Welcome, welcome, welcome. How's everybody doing? Hope you are doing well. My name is Andrew Coon from Focus Compounding on air live with the co-host of the Focus Compounding podcast, Jeff Gannon. Jeff, how's it going today? It's going very well, Andrew. How's it going with you? It's going great. We hope it's going great with everybody else as well.
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So Jeff, I was just telling you, and I was like, wait, we should stop talking. We like to keep it all real here. Let's hit the record button and talk about this. It's 11 a.m. right now. We normally record at 3.30, and I got to say, I'm like three espresso's in. Haven't had any food yet. So I'm still fasting. I've gone on a walk, you know, just get the brain going, get the brain pumping. I have a Celsius that I've yet to open up right next to me. Of course, the best flavor, sparkling orange. And I feel amazing.
It's 11 a.m. so I feel much better recording at 11 a.m. instead of 3.30. So perhaps we could start recording at 11 a.m. That's how I'm feeling. How are you feeling?
Yeah, that's fine with me. Fine with you? It's not right here. I have a top right here.
嗯,对我来说没问题。你呢?这里不是对的地方。我这里有一件顶部。
Very good. Very good.
很好,很好。
Well what are we talking about today? I don't even know. March 1st, we could get right into it. Did you have a chance to check out the Buffet Letter? I did. I read the Buffet Letter, yeah.
Did you print it out? Or did you read it on your computer screen? Yes, I have it right here. Right there. They just see the back of pages.
你有把它打印出来吗?还是在电脑屏幕上看的?是的,我这就有它。就在这里。他们只看到页面的背面。
And I'm not a lot of evidence, but yeah, that's the letter. Okay. So did you print the whole annual report? Or did you just print out the letter? No. Nope, just the letter for this podcast. Because I figured we'd probably go over the letter. People would ask about the letter, but not the entire annual report.
So I guess before we go through it and go over our thoughts, what are your initial thoughts about the letter? This is probably our third or fourth, I guess probably fifth year of doing this going over the letter. So what are your general thoughts before we jump into it?
Well I thought it was very short. I thought it wouldn't tell anyone much about Berkshire if they didn't know about Berkshire and this was the letter that they were looking at to decide on making the investment. I also thought it was very good in some of the things that said, especially something that we've talked about a little bit. And I think Charlie Munger has talked about more.
Buffet goes into talking about how he's actually only made about one truly good decisionary five years or so at Berkshire. Yeah, about 12 of them. And also how he's made a lot of mistakes, but because the mistakes compounded at a low rate and the success is compounded at a high rate. They become a very small part of Berkshire. So I thought that was all actually very good and very helpful in understanding the record.
And he did talk a little bit about some other things like saying how the media doesn't cover the stock correctly and to ignore operating earnings. And he also talked about float and it talked about making sure that people go and read a description of float. So if they did all that, then I think they would learn a lot about Berkshire compared to what things the media gets wrong.
Dude, I thought, I mean, apparently he listens to podcasts. So I'm just going to go on a limb and say he listens to the focus compounded podcast. And when he was to your point, right, and I have this because I thought it was one of the most important sentences or paragraphs in the letter. So I highlighted it in blue when he says the lesson for investors, the weeds wither away in significance as the flowers bloom over time. It takes just a few winners to work wonders.
And yes, it helps to start early and live into your 90s as well. And then how he was talking about, yeah, the once every five years he's come up with like these big, great decisions. But it reminded me of how you would manage your personal portfolio and advice you would give to other individuals where you come up with perhaps one idea per year. You don't sell. And then over time, assuming you are good at this, the winners should just take, you know, it should become a huge part of the portfolio. And then the losers just become minuscule compared to the rest of the portfolio over time.
Yeah. And that works for Berkshire because they have earnings and they have float. And that would work for individuals if they're saving. You know, that's where we talk about the difference between like a portfolio idea, which is usually I feel talk about like how much should I have in this or something. And the reality of how you're going to save, which is usually that, you know, when you're 20 something years old, you could put 100% into something because at that point, you've managed to save almost nothing, right? But your savings in future years are going to be a lot larger than they were initially.
And since I'm sort of think of Berkshire, you know, he talks about how float increased 8,000 percent. I mean, 8,000 times, sorry. Yeah. And so of course, the same thing wouldn't work out if he had a limited pool of capital and nothing more came in, right? I feel like if you kept the text out, middle open for 20 years longer than it should have been open. But he'd been dealing with like a portfolio that you would get because you inherited something and you never saved money again. This is for more flows of money coming in each year. But that's how most people are saving and investing. And it's how Berkshire does it. It's how most companies work. You don't just have a pot of money that you get one time to deal with and you have to sell to buy something else. You get more flows coming in over time.
So there are a lot of fund managers that listen to the podcast. How do you think they should think about it in the context of perhaps they're continuously getting inflows, hopefully, from investors as well? And how you would think about that? Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. Ben Graham made a bit more than half of his money, made most of his money from his Geico position because he agreed to buy Geico for the fund. It was distributed and he took his distribution of it and he never sold it. He just viewed as a different kind of stock, didn't sell it, right? So he actually made more money from that than he did from managing money that way.
Bill Miller invested in Amazon. And so with the fund and everything has always held it, but it's trimmed it back to whatever 5% or whatever the normal thing for mutual fund would be. So it made a lot of money over time. But of course, if it just had held it since, you know, first buying it would be doing much better than if he did all the decisions that he did since then. So the problem is a lot of this can't be applied that well to the approaches that money managers have, right? Because it's not what people are looking for that way.
Bill Miller 投资了亚马逊。他一直持有该股票,并减持到了普通共同基金的5%左右。随着时间的推移,他赚了很多钱。但是,如果他从一开始就持有,就会比他之后的所有决策都好很多。所以问题在于,这些思路不适用于资产管理人的方法,因为这不是人们所追求的方式。
So I don't know the answer to that, except it's difficult. Sequoia over the years had a Berkshire and trimmed it back and everything. So it can still contribute a lot to your results, but it's not going to have the same contribution over time that way. Buffett also talks about how the rest of the decisions were, you know, on average, didn't add or to track that much, right? So that is one thing to keep in mind is that like churning the smaller parts of the portfolio might not matter that much for fund managers to think about.
So if you have, you know, say you have a fairly high level concentration, so you have, you know, your top 10 stocks or something account for 50%, 70%, or whatever of your portfolio, what you're doing in the other part is probably churning even faster than the part that you have the bigger positions in. And it probably is one, the ideas aren't particularly good or particularly bad, you know, as Buffett's experience has been. And two, it's a smaller percentage in each of them. So it may be that the portion of your portfolio you're churning more is, you know, less important that way, you're spending too much time thinking about that.
And what he talks about the, you know, one idea every five years, right? I mean, this line right here, he reiterates how they're not stock pickers. They are business pickers.
他说的是每五年一个新点子,你知道的对吧?我是说,这句话表明他们不是股票拣选人,而是企业拣选人。
And I think when you think in the context of the portfolio and how he thinks about, well, you have this flow coming in and how over time your winners should make up for all of your losers, it's just an interesting framework that I think a lot of people don't, you know, sometimes think about.
I mean, sometimes like I got flamed on Twitter because I was talking about how, and I knew this was going to upset a lot of people, but I was saying how you should approach from like a framework perspective, doing research on a stock as if you're going to acquire the whole company.
No, you're not ever going to get to go and sit in like a special office where they have all their financials with a bunch of lawyers and accountants and be able to go and do that level of due diligence.
But basically what I was trying to say is I believe most investors, when they approach a company, they're truly thinking about it more so from like the numbers and how the numbers work and doing all this Excel monkey work and stuff like that.
As opposed to thinking about, well, if I was going to purchase the whole company, guess what I would be thinking about, who are your customers, who are their competitors, and really thinking about like understanding the relationship from those two, you know, perspectives or whatever.
So I had said, you know, you should approach it as if you're going to acquire the whole company.
那么,我说过,你应该把它看作是要收购整个公司一样去处理。
Of course, I mean, I'm under no illusion that you will never be able to do, they're not one in the same.
当然,我的意思是,我并没有幻想你永远不能做到,它们并不是一回事。
However, I do think it's a good framework because I think it gets people away from thinking about just the numbers and really starts to get people to think more so about like everything we talk about in the podcast, right?
Like the competitive advantage, how durable is the business, but more so the customer and competitor decision making because one of the best things we've ever said, and I think it's so true is that you can't understand our business until you understand those two things, right?
The decision making that customers and competitors both make.
客户和竞争对手都做出的决策。
So when Charlie or when Warren and Charlie speak about not being stock pickers and how they're business pickers, they're not thinking of stocks like, oh, we have a 10% position or portfolio and we should trip it back and we're managing this, you know, this beta and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's really, they're investing in businesses, right?
他们真的在投资企业,对吗?
