A documentary in which Charlie Munger, Bill Gates, and others talk about Warren Buffett.
Charlie Munger, Bill Gates, And Others Talk About Warren Buffett
Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Transcript
I brought all the checks individually I filed 11 income tax returns of delivery on stodge for different coverage. I was a one man band there for six years.
One would sit upstairs in his little office there. And I would bring up the name of a company and most of the time he knew much more than I did about the company he'd know how many shares outstanding you know the capitalization. No the earnings it was absolutely incredible. I mean when one said something it meant a heck of a lot. And I think all of us paid a lot of attention to Warren when he took a definite stand on something.
When I first met him back in 1959 I read immediately that he was a very intelligent person.
For the last four five years the stock market has been booming along and. Presumably forecasting better business which has really not materialized. So maybe the stock market is really correcting a previous incorrect forecast this time rather than making a new correct.
You made a lot of money buying thinly traded securities credibility cheap statistics.
Warren was at that time dealing with small companies and his investments often were to buy a company that you could figure was a discarded cigar but it had one more smoke in it and he wanted to buy the right time to be able to benefit from the one smoke.
The first partnership started with 100 and five thousand one hundred dollars. I put up the 100 and the other people put up a hundred five thousand and then started of 1962. Move to Keiller Plaza. And by the time I moved to keep it close we had seven million dollars invested and Fermat was profits that was a pretty silly way to behave as one as recounted in retrospect.
One of the reasons we're successful as brutal in appraising his own past he wants to identify him as thinkings and avoid them in the future. But it was an accident that he chose Berkshire Hathaway. If the chairman hadn't tried to cheat him out of an eighth there wouldn't have been any Buffett - Berkshire Hathaway history.
If you are emotional investment, you're not going to do well. You may have all these feelings about the stock the stock has no feelings about you. Looking back it's interesting that tender offer.
He'd made so much money for so long doing what he'd been taught by Ben Graham which by these very cheap stocks if they were cheap enough he didn't care. It was a lousy company and lousy management. He knew it was going to make money anyway just because of the cheapness.
Charlie Munger has had a big impact on me and moving me toward looking for wonderful companies fair prices rather than fair companies at wonderful prices. And that was enormously important because it enabled Berkshire to scale up in a way that would have been impossible to do otherwise.
What are the key indicators you'd look for within companies before making an investment?
Well I look for something that does give them a moat around them.
We have a company called See's candy out on the West Coast See's Candies box chocolates. If you give a box of chocolates to your girlfriend the first day and she kisses you will you know we can raise the price tomorrow and buy the a box for obvious success. So the key there is the response. You do not want to go home on Valentine's Day and say to your wife or your sweetheart preferably the same person you don't say here honey. I took the whole bed. It doesn't work. Tries to a degree is immaterial. If you got an economic council coming and want to take that council away from and you better have a strong vote. You better have a nightmare council that knows what he's doing.
You're not buying an asset to buying a name you're buying a brand you're buying a real franchise here and Charlie was more responsible for that than anybody.
We were metal partners right from the moment they met.
I want to know going back 50 years what it was like when you first met Warren.
Well I thought he was a prodigy and I got a lot of criticism. My wife said why are you paying such enormous respect for a young man with a crewcut who won't eat vegetables.
He's ungodly smart. He's got a much broader intellect than I do and he's magnificent at being able to condense important ideas into just a very few words.
