So how does someone with 55 years of investment experience like me learn something new? Listen to someone with 80 years of experience.
It is with great anticipation that I read Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. Having banged the table for decades that his Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) is a “must own” stock, keeping up with the 92-year-old Oracle of Omaha” is essential.
Besides, Warren was one of the founding subscribers to The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader 15 years ago.
I’ll give you the high points.
Berkshire companies took in a record $30.8 billion in operating profits in 2022, producing a net 3% gain in the share price.
Sounds like a deal to me!
Buffett describes himself as a business picker, not a stock picker. Over time, the great businesses prosper and compound, while the poor ones fail. The flowers bloom and the weeds wither away.
One need look no further than the Dow Average, where NO stocks were able to stay in the index over the last 100 years because of business failures. (Corn Products Refining Company? Woolworth’s? Union Carbide?). This is known as “creative destruction,” which moves capital out of the past and into the future.
“Efficient” markets exist only in textbooks, their day-to-day behavior “baffling” and only understood in retrospect.
In the ultimate act of humility, Buffet confesses to only making a dozen good decisions in his life. Coca Cola (KO) was one of those. His initial investment of $1.3 billion in 1994 is now worth $25 billion and now spins off an annual dividend of $700 million.
American Express (AXP) is the same, the initial 1995 investment of $1.3 billion is now worth $22 billion, paying $302 billion a year in dividends. Over the same time frame, an investment in 30-years bonds yielded nothing.
Warren makes the case for share buybacks, which he regularly executes whenever (BRK/B) trades at a discount. When the share count goes down, the shareholders’ ownership of the businesses goes up. This is how Berkshire created many $100 millionaires over the years.
Buffet also makes his annual case for the “Great American Tailwind.” In Buffet’s 80 years of investing, he has only seen it becalmed occasionally and briefly. Never bet against America.
Buffet started his investing career in April of 1942. Unknown to him, the US was about to win the Battle of Midway. Stocks bottomed and launched a torrid 20-year run, even though the public was unaware of the victory for three more months. It’s proof that markets see things before we mere mortals do.
As for me, I suppose I have to be even more humble than Warren Buffet, for I have only made four good investment decisions in 50 years. I agreed to accept a job offer from The Economist magazine in London, kicking off a half-century of intensive research. I took a big pay cut to go to work for Morgan Stanley (MS), which rewarded me with pre-IPO stock at book value of 25 cents a share. I bought Apple (AAPL) at $2 when Steve Jobs returned to run the company on the edge of bankruptcy. I bought Tesla (TSLA) at a split-adjusted $2.35 a share in 2010, completely buying into Elon Musk’s 30-year vision.
I only have to live another 17 years to see if he was right.
It Only Took Four Good Decisions