So what does that mean to you when they say, yep, we're not stock pickers, we're business pickers?
当他们说:“是的,我们不是股票选择者,我们是业务选择者”,对你意味着什么呢?
Well, he kind of lays it out in different parts. He doesn't put all in one spot, but basically what he says is, Berkshire does two things differently when it takes a full position and when it buys an entire company instead of an individual stock.
And those two things are it controls capital allocation and it picks management.
这两件事情就是它掌控资本配置和挑选管理层。
And so where you're saying, you know, people are saying, it's not the same thing buying a stock versus buying the whole company. It's exactly the same things that for two things.
所以,在你说的那个方面,人们说,买股票和买整个公司不是同一回事。对于这两件事,确实是完全一样的。
You don't get to select capital allocation and you don't get to select the management.
你没有选择资本配置的权利,也没有选择管理层的权利。
Now in exchange for that buff, it says you can get a bargain price when buying pieces of business, you'll never get a bargain price buying the entire business.
现在,这个牛肉干可以换取一次购买生意片段时的特价哦。但是,购买整个生意是永远不可能有特价的。
That is, I mean, they won't knowingly sell to you at a bargain price.
我的意思是,他们不会有意以低价卖给你。
They will knowingly sell a stock to you.
他们会有意地向您出售股票。
I mean, we've had that happen that people believe that they're selling you too cheaply, but they'll do it.
我是说,我们曾经遇到这种情况,有些人认为他们以太便宜的价格卖给你,但他们会这么做。
But they're probably not going to do that except as he says, except under duress if they control the company.
但是除非他们控制了这家公司,在受到压力的情况下,他们可能不会这样做,就像他所说的那样。
So in exchange for getting a bargain price, you give up control of capital allocation and picking the management.
所以,为了获得便宜的价格,您得放弃资本配置和选择管理团队的控制权。
So that's one reason why Berkshire focuses a lot on capital allocation and management when buying stocks because then it doesn't matter as much that they don't have control of that. Right?
So like when they bought a piece of capital cities in the market, a small amount and they sold it later just in the public markets, that really isn't different for them than when they got a very influential purchase that would have given them a lot of control over capital cities, ABC when they merged together because they didn't, they liked the management and would have wanted to keep it and they wouldn't have wanted capital allocation to be any different.
So it's better for them just to buy as a passive buyer in those cases. So I think that's the approach that we always use.
所以在这些情况下,他们最好只是作为被动买家购买。所以我认为这是我们一直采用的方法。
Certainly the approach that I always use is to the big mistakes have been not buying something because not buying something that I certainly would have bought if I was offered the whole company. Right? So we've talked about that before.
Right? So like that's why I say dream work and animation or something was a mistake because it's not that it went up all that much or whatever before being sold to someone else. But if they said you can buy the whole company here, it is for this amount. I would have said, okay, I'll buy it as would have, you know, a lot of other studios and stuff.
So that's buying the whole company. The, a lot of people get caught up on the difference between the two, right? And I'm not sure how big the difference is it's difficult to calculate because for one thing, you don't know the way in which you'll get your return.
So most people kind of assume a continuation of the status quo sort of thing. So you look at a company and they always assume, oh, well, it'll stay public and it won't change its policies about dividends or whatever it won't get bought out management won't offer to buy it out.
So I won't try to buy it out. People who are involved in it won't die merge it together, whatever. Okay. But at some point they will and whatever gap there was will close, you know, instantly at that time. So that's always one of the arguments.
I have invest in companies where management controls all of the company. I mean, I have invest in companies are management controls more than 90% of the shares, owns more than 90% of the shares. And in cases where the company's gone private because management is taking them over, which has happened in a few cases, you know, you've gotten well compensated.
So eventually you've got a price that's closer to the fair price that you'd get. Sometimes management participates in buying out the company. Sometimes management has to be given different things on either side, whatever. But you know, eventually the only way to think of the asset is what it's worth to people, you know, economically in general.
And so if you get too far away from that, then you're thinking about like, well, what can they report in earnings or something? It doesn't matter.
如果你离那个原则太远了,那么你会思考像:他们能报告多少收益之类的东西?但这并不重要。
You know, that's why cash will matters and those things because these things matter not because we say that they matter and it's magic that this works out this way. But because that could be used in some way by owners, it can be used to pay debts. It can be used.
So it can be used to finance a deal. If something strategically important in the industry, then it has value, even if it doesn't have value in terms of reporting earnings today, right?
So all of those things matter a lot. And I don't see any other way of doing it except asking what's the value to a private owner.
所以,所有这些事情都非常重要。我认为除了询问私人所有者的价值之外,没有其他途径。
I mean, that's also something that Buffett, Munger, others have talked about that when they say here, the things about Ben Graham that are things that are true for now and true forever, the two that they really talk about are how to think about the market fluctuation. So the Mr. Market idea, they talk about margin of safety.
But the other thing that they'll mention is the idea of the value to a private owner, thinking of a business. I think it was stock as a business instead of thinking of as a stock.
That's why Ben Graham thought about it and that's the way Buffett, Munger, think about it. And it's a different way if thinking that Graham was thinking about what's the liquidation value.
But it's the same argument that people would say, well, what does net-curren-asset value matter? Because they're not going to liquidate. But ultimately, the fact that they could liquidate that that would be a better use of the company means that you'll get a better return in from that.
So that's why looking at the entire company, looking at the stock as if it's the company, makes a lot of sense. And I don't see another way of doing it.
那就是为什么要从整个公司的角度去看待股票,因为这是很有意义的。我也没有看到其他的方法。
I don't have a better method for how you would do it that would make sense. Now, over very short periods of time, sure. Like, over one day, then if you're buying an option that expires at the end of the day, then you're just going to use zero-to-day supply-expiration, maybe.
Yeah. So you're just going to assume random movements, right? But over a longer period of time, it's just common sense in terms of the business and how the business does. And that's all that's going to matter in the really long term. Are you generally pretty skeptical of management buyouts?
Like, in those situations, right? We talked a little bit about this last week, especially in net nets, how well they could buy out your net net for 100 or 200 percent higher. And then you could still be upset because you're like, well, it's actually probably still worth three or 400 percent higher.
Yeah. I mean, I'm not as skeptical that they'll happen. I do believe that management will buy out their shareholders in a lot of cases, especially in places like the US and stuff where it could be aggravating to be a public company. Yeah, I think that that happens a lot. I've been in situations where it's happened.
Yeah, you don't get as good a deal, sure. Because it's not being shopped around management can block it from being shopped around. But sometimes you get a pretty good deal. So examples of like management buyouts, we talked about, I've talked about in the past bank insurance, which was eventually taking out at less than book value. But at a very high, but you know, almost close to 100 percent premium, 80 to 100 percent premium over what it originally said.
Some things in Japan, we're taking no right management. Hunter Douglas, we talked about, right? And that, that stock, there were three, four, 10, so over 15 years to take it private. And then finally they did with also getting a little skin in the game for taking private to. So not 100 percent taking private, but sort of that helped, I think, finalize the deal. And then we also talked about Cambria, the automotive company in the UK.
And that one also, you know, you got a higher price than you had before, but you didn't have an amazing price. But on the other hand, how bad is the price if you compare it to like virtue or other UK card dealers, because they've all been valued at less than five times EBITDA for seven, eight years or something now, you know, some of them, they haven't consistently traded over five times EBITDA for any one year that I can bank of.
So you could say, well, the price was what they again, the public markets. But that is what Buffett's talking about, fortunately, management is taking advantage of the individual shareholders, the way they think about stocks as opposed to the way they think about entire businesses. By announcing a deal, you can in stocks like Contra Douglas to a point, although at the end, they couldn't, I mean, they got left with the shareholders who would never sell no matter what, you know, that's what ended up with them, which made it hard.
They couldn't squeeze out the last 10 percent or whatever, because over time they bought most of it, but they were left with only the people who turned down every tender offer and stuff. Well, with Cambria, you know, you can take advantage of this people because it's a small percentage of their portfolio, some of them are professional money managers, whatever, they're ready to move on to other things. And so they can't get together a big enough group to block a deal, right?
Whereas if they were people who are members of your family, an extended family that also own those shares or something, and you said, well, I want to take it over from this small group, it wouldn't work because they would view the stock differently, but because it's a public-a-trade stock, people in public-a-trade stocks are going to be taking advantage of by the majority owner or by potential buyer or even LBOs and things, because you can just offer 30 percent above the past market price and take it. Yeah. Private in a lot of cases, yeah.
Regardless of how cheap it was. So it could be, it could be worth 10 times what it's selling for. You offer 30 percent more and you've got a good chance of taking it private. Hmm. Crazy. So it's, at this point, a report card for me is appropriate in 58 years of Berkshire Management.
Most of my capital allocation decisions have been no better than so, so. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. Is that Buffett just. That's true. Being conservative, you believe that? No. I 100 percent believe it. Now, in.
