stays in the textile business or department store business and expands. And, you know, I’ve looked at a lot of businesses. And that’s what’s caused the number one problem. And it isn’t the kind of thing where they list them all because the lawyers tell them to list them.”

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: Earnings Expectations Become Impossible Over Time

The unreasonable expectation that businesses will report ever increasing earnings quarter after quarter is something that Warren Buffett warns against because it incentivizes managers to cheat, or face getting punished by investors.

“Businesses do not meet expectations quarter after quarter and year after year. It just isn’t in the nature of running businesses. And, in our view, people that predict precisely what the future will be are either kidding investors, or they’re kidding themselves, or they’re kidding both,” Warren Buffett noted at the 2005 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “Charlie and I have been around the culture, sometimes on the board, where the ego of the CEO became very involved in meeting predictions which were impossible, really, over time. And everybody in the organization knew, because they were very public about it, what these predictions were and they knew that their CEO was going to look bad if they weren’t met. And that can lead to a lot of bad things. You get enough bad things, anyway, I mean. But setting up a system that either exerts financial or psychological pressure on the people around you to do things that they probably really don’t even want to do, in order to avoid disappointing you, I mean, I just think that it’s a terrible mistake.”

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© 2021 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: Staying Within Your Circle of Competence

For Warren Buffett, being a disciplined investor means staying within your circle of competence. How do you know the limits to your circle of competence?

“I would say this, if you have doubts about something being into your circle of competence, it isn’t,” Warren Buffett said at the 2002 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “If you get to something that your friend is buying, or that everybody says a lot of money’s going to be made, and you don’t, you’re not sure whether you understand it or not, you don’t. You know, I mean, and it’s better to be well within the circle than to be trying to tiptoe along the line. And you’ll find plenty of things within the circle. I mean, it’s not terrible to have a small circle of competence. I’d say my circle of competence is pretty small, but it’s big enough. You know, I can find a few things.”

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© 2023 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 a 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: In Aggregate, Investment Professionals Don’t Add Value

Warren Buffett is famous for saying that after he dies he wants his wife to put her money into an S&P 500 index fund. Why does Buffett say that? It is because Buffett doesn’t think the financial management field adds value above what investors can do themselves.

“Most professions have value added to them above what the laymen can accomplish themselves. In aggregate, the investment profession does not do that,” Warren Buffett noted at the 2006 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “So you have a huge group of people making, I put the estimate as $140 billion a year, that, in aggregate, are, and can only accomplish what somebody can do, you know, in ten minutes a year by themselves.”

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: The Moment Warren Buffett Knew He Would Be Very Rich

We all have epiphanies that change our lives, and for Warren Buffett it was the moment that he realized the lengths that people will go to engage in gambling behavior, even when they know the odds insure that in the end they will lose. It was a moment that cemented the advantage the disciplined investor has over the gambler.

“I walked into this casino, the Flamingo, it was kind of a motel-like arrangement, and I was 21 and my bride was 19,” Warren Buffett said at the 2022 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And I looked around the room and there were all of these people, and they were better dressed then, it was a more dignified group than, perhaps, currently, but they had flown thousands of miles in some cases, you know, in planes that weren’t as fast as the current ones and were more expensive, probably, on a per-mile basis, adjusted, then. They’d gone to great lengths to come out to do something that was mathematically unintelligent, and they knew it was unintelligent. And, I mean, they couldn’t do it fast enough, in terms of rolling the dice, you know, and trying to determine whether they were hot or whatever they may be. And I looked around at that group. And everybody there knew that they were doing something that was mathematically dumb, and they’d come thousands of miles to do it. And I said to my wife, I said, ‘You know, I’m going to get rich. I mean, how can you miss? If people are willing to do this, you know, this is a land of opportunity.'”

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© 2023 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.

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Lessons From Warren Buffett

Lessons From Warren Buffett: Wall Street Needs Activity, You Don’t

Buy and hold might be a slogan that gets occasionally mentioned by brokerage firms, especially when they don’t want retail investors to flee in market downturns, but it’s not a philosophy that Wall Street really believes in for one simple reason, they get paid for activity. And having people treat investing like gambling is far more profitable than having investors patiently hold on to their stocks and bonds.

“. . . The money is in turning over stocks. I mean, people say how wonderfully you’ve done if you bought Berkshire in, you know, 1965 or something and held it. But your broker would’ve starved to death,” Warren Buffett said at the 2022 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “But they don’t make money unless people do things, and if they get a piece of them. And they make a lot more money when people are gambling than when they’re investing. It’s much better to have somebody that’s going to trade 20 times a day and get all excited about it, just like pulling the handle on a slot machine.”

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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.