So there's stock. In the digital stock for the rest of us is what you're saying. You're telling me there's a chance. I don't know about that because I don't think that his results in stocks have been particularly mediocre. Inpying entire companies, yeah, they have been.
I think this is a big explanation of what happened from about the time of the January deal to today of why Berkshire's performance has not been as good.
我认为这是一个从一月协议时到现在发生的事情的大解释,解释了为什么伯克希尔的表现不如预期。
The stock market got quite expensive around 1996 or so. And Berkshire's last purchase is that he talks about here in 94 and 95 around that area. They do the merger with January a couple years later.
It's in that neighborhood of the later 90s, in the 90s bubble, starting the 90s bubble into the full size of it. That Buffett's performance really weakens a lot. And I think that also explains why he moves to buying entire businesses.
There are some advantages to Berkshire to buying entire businesses. It's also why he bought preferred stock. So there's some tax advantages.
购买整个企业对伯克希尔有一些优势。这也是为什么他购买了优先股。因此,有一些税收优惠。
Berkshire is inefficiently an inefficient vehicle for taxation purposes. So it's going to pay more in taxes than you would owning stocks. But it does benefit. It does offset that, to some extent, that double taxation issue in cases where it can collect a dividend from one corporation to another.
So in many cases, Berkshire buying a preferred stock would be more attractive to it than you buying the same preferred stock.
因此,在许多情况下,伯克希尔购买优先股比您购买同样的优先股更具吸引力。
Now, I don't think that matters much because in the cases where Buffett was very successful in preferred stocks with large amounts of money, he would have been better off buying the common stock. Now, sometimes they worked out okay, fixed investments, so as alternative sub-ons.
But in general, he just should have bought more, like Gillette Moore, American Express, as a common stock as much as he could. You certainly could have done as well better by copying him in those things. But he wanted to make investments in things like USA or Solomon Brothers, a champion, a bunch of other ones, if it wasn't that he was getting different taxes on that.
He also would not have bought a lot of businesses, I think, unless it was due to the tax situation. So I mean, there is in the book of permanent value, he has quoted in that as talking about that with Derek Queen.
That Derek was a public-traded company and he would not have bought it as a stock. They bought it because it was more attractive and he estimated as being something like 20% more attractive to them or something based on that. That would have to be trade 20% or 30% even lower for him to buy it as a stock.
So I think that his record in buying control businesses is not so great. His record in stocks is a lot better. There's a lot of stocks. They're all available to you. The owners, you know, that can't block you from buying into them. And you get much better prices.
In control businesses, his record is very mixed. I think anyone could, you know, anyone with a lot of common sense and all that could get pretty close to what he's done with control businesses if we're doing it in like a hit rate.
Now, that doesn't mean that his decisions with very large business purchases have been bad. But I think that that's true. And part of it is that his ability to buy things in the industries that he likes best is probably very limited. So control purchases of financial companies is just not something that Berkshire could probably do a lot of.
I doubt that he's got a chance to buy many brands. You know, he's probably limited in lots of things, whether it's media things or whatever, his usual kind of circle, competent stuff. So food, media, insurance and banking and all that stuff is probably not where he's getting offers, getting a lot more offers and retail and a ton of things related to home building and the 2000s and stuff. And so his record on those are very mixed.
I was just thinking about this. Do you think Buffett has ever invested in other funds or anything like that similar to Munger investing in Lee Lu, Munger investing in all these different things? If you had to guess, or do you think Buffett just kind of sticks to Berkshire than his personal account?
Oh, his personal. Well, I mentioned a permanent value. It has a chapter on his personal account. And I think we have some pretty good estimates about what he's done in his personal account from things he said if they're literally true.
So at the time of the financial crisis, he's quoted saying to Hank Paulson that he could put in $100 million into something and then that's about 20% of his net worth outside of Berkshire. So that his personal portfolio was about $500 million at that time, which sounds about right.
We know he was in a ton of reeds and he's, you know, there's a chapter on that in the book. And because he went over the 5% limit on that, he also says around the time of the financial crisis that when he says in the Buy American because I am one, he says that he's been buying American stocks in his personal portfolio.
We know he bought like JP Morgan, for instance, probably for his personal portfolio and there may end up, he would have owned what's a serrage, right? Was a personal purchase.
So he says in that that he had only owned government bonds a few years earlier. Judging by that, we would know that in the earlier 2000s, shortly after the blow up of the.com stuff, he was in reeds looking for them to liquidate and some liquidating stuff.
There's also like, there's a couple other stocks we know of. They're not mentioned in the book, but I remember reading about them, which is a liquidation and stuff. So he was in special situations sometime in the early 2000s, then he's out of those and only in bonds by the financial crisis. We also know he was in Korean stocks because he picked those personally off that manual. And they said they want to probably for Berkshire. That was also early 2000s. So we have some information about like early 2000s stuff for Berkshire.
As far as being in funds and stuff, no, I believe he's never been in funds or anything like that. Berkshire itself has been, it has participated in funds run by other people. There was an arbitrage operation that they invested in and some stuff like that. What was that situation? And I was just curious like from a private perspective, they just like, they just like seeded someone. There were some things in insurance and things like that. So they're people that they've basically, I mean, we don't know all the deals of it, but I believe that they ran an arbitrage operation that would have been like what Buffett was doing.
Buffett would have been doing himself similar to what investment banks would do. They had some stuff of the Katie, which I think would have been similar to. So I think they'd be willing to put in money with some people to manage stuff that way. They've also done some things where people have managed stuff for them for maybe like tax purposes, a tax credit purposes that we know about.
So I think my, I don't know, my guess is he would never do something like the Lee Lou thing. It's possible that he would give money to someone to do stuff in markets that he's not involved in. I could see that happening with Berkshire or something at one time. So for instance, like, you know, he's doing arbitrage with with the Activision all of that, but I could see certainly arbitrage in certain markets or something in different commodities. We talked about how he bought silver and stuff himself.
So I, yeah, I could see that. And there's probably things for his personal portfolio. We can guess are probably related to things like that from what we know. They're probably smaller, some leverage things, some supply demand things that might have been in commodities and stuff like that, probably liquidations. The reats were just like trading below in that tangible asset value type stuff.
So probably very bang, gram type things, maybe, maybe bordering on things like going to go to the AQR or something, that kind of stuff. Probably honest, but on a smaller scale and more certain betting bigger, probably. So if you had to guess like what the Kager on that personal portfolio has been, if we knew it was around half a billion in the financial crisis, what would you guess?
Well, I don't think it's grown like much at all since then probably. Really? So yeah, because I think it's just idle for a long period of time. We have like no information about him doing anything with it. It's very unclear about that. So I, we have very, very little information since the financial crisis on it.
And also the fact that he would buy some personal things that could be in the same categories like a Berkshire, I feel like suggests that he probably hasn't spent much time thinking about it. I think decades ago, he probably spent a brief period of time working on it and made a bunch of money. So, but when that was, I don't know, maybe sometime in the very late 70s or early 80s through the early 2000s, but I think sense about the housing crisis. I don't think that he's done much of anything with it.
Yeah, I mean, whenever people meet with him, obviously they want to talk about Berkshire and everything around that. If we ever had dinner with him or if we were ever interviewing him, I think I would want to spend the whole time talking to him about his personal account and what he did in there.
So we can move on. Okay, so he had said that I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Our satisfactory results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions. That would be about one every five years and sometimes forgot to manage the favors, long-term investors, such as Berkshire. So I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on that.
So the hit rate on that from a good decision standpoint, one every five years. Well, we've been doing this podcast for five years and I was talking about how long that feels, right? So investors always want to just own stuff all the time. It seems like. So I'm kind of curious, what do you think those good decisions would be? Those truly good decisions, as he said, if you had to start listing them?
Oh, well, he talks about two from the 90s that would make sense, which would be things like American Express and Coca-Cola. He doesn't mention one that actually is on usual smaller. So it's from an unusual period. But around 2000 or 30 I don't remember exactly when it was. He did also buy as much as he could of what was then done in Brad Street so that he could get yours of Moody's when it was spun out.
So Moody's was obviously a great one, but it wasn't big enough size to Berkshire to matter a great deal. Washington Post is a good example. In terms of control businesses, these candies was a big one. National indemnity.
But that's more complicated if he's counting insurance things because insurance is really funding their performance that way. In terms of stocks that we know that they bought from years ago and everything, one easy way to look at is what stocks do we know that Buffett bought and that went up like 10 times or something. And this is why I mentioned in particular things like media and financial because this is where they're concentrated. He had affiliated publications, right? It was an amazing one for them. It was along with Washington Post, so both newspapers.
And then also, you know, the ad agencies in that time period also did really well. Those are all concentrated in time period in the like 74 or 73 something around there time period in the 1970s. He may have been buying for a few years before then and some of them went down for like three years or something, but a lot of them were concentrating that period.
And in terms of acquisitions of total companies, you know, there's somewhere he's made very big acquisitions in recent years. And so that might matter that the results haven't been amazing, but they've been good enough when combined with how they did them that I think matters.
There's very few from the 2000s that I put in that category. The only one that's probably really strong in that is the railroad. And then another controlled investment which they've done also as a individual, also as a public-marked investment too though, is a Geico. So in terms of like total control of a company thing, the ones that have made a lot of difference in terms of size and performance have been the railroad, being SF and Geico in the last, you know, a couple of decades.
Yeah, Moniche Pobry had tweeted this and he said these are likely 10 of the 12 probably not in order. Number one, hiring a G2 national identity three apple four, Berkshire Houthway energy five BNSF six Geico seven Bank of America eight C's nine coke, a cola, 10 AMX. He said what might the last two? What might be the last two season Buffalo News were bought from Blue Chip float cap cities question mark oxy slash Chevron question mark Gillette question mark.
哦,Moniche Pobry发推文说这些可能是12项中的10项,但没有顺序。第一项是聘请G2国家身份证的人,第三项是苹果公司,第四项是伯克希尔·哈撒韦·能源公司,第五项是BNSF(美国铁路公司),第六项是Geico(美国汽车保险公司),第七项是美国银行,第八项是C's(谷歌的新母公司Alphabet的子公司),第九项是可口可乐,第十项是AMX。他还说最后两项是什么呢?是从Blue Chip Float Cap Cities买来的季节性水牛新闻(Buffalo News)吗?还是Oxy/Chevron公司?或者是吉列公司?
I saw it. G G G S's in fact he talks he's talked it before about how they made a very big mistake in not going out and buying more little savings and loans just because there was a limit of 1% that you could get 1% of the common stock for each savings alone you own. So they should have just gone out and bought like every little savings and loan that was out there and stuff. So but they sold those eventually right. So what I'm talking about is like fanium for any type stuff. Yeah. So those get forgotten now but they were good performers for them for the time that they were in them.
我看到了它。G G G S's实际上谈到过他们犯了一个非常大的错误,那就是不去购买更多的小储蓄和贷款,只因为你拥有的每个储蓄和贷款你只能获得1%的普通股。所以他们应该只是出去买像每个小的储蓄和贷款那样的东西。但是他们最终卖了那些,对吧。所以我说的是像fanium这样的东西。是的。现在那些被人忘记了,但是对于他们来说,那些在他们的时间内表现良好。
When he says the hit rate is one great idea every five years, how do you think about that? Do you agree with that? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think investors should almost lower their expectations as they're sifting through a bunch of these names and raise the hurdle if the world's greatest investor is saying, hey look, it really comes down to about a dozen ideas over my lifetime which is a very long life and the hit rate is one every five years. I mean, how do you sort of what's your takeaway from that?
I'm not sure that I've done better than one every five years. Certainly you have more ideas than one every five years but you have to recognize the idea that large enough on in and hold on to it for a while. So he means not that he had a good idea once every five years but that he that they benefited from his realization of a good idea fully enough.
Well, we're talking about the personal portfolio. He could come up with ideas for his personal portfolio but they can't move the needle. So that's part of the issue is that Berkshire is too big. The other part is that there's long stretches of time in which he doesn't have any good ideas.
So, you know, from the late 1990s through about the financial crisis, Berkshire has virtually no good investments than it may. You know, like I just mentioned, uh, Dene Brasser or something's like the only thing that they did. Anything else. I mean, if they had been in cash instead of being in that stuff, I don't know how big the difference would have been and then they could have gone bigger into things afterwards. Um, you know, they did buy some stuff that worked out fine, like they bought some junk things, um, but they couldn't do it in huge scale. The market was just expensive, you know? Um, and so that's very difficult.
When they're using almost all their money to buy private businesses, it probably indicates that the public markets are too expensive for them or that they just can't find things in what they want there. Um, and so they have to resort to that and he says that you don't really get good prices on that. So that's how he's judging it.
I mean, Berkshire's that performance, you know, which they cover in the first page, uh, in market value versus the S&P is 10%. So, at times Berkshire has been, uh, leveraged about 1.5 times to, to one. Uh, however, there's long stretches of time in which as best we can gauge his performance and stocks, it's about 20% a year.
So the stock performance is actually similar buffets stock picking at times has been similar to Berkshire's return, even though they use leverage. So what's happening with it? Uh, the leverage in, in fact, is leveraging okay prices on the business side, right?
So like, it's allowing Berkshire to invest fully by being, you know, by being leveraged up so that results that would otherwise not be so great on the private business side, um, look okay if they're done with leverage. So like, when I gave the example of the railroad, let's say you bought the railroad at 20 times, uh, you know, the part, the 75% or whatever that they bought that, um, you didn't already own at about 20 times normalized free cash flow or something like that. Um, they borrowed a bunch of the money to do that for a little while.
Then they also have the credit rating they have and then they can also not guarantee the credit of the, the, um, railroad or whatever. So there's some benefits to that like, because it had a, I don't know, uh, maybe the market gap was three times the debt or something. So it had a bunch of debt. But if you just get an okay price on the railroad, let's say, let's say it was something like a 5% yield or something, obviously you're paying 20 times zone earnings, um, then with a little leverage it works out, right?
If you're using float or something with owners money, it, it might do what the historical return in the S&P over time has been, but it won't kind of beat the S&P. It may be the S&P going forward if the S&P is really overvalued, but that's kind of the thing that they face.
Um, so when we get into things like, is returns in the 70s from stocks, that's part of the really impressive result is that two things were happening. One, he bought these stocks that really love values, you know, and they went up a lot. So there's stocks that went up 10 times or something that we talked about, immediate advertising and all that stuff. But also, although their combined ratio was not good, they had a bunch of float.
So a huge amount, you know, there's a higher degree of leverage back then in the business and more of it is allocated to stocks. And so the, their best years really are years where there's a significant amount of float and it's in, um, stocks. As float comes down and as you buy private businesses, I think you just see the difficulty of it that, um, I mean, it's ironic because we talk about efficient markets and public markets, but really the market is more efficient in the private space for them to buy control of entire businesses. That's where it's harder to get inefficiencies.
So the secret sauce, you think he talks about Coca-Cola and AMX as examples because those are two businesses that everybody could visualize and would be familiar with?
所以,你认为他举了可口可乐和AMX作为例子,是因为这两个业务是每个人都能想像并熟悉的吗?
Uh, it's possible, but like I said, with the exception of, um, Moody's, these are two of the best, um, stock investments that he's made in the last, um, 30 years or so, 25 years.
And, um, also, the other examples would be like things that you buy, total control of. So I think he wanted to use stock examples. I think that's absolutely right. Yeah.
And stocks that they don't for a really, really long time. So these are two. If they still in Wells Fargo, he might have used Wells Fargo as an example, you know, time back a few years. Yeah.
Yeah. My takeaway from this section was one word time, really owning it for a very long time.
嗯,这一部分给我留下了一个词:时间,真正拥有它并持续很长时间。
So for Coca-Cola, they purchased a $1.3 billion worth, $400 million shares, the cash dividend in 1994 was $75 million by 2022. That $75 million was $704 million. And he, you know, talks about how all they had to do was just cash the quarterly dividend checks that he talks about American Express as well.
The cost was $1.3 billion. And the dividends received from AMEX have grown from $41 million to $302 million today. And that he also believes those two dividends will continue to grow in the future.
But he does say these dividend gains, though pleasing are far from spectacular. But they bring with them important gains in stock prices.
但是他说这些股息收益,虽然令人愉悦,但并不令人惊叹。但是它们带来了股价重要的收益。
And he says that year on our co-investment was valued at $25 billion, which is obviously a lot more than the $1.3 billion at cost. And the AMEX was $22 billion, which is a lot higher than the $1.3 billion at cost in AMEX as well.
Yeah. Well, one thing is if you run the math on it, the dividend growth rate is pretty high, like it's significantly higher at Coke than the growth in the business and stuff.
嗯,有个问题,如果你计算一下,可口可乐的股息增长率相当高,比业务增长率和其他东西都要明显高。
So it may surprise people how much the dividends grown. And then American Express is a little, not as good, but it's fine. And it might be a bit cheaper and it is bigger reason is that it's buying back stock, you know, is why the dividend is lower.
But yeah, I think that the dividend growth rate in those cases, you know, a meaningful part of it. And then in the case of Coke, re-rating of a multiple from much of the time he's owned it.
However, it probably is one of the stocks he was talking about when he said, not a nist letter, but he said in the past, I probably should have sold some of our largest holdings during the bubble, meaning he maybe he should have sold Coke in 2000. So maybe he should have only held it for 10 to 15 years instead of for 30 some years. Yeah.
Thought other than that? Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on the past year in brief section? Talks a little bit about purchasing Allegheny. We've covered that on the podcast.
I did think it was interesting when which you hit on earlier since purchasing our first property, casualty, insurer in 1967. Berkshire's float has increased 8,000 fold, your acquisitions, operations and innovations. But of course, that's not captured in there. Financial statements might take away mainly from this, which is how important float is to Berkshire's operations and how crucial or strong it's been to the success of the company.
Yeah. So there's kind of two things. One is that Buffett's record is pretty close to the record of Berkshire, but that his ability to do it in size has only been because of float. So like Berkshire, if you're talking about Berkshire's record as a stock, it is driven very, very heavily by float.
Buffett as a stock picker, sure. If he stayed running a fund and he distributed money every once in a while, said, okay, I'm going to pay this out and stuff when I ran it like Renaissance or something, then yeah, his record would be really good over a huge period of time, but he couldn't grow to bigger and bigger sizes. The way they've been able to do it is with float.
And so the success of Berkshire has a ton to do with float and the miscalculations of the value Berkshire always have to with people saying it's like a closed end fund and all that, which it has nothing in common with those things. It's like a banker and an insurer or something like that that's able to get money at low cost and then earn a spread over it because it has so much money in float that they talk about there.
It's such low cost that if you turn around and you vest that even in things like bonds, then you could make a lot of money. And I think obviously people don't think about that.
There are some calculations that people make of the stock, not people who are probably listening to this podcast, but who basically just valued in terms of liquidation and language of look at things like price to book and all that. But effectively, let's say it has 100, you know, this is 100, what does he say? They have up to 160 some billion in float.
If you have that much and it's two year yields, you know, 5% or whatever, then given how long that you have on your float and everything, you can invest 100% into that because actually even if Berkshire stopped writing tomorrow or something, it would take that long for it's a book to run off to a significant, even a meaningful part of it. It's not going to have more than 50%.
I mean, it's not going to have 100% of the float roll off in two years and it's probably depending what they're in, not going to have 50% roll off in a year. So, you know, you're going to earn money on that, which is billions and billions of dollars.
You know, the spread that you're going to earn on that is, that we're talking about is something like, you know, one and a half billion a quarter or something. And that's excluded from the valuation of the company when people talk about it as if they're using owner money when they're not there.
It's the same as using deposits or something. So, it's incredibly important for Berkshire that it has that float. And he also with the alligator thing, the thing he did say, which is interesting is like that they will benefit alligator from being part of Berkshire because of Berkshire's strong balance sheet and their approach, which is basically that they're going to not lay off risk on anyone else because I think that Berkshire's the only insurer that literally does not pass on risk to anyone else.
If you look at like tables of the largest insurance groups, even those that are very, very highly rated do maybe just to manage their earnings or whatever, seed some risk to others. Right. So, even if they themselves own reinsures and everything, they seed stuff to other reinsures, Berkshire's premiums and the amount that they're keeping is the same.
They're basically keeping everything for themselves, which means that if you buy a company that was seeding some, then you're going to keep more of the risk for yourself. So even if they write the exact same amount of business, you're going to keep more on your balance sheet.
So, it's kind of like if they bought a bank that was selling the loans off to someone else, now they're going to buy that bank and keep all of it for their own book. That's the kind of approach when they buy insurer.
We get to into talking about share buybacks, kind of throw out jabs at the politics of it and then taxes. Were you surprised that he's, do you think he was kind of coming out a little bit fiery than normal on this or what?
No. Okay. I think the share buyback thing probably bothers him a lot. Okay. Why? And why is that? Because it encourages stupid and unethical behavior. Right. Because you're taxing something which is an ethical use of it.
I think it also bothers him because of some of the ways he's talked about trade, for instance. You'll notice that the way he talks about the buyback being beneficial to everyone, not harming anyone is exactly the way that people, um, turn 50 years ago or whatever, um, talked about, uh, trade, uh, talked about free trade and the importance of it.
And what his point is is, um, they're not forcing anyone. This isn't a deal. You're not, for instance, we talked about management buyouts or something. If you tax people for squeezing out shareholders, that's a different thing. Uh, this is something in which the people who are selling are electing to sell. And the people who are buying are buying because they think it benefits others that way. It's also helping to not waste the capital on other things.
Um, so to him, I think it's the same as if you said, okay, let's tax, um, you know, voluntary trade between people. Um, it, and so it's just not a good idea. I also think that it probably bothers him because it does encourage not on ethical behavior. And because you don't really need to encourage more buybacks, um, I mean, less buybacks, you don't need to encourage people to not buy back stock.
As we know, um, management is very inclined not to buy back stock. They would prefer not to buy back stock. They would prefer to expand the business, have a bigger business to, um, run, obviously, they would prefer acquiring things. They prefer doing lots of things other than, uh, treating their partners who don't have a, um, a organized vote often very well.
You know, they don't have representation on the board and stuff usually. I mean, they can, in theory, you all together as a disorganized group, we know, vote sometimes, but, um, they're basically not very well represented. And, uh, they can be mistreated as kind of silent partners because individually like, um, that's kind of what they become. Yeah.
So I mean, this also, you'll notice in the very beginning of the letter, he says something interesting where he talks about individuals, and he, the sabre slide. Yeah. So he says, but specifically says individuals, he's probably annoyed with the ESG stuff and the black rocks and the vanguards and things of the world.
Um, but he decided not to go after them and to say bad things about them. But he, I don't think he has good things to say about them anymore. He made a very strong point of saying individuals. I think he's kind of shifted in terms of how he's going to talk about shareholders and stuff.
I think they're going to totally ignore passive shareholders and say that they don't count, um, you know, indexing shareholders. Uh, and, you know, but to some extent, that's his fault because he wants to get in the S&P.
So why did he slash it comes up in? Yeah, no, that's why he did it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he may have, he may have, yes, he may have even written a section and then deleted it or something, but it's clear recently that he's gone annoyed with all that stuff. Yeah.
Um, and I think the share by back in the individuals, yes, and not institutions are just passive owners of the company. Yeah. That's funny. Yes. I didn't pick up on that. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Um, and I think that's connected with him because his one of his really, really big things in terms of ethics and stuff with Buffett is, uh, poor stewardship, right? So the, the requirement to, uh, use other people's money properly and when it's entrusted with you to treat them well, not to abuse it to take whatever things and, and, and all that.
Um, so which sometimes is a little different from other things. He's, he's seen as being very, um, his politics being very left wing or whatever things. But this is a big part of his concern about it.
Uh, you remember the, uh, the boys town thing, right? That was the one time he gave a story to someone and everything. And that's exactly what the problem was there is, is, um, mishandling of it, bringing in money when you actually were, uh, you know, continuing to bring in more and more money when you actually were spending more than you needed anyway, you know, you didn't need to bring in any more money.
Um, so I think his problem with the stock buyback thing, honestly, is that it's encouraging management to do, to mistreat their owners and not to think of their owners as partners. And that is a bigger part of the whole stakeholder issue. Mm hmm.
To think about is that as you widen what groups you think you're responsible for, then you become responsible to no one. I mean, in a sense, when you say our, our act, you know, you start your annual part by saying our actions touch all the world and, you know, um, and all that stuff, then you're saying we're not responsible to our shareholders in a special way. We're not responsible to the particular country we're in in a special way because we're, we're for everyone and all things and stuff. You know, as you do that, so you can have a few stakeholders.
If you say, um, you know, our, our customers are, um, our owners, whatever, the things that you would often see in reports, but as you broaden that out, then it becomes more and more of an issue of, um, then you don't feel special responsibility for certain groups. And I think he feels special responsibility for shareholders and wants the companies that he's invested into feel that special responsibility. And the share buyback tax is very, um, damaging that way.
It's a good excuse for people not to do it. And then also he probably, um, the other thing is it wasn't talked about a lot because it's a very small tax, but that's how all tax, you know, usually you start as a very small tax and then you're going to change it later when you want to. Um, so yeah, I think that that's not something that he's particularly happy about.
Um, but I think he's also tried definitely in recent years to avoid, uh, being as involved in political stuff. Cause he had some bad experiences with that. I think mainly from the early Obama period with the Buffett tax and all that. And so I think since then he's even said sometimes when asked about it, why haven't you said as much about your supporting this person doing this and I feel this way about this and everything that, um, he tries not to call people out on that as much.
So, um, talks about his, um, comfortfulness, holding a ton of cash. Um, said as for the future, Berkshire will always hold a boatload of cash and US treasury bills along with a wide array of businesses. We will also avoid behavior that could result in any uncomfortable cash needs that inconvenient times, including financial panics and unprecedented insurance losses. Our CEO will always be the chief risk officer.
You have any thoughts on that aspect of me? He's always been very comfortable holding cash. Mm hmm. Yeah.
你对我那一方面有什么想法吗?他一直非常喜欢持有现金。嗯嗯。是的。
Um, not really. He's the same thing that he said before that, you know, again, it's a, that's a, um, subtle way of criticizing every financial institution, every investment bank, every whatever. Who has a designated risk chief risk officer? He's saying the chief risk officer is the CEO. There should be no chief risk officer. Sure. Yeah.
And in fact, that's something that like government and stuff likes to have is that regulators like to have the chief risk officers and saying that you can't do that. Um, yeah. So, and again, it's a stewardship type thing because if your chief risk officer whoever signs off on it, then you feel like, Oh, well, then it's not my responsibility. I said, I'm going to take this risk. They said it's okay. So it's okay. Right. Whereas if you're taking it personally and you're the buckstaffs with you, then you have a different attitude about it. Mm hmm. So I think it goes to that same thing. But again, he does it in a nice way. Yeah. I'm saying that they don't need the chief risk officer, but he's that language specifically because others, uh, mentioned chief risk officers and stuff and do it as a way of not having the CEO be the one who handles, um, responsibility for all those risks and has to judge that. Mm hmm.
So then he talks more about federal taxes, right? Is this sort of a continuation on, uh, being upset and criticizing like the, uh, share by back tax, right? How he's basically saying, Hey, we do contribute. Berkshire's contribution via the corporate income tax was 32 billion during the decade, almost exactly a tenth of 1% of all money that the treasury collected. Mm hmm. Yeah. I'm not sure what this is about. This is started. I mean, he's done this at times a long time ago in terms of the size of it, um, about the company, everything. But he doesn't usually criticize when he's talking about the amount of taxes that they pay. Mm hmm.
However, he also is debt. You'll notice a difference in that when talking about personal tax and stuff that he pays, he says they're under tax. He never says Berkshire's under tax. Mm hmm. So there's clear, it's not that he's saying that Berkshire doesn't pay enough or something. Um, I notice it more in a sense they've been involved in the heavily regulated businesses. And I do feel that maybe Buffett is concerned with, um, maintaining good relations with the government and stuff that were now that they're in energy and railroad. Um, and avoiding, um, criticism of the company overall for its ownership of those things and people going after them and stuff. So yeah, I do think there maybe is a bit of a shift that way. Mm hmm.
And then he's like, well, in case these words don't mean much, let me pay in a picture for you and tell you just how much we paid in taxes. And he says, imagine piling up 32 billion, the total of Berkshire's 2012 to 2021 federal income tax payments. Now the stack grows to more than 21 miles in height. If you, uh, converted it to $100 bills and stacked it up about three times the level at which commercial airplanes usually cruise. So he's really hitting on that.
Um, I, I, I mean, they thought to myself, I'm like, so did he just calculate this himself as somebody thought through this thought exercise? You just probably ran the math himself and estimated what it would be. Yeah, probably. I mean, I think of the size of a bill and stuff and it's not difficult to do that. Uh-huh.
Um, there is, I didn't think about this before, but actually when I was reading, I did think about it. He doesn't get into it much, but it is possible that part of his reason for discussing this a little bit is, um, he wants to sound very positive on America's future as a country. At the same time is not being super positive on its, um, budget deficit and its inflation situation. And the likelihood of that continuing and I don't know what that's all about if he fears that they'll be higher taxes in the future or he or what, but I think he has some awareness of, of that issue. Um, and he gives it very short mention in the letter that, you know, there's almost no mention of it, but, mm-hmm.
And then he spends some time talking about Charlie. And he had said he were a few of his thoughts, many lifted from a very recent podcast.
然后他花了一些时间谈论 Charlie。他说他分享了他的几个思想,其中许多是从最近的播客中得来的。
So I was looking, I'm like, where's this podcast? So internet, you have to do your thing and send it over if you could find it.
所以我在找,然后就想,这个播客在哪里呢?因此,请互联网尽你所能,如果你能找到,就把它发送过来。
A lot of this, uh, stuff has been said over the years, but, you know, good ideas don't go stale. So it's nice to, um, you know, read a lot of these again.
这些话多年来讲过很多次,但是你知道,好的想法永远不过时。所以很高兴能够重新阅读这些东西。
I mean, a lot of them from like poor Charlie's all men. I can actually wonder people were speculating if I guess they're doing like a video form of poor Charlie's all men, I saw a two minute clip.
I think it was the striped guys, one of them are interviewing monger at his house. So I'm thinking maybe that's the podcast that Buffett just saw before. It was a publicly available.
But hey, man, my life is complete because Buffett, you know, he listens to podcasts apparently. So I was, uh, yeah, did you ever think that the word podcast would appear and it's got to be the first time that's ever, yeah, that's got to be the first time.
So I was like, we made it, we made it. He's definitely searched born Buffett or Berkshire. I'm just going to guess he's had, he's definitely come across our podcast.
But yeah, I don't know. I mean, do you know of a podcast that has come out on monger? No. Okay. No.
嗯,我不知道。我的意思是,你知道有什么关于Monger的播客吗?没有,好的,没有。
Anything from this section that stood out to you? No. I mean, obviously it's different in that he doesn't normally do this. So um, dedicate a section to him. Correct.
Yeah. And it's not specific, you know, anniversary of whatever things and stuff. So yeah. Um, I think you talked about in recent letter, I don't remember which one it was. It was a year ago or something about whether it's a victory lap or what sort of, uh, the letter was like, you know, um, this is definitely doing that with with Charlie. Yeah.
Trust 99, right? 99 years old. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I mean, and with COVID and everything that happened with them, not having in person meetings and we've talked about that.
Um, yeah, I think that that has definitely changed the tone of some things. I think like there's a tone of the meeting or things since then, uh, because of that happening, not so much that there was a pandemic or something, but that it caused there not to be meetings for a little while and everything. Mm hmm.
I did think it was interesting that the daily journal didn't have an in person meeting this year, but obviously Berkshire had a meeting last year in Omaha.
我认为很有趣的是,日报今年没有面对面开会,但伯克希尔去年在奥马哈开了一次会议。
Perhaps that was just a difference of the states that those two companies operated or whatever, but I did, I thought that was interesting.
也许那只是这两家公司所处的州份的差异或其他原因吧,但我认为那很有趣。
My guess would be that it's Warren doesn't do zoom. And Charlie is probably on zoom 24, seven. Yeah. Um, it's more of that kind of thing. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. It's easier for Charlie, you know, yeah.
Charlie has said that he, uh, he really enjoys zoom. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also think Charlie would be more likely to do, uh, you know, with to do something where he talks.
If he can just switch from talking to one person to the next, we'll sit in the same place that way. Um, yeah. No, I think that Buffett definitely would like the crowd and everything there.
Yeah. I don't think it's going to go virtual under, um, but well, I mean, it was like basically had to then, but other than that, I don't think it'll be virtual during Buffett's time. Mm hmm.
Munger did say that he did have COVID and then he had sniffles for like a day or something. Then he was all good. So I mean, this man just built different Jeff.
Uh, shocking statistic on C's candies. Did you see that about what? How this tensales permitted? How much they sold?
哇,C糖的统计数据太令人震惊了。你看到关于什么了吗?他们是如何获准销售的?他们卖了多少?
Yeah. When I read the first part, I was, it's funny because I read the first part. He says, what does he say first? Um, 11 tons.
嗯,当我读到第一部分的时候,我感到很有趣,因为我读到了第一部分。他先说了什么?嗯,11吨。
Yeah. So when he says the, that's what it is. Yeah. So he says the tons first. So it's funny because a few paragraphs later, he breaks down everything about that.
Yeah. When I read the tons, I'm doing in my head like, okay, so how many individual sales is that? And how many, you know, and he does it like two paragraphs later, but because it's an incredible amount. I'm like, okay, so these might be what two pound boxes.
Yeah. Yeah. They're picturing like what a ton looks like. I think like a dump truck. How much of that is a ton? Yeah. It's crazy.
嗯。嗯。他们想象着一吨的样子。我觉得像一辆垃圾车一样。那么一吨有多少?是啊。太疯狂了。
Yeah. So I, I agree with you on what your thoughts were. I was like, it's kind of, I don't know. I mean, I've benefited from a lot of Buffett's other letters. So I mean, can't judge him. But I agree with you.
When you had said that, you had felt like you didn't think this would be a good representation or learn a lot about Berkshire if you were going to invest in the company. Yeah. To me, it just seemed shorter, kind of more, just things he has said in the past. But I mean, can't judge the man for that.
Right. Yeah. And there is a lot about the decisions that they made. Right. And how the decision, so that part of it is very important. And maybe doesn't get explained enough about Berkshire. Not sure all the reasons for getting into disgusting it that way.
It's always interesting about why I choose to discuss what topics in what year. So I like that kind of stuff because otherwise we just have discussions of share buybacks or whatever things. He does do a good job of making a letter. It's timeless so that when you have an entire collection of them and read it, it makes sense.
We don't appreciate that now because we read the 70s or 80s letters and don't think, oh, why is it not just constantly about inflation and stuff? You know, we don't read in go, oh, why is it a discussing water gate? But when we read the because you don't think about it back then.
But when we read the letters during COVID and stuff, it was notable how little specific discussion there was of COVID and how little specific discussion there was of inflation. There's a little bit more of that at the annual meeting. But he tries to stick to things that are not just like that one year type discussion.
So there is the share buyback thing, which is specific to now in it. I think the more timeless thing that's in it is this discussion of how few purchases that they've made have mattered so much. And how others have not done so good. He even says, I mean, he says two things. One, he breaks down if it didn't do well. Like if it got bond like returns, how small a percentage it would become over time. And he breaks that down for people, which is helpful. But then he also even says something like does he say?
I don't remember. He says he uses a pretty large number, a pretty large word describing the number, like a great man in year, whatever of the businesses are not good. They're marginal. He calls them marginal. And that's a recognition that I think rarely is made about Berkshire. That in terms of numbers, there's a large number of businesses that are not very good inside of Berkshire. There's a smaller number of very good businesses. They're worth a lot more than book value and all that. But it's a mixed bag that way.
Any final thoughts? Anything else on the Berkshire letter from Mr. Buffett? No, they're good. They're very good. Well, we could hop over to PowerPoint. But we have some emails, but we're not going to spend too much time on it because I actually want to get into our topic, which came from an email to you.
Okay. And it's about this idea of like asymmetry in asymmetric investments. And somebody had emailed you saying, I've been reading about Ted Washler's, dealer's investment. And I wanted to know what's your opinion on the investment. What do you think gave him the conviction that it wasn't a value trap? It would stay at similar or worse prices for many years without being able to obtain a good return.
Also, do you think he thought in advance that the return could be as good as it has been? I was curious about that when I was reading through this. And then he provided a link where somebody gave a background to the investment that I thought we could use for the podcast.
But when did he invest in a dealer? So I remember when the news came out, it was like peak pandemic, right? It was 2020 sometime. And what's a ticker for? Is it DDS? Is that right? Yes.
DDS. So we could see what has happened. The part that was super interesting to me, Jeff, is if you pull up like an all time chart, right? It's, I mean, okay, so 2020, let's say the average, I mean, he bought what around like 30 to 25, 35 to $35 to 30 to share somewhere around there. And this guy goes into it.
But this hasn't been an investment where it's like, oh, you're just back to pre-COVID highs, right? And, you know, 2015 or whatever. I mean, the stock has just gone up multiple higher than it ever has been in its history. So it is an interesting stock to look at and study and try to understand, hey, what happened here?
Something that I also thought was interesting and curious to hear your thoughts on it, right? So Ted invests presumably, I mean, he has an LBO background, private equity, stuff like that. But he presumably invests like Buffett, right? High quality companies. At least that's what he preaches when he talks at public. He did do a podcast. I believe in 2021 where he talked about things. And it was all about buying the great businesses, right? Munger, the same thing.
But you look at a few of their huge winners in life have come from almost breaking their rules a little bit, right? When you think about Munger's investment in TENICO, now you think about Ted's investment in Dillards. And it reminded me of Munger's quote from the daily journal meeting, and this only comes with experience when he said, a young man knows the rules and an old man knows when to break the rules.
So clearly they just saw the opportunity there. But I thought that was interesting because something clearly has changed with the business because it's the value, which is way higher than it's ever been. But so you're talking about, you know, good, versus perfect as an investment. And we could go into it. But I guess I mean, do you have any initial thoughts on this idea of asymmetry? Is it an overused financial term? Personally, I think it is.
But before we get into it. So, right. So we should explain this. So this is from the after dinner investor, who you can see the website, you know, seeing the website that you can see it on the video and stuff of your list, if you're watching this on the video. But he also is on the punch card investing on YouTube. So if you, if you haven't seen his website, this is that website.
He is not the person, the after dinner investors, not the person who sent this in. Actually, I've gotten this one of the ones. So that's why I forwarded over to you. It was floating around Twitter too. Yeah. But I mean, I've got more than one email asking us to do this. Okay. Different people. I mean, not I shouldn't say asking us to do it. They did not ask us to do it. Saying I want to understand this better and stuff, talking to me, not not necessarily for us to do in the podcast. But because this happened more than once from different people, I said, okay.
Well, you know, obviously, like you said, it's floating around and stuff that people are looking at this reading it. So, so the analysis here that we're going from that we're, we're highlighting everything may not be have anything to do with Ted Wessler's thoughts about it really. Obviously, it's, it's sort of the prism of this blog post. And then also, we may not be agreeing in terms of like how we would analyze it with how the after dinner investor would analyze it to the same thing. Right. So, so it's like three levels here when we're looking at it, we're looking at we're back in the past to look at Dylan.
So it's like, how did he actually look at it? How's the after an investor looking at it? How, you know, would we look at it? But anyway, so this is very easy for people watching the video to understand all of this. But I just want that clear for the podcast because it sounds like we've got some, you know, like we're in Ted's brain or something that we're doing this. So, and I also wanted to make it really clear that this was not sent by the author of the right, you know, so yeah, go ahead with what you've got highlighted there.
So, I mean, I'm just kind of curious, do you believe that asymmetric investments come around? Like frequently, have you even come across one that you categorize as being an asymmetric upside or having extreme asymmetry where there was a lot of different ways to win? Do you think about it in terms like that? Or do you think about it more so from like a margin of safety perspective? Hey, there's a lot of layers to this. It's trading below book value. It's trading below, you know, private market value. How do you typically think about that?
Yeah, the second one. I mean, it does happen. There are ones like that. You know, we've talked about, um, any more precious metals in the past. So if something happened and it makes a bunch of money, but if you say that there's never going to be volatility, then it doesn't make any money. But at the time, it was trading at a price that kind of assumed there never be volatility again and gold and silver and things like that. Um, so that happens, we've all talked about other ones. Um, that would fall into that same sort of category.
Net nets, ten, you know, the net nets that are huge winners are always going to fall into this category, to be honest, where there's not a lot of downside, but then they people go wide event net net explode like that. What's something happened in the industry? And so just temporarily, you know, change things. Um, so yeah, a lot of net nets and things have that sort of a, some tree, although you often don't discover it ahead of time. When you look at it, you think, Oh, this is boring. Nothing will ever happen with this. And then something surprises you that happens, you know, because when it's something so cheap, it actually has a lot of upside potential. People always underestimate the upside potential because we get to re-read it all like a real business, then upside potential is going to be huge.
Yeah, imagine if you buy like a two or three P, which those opportunities don't come around that much. And by nature, they shouldn't, right? And perhaps there's a little stickiness to it or heriness if you're going to find companies like that. But, you know, if a company goes from a two or three P to a 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, and then has growth on top of it, I mean, that's where you could really make insane returns.
Um, so he talks about this idea of like good versus perfect and good investment ideas and perfect investment ideas look similar. And then he continues on. He says, but oftentimes, the margin of safety is smaller than we think it is. The brand isn't as strong as we think. The real estate isn't as valuable. The product is not as sticky, et cetera. This is why investing is difficult.
Our natural bias is towards action, which kind of looping back two buffets, one every, one big idea that was successful over five years. Yes, he had more ideas in between, but just the ones that really move the needle, right? Our natural bias is towards action. We want to find investing ideas. So we end up making too many purchases of merely good ideas and we fail to be patient and load up on the perfect ideas.
So to set the stage, this author, he does conclude later on that he did think that the dealer's investment was a perfect investment or perfect idea. So it's good looks like perfect. That's what makes things difficult, but perfect is different with perfect investments. The downside is smaller than the good investments and it is also more defined. And you have a higher confidence level in your understanding of the very limited downside.
And on the upside with perfect investments, the upside is much larger than the upside you get from good investments, good and perfect investments have the same basic outline, but it's the degree of downside confidence levels and upside that separate perfect investments from good investments.
So that kind of reminded me of greenblaths, right? When he talked about like how he sizes his positions, his position sizes are not the ones that he thinks he's going to make the most money, the most money on it was the ones that he felt like he wouldn't lose any money. So kind of this idea of confidence, right? And we've spoken a lot recently about what does confidence mean in investing?
Do you have any thoughts on that section? Yeah, I mean, the thing is it's difficult to know the difference between you have a high degree of confidence, something's going to make money that so it's really cheap and the upside because of that cheapness. So a lot of times people when you think that something is very, very safe, you tend to underestimate the upside. So what you're doing is when you're saying, oh, this has a tremendous margin of safety, often you're underestimating future circumstances under which it could have tremendous upside.
Because what you're saying is it's really, really cheap, but I don't think it has a lot of upside. It's kind of what you're saying when you say I'm very certain about this, but I don't feel like it has the best, you know, like it might not be the biggest winner, but a lot of times you underestimate that and actually the things are most certain and tend to become your biggest winner.
So since I have a great example of a perfect investment, the Dillard's investment by Ted Wesshuler comes to mind sometime likely in 2020, which I remember when the news came out, Wesshuler began buying Dillard's stock by September 29th, he crossed the 5% threshold and showed up in a 13G, he likely paid 25 to 30 dollars a share, call a 30 today, Dillard's is at a 360 dollar share price and in December they're going to pay a $15 special dividend with a special dividend capital turn to date, he's likely at a 12 to 13 bagger in less than two years time, Wesshuler's investment in Dillard's was a perfect investment and we pull it up right now, Dillard's is at $358 per share.
So yeah, that's been a huge home run. He had to actually get approval, I believe, from Berkshire to purchase the stock if I'm correct about that, not like that's really relevant to the investment, but he continues on, it was a perfect not just because of the result, but because of the situation.
In the third quarter of 2020, Dillard's had 22 million shares outstanding, at $30 a share, that's a market cap of $660 million, that debt was $561 million, but tangible book value per share was $63, double the share price. So despite the net debt, Dillard's was selling for less than half of tangible book value. Why? I believe it was the real estate. On the books, after depreciation, the gross property plan equipment was at $1.4 billion. According to their 2019 annual report, for the fiscal year ending February 1st, 2020, Dillard's owned approximately 43.7 million square feet of store space across 285 stores in 29 states.
That's on page 10. That on page F 10, they say property and equipment owned by the company is stated at cost, that's important, which includes related interest costs incurred during periods of construction, less accumulated depreciation and amortization.
This all makes me think that the after depreciation and on the books at cost, real estate property plan equipment, it's worth way more than the state of $1.4 billion. The stores they own, the 43.7 million square feet, was very likely bought at prices way less than their worth today. And just because depreciation is on the books, it doesn't mean those properties depreciated in real world value.
So do you remember that Nebraska furniture mark podcast he did? He kind of talked about, he didn't specifically say Dillard's, but I think the person asked him about finding investment ideas.
And I think he had said just kind of they jump out at you reading the newspapers or just reading things that other people aren't reading. And I believe he had said that he was reading a furniture periodical. So I don't think he specifically said Dillard's, but he had said, hey, sometimes ideas just kind of jump out at you from just really random places.
Let's see, during fiscal 2019, the company received cash proceeds of 30.6 million and realized a gain of 20.3 million, primarily related to the sale of six store properties. That sentence shows that two thirds of the sale value were gains. So it does look like the properties are worth more than book value.
Who knows if those six stores represent the average value of the other 285, likely not as they might have sold some of their worst performing stores and least valuable properties. Question mark, who knows?
Well, actually, we can, but just for one thing to be able to understand, he knows how many square feet they had, they had about 45 million square feet. And he knows what's carried on the books at 1.4 billion, 1.4 billion is 1,400 million. So you can convert that into it and say that it's 1,400 million divided by 44.7.
So 1,400 divided by 44.7, you can see that on price per square foot, it's carried on the books at a fairly low value. Actually, tremendously low value. In fact, the replacement cost could be a lot higher because it's being carried because you can just do that division and see that, right?
So you would expect it to be carried at like hundreds of dollars of square foot or something. It's being carried at tens of dollars of square foot. Yeah.
Go ahead. It says, and you can also do a seritage like valuation on the 43.7 million square feet they own. Let's say they can rent that square footage at $14 a foot, which he says is conservative. Assuming the cost it takes to redevelop some of the properties, $14 a foot times 43.7 million square feet equals
611 million times roughly a 50% net operating income NOI margin that gives you 300 million as an annual NOI. Give it a conservative 10% cap rate. We're looking at 3 billion in real estate value. So again, building sort of a case for hey, there's a lot of tangible equity here in this business.
Yeah, and the replacement cost is probably very high. Yeah, because you can ask what would it take to replace almost 45 million square feet and obviously you're going to get a number that's very high, you know, higher than the number he just mentioned.
So we're back to the private market analysis. What a private buyer would pay or have to pay to build it yourself. Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, obviously like Amazon has a deal with what coals, I think it's a coals, one of those department stores to take returns and stuff for them and things like that. So obviously some of these companies, if they want to do things, you know, in locations, need to have some sort of presence that way.
So it's a question of like, well, what would someone pay to buy this thing? So he says, whether you take the price on the book, sell 1.4 billion minus the 561 million of net debt, and you're looking at a tangible book value of 800 million versus the market cap of 660 million, or if you take the rose year, but still likely conservative, seritage like approach, valuing the real site after net debt at around 2.4 billion.
Either way, you've got a big margin of safety because you're buying that own real site net of the debt for less than it is worth. So again, he's talking about asymmetry. There's downside protection. You're getting this, you know, not even talking about the income or the actual business itself. There's a lot of what do you say the book value was two times what he was paying, right? Something like that book value per share was 63 dollars, and he was buying, let's say, around $30 per share.
So there's a lot of embedded value in that from like a protection standpoint. But what about the income statement in cash flow? But Dillard also makes money and has cash flow. This is where the upside investment comes from. And we were just talking about this, right? If you buy a low P stock or a net debt or whatever, and then they start to be rated like a real business, well, that's where you could make multiples on your investment.
Dillard's has cash flowed from operations every year in the last 10 years, including during the pandemic, and they're operating cash flow minus capital expenditures of free cash flow has ranged from 400 million to 200 million in recent years. They make money at what they do. They seem to produce free cash flow. They also seem to have a culture of buying back stock, buying back more than 100 million a year, and sometimes much more in each of the last 10 years.
And he goes putting it all together. He didn't think this was just a heads I went, tails I lose, but this is more like heads I win huge because a real estate net of the debt is undervalued currently, and they're likely going to stay in business and every cash must be valid at something. And tails I don't lose at all because a real estate net of debt that I'm buying is worth more than the purchase price. The upside was huge. And the more importantly, the downside was limited to almost nothing. And it was clearly defined and noble. What a home run investment.
So if he bought it at 35 or $30 a share, which whatever he said was a $600 million markup, ish, and they were doing around, let's call it, I don't know, 100 to 300 million in free cash flow. If you put a 10 multiple on that, right? You still get a price that's much higher than what he was buying it at. And then you have all that real estate value as well. Yeah, it looks like I'm enterprise value to free cash flow basis.
Let's say it was maybe five to six times, you know, he said they had a half a billion or something in that debt. So low one billion, it was valued a little over one billion, say it's 1.2 billion or something, then six times, you know, so if you're taking the debt together and then you're, and then you're just saying that you're counting debt, but you're not counting the real estate. So of course, you could get rid of some of the real estate and instead put it in.
And then you know, you'd have, if you're cash flow goes down and something presumably you wouldn't need to real estate, you could sell that if your business got worse. But of course, the timing is the issue here. So there's a few things, right? One is for the most part, if we go back to like, if you look at a chart from like the 2000s or something, the case against it would be one, it hasn't been valued all that much higher.
Now, at the very bottom, it actually had been valued a lot higher not that many years before, but it's often been valued fairly low. Let's put it that way, you know, in the 2010s. It's not been a particularly expensive stock. So maybe the bounce back won't be as big. Two, at the exact moment you're buying the belief is that Amazon and those sorts of things will keep growing.
You'll not grow. Your real estate is believed in the among investors, not among the general public and stuff, but among investors, the belief is like, okay, the real estate that you have is like worthless because no one's going to be in this business at all in person, real estate, in person, retailing stuff. And with department stores, it's all going to be online. And so not only is your business being destroyed by that, but the real estate too.
I mean, that is the risk here is that the real estate and the cash flows are related. And so the stock is probably very cheap when people are negative on the entire industry, the entire concept of brick and mortar, big format department store type retail.
Yeah. Because they're negative on you as a business, but they're also negative on like your locations. I mean, don't you remember the narrative, right? In 2020, hey, all these retailers were actually going to fail over the next 10 years. COVID just sped it up. They're done.
Yeah. So that was not going to happen. Right. Now that wasn't going to happen in the case of dealers. It's very, very safe. Right. So one, it owned a lot of the real estate, like we said, but also had a long history of very positive cash flows, pre-cash flow, which is quite a lot different than some of the other retailers that did fail or came close to failing or whatever.
It had a lot of pre-cash flow production over the last 20 years of being it rarely ever had negative pre-cash flow, like maybe one, two years. So it certainly had operating cash flow all the time. Yeah. Now part of that is it owns this real estate. If it, you know, it owns a lot of real estate. If it had leased everything, then it would be more likely it doesn't always go under. You know, go and have negative in this single year.
Would you put this in that box of being like a complete no-brainer at the time, right? Take the the result out of it. I mean, who would have guessed though that the stock would go, I mean, multiple sub-up like what it's, what it ever traded at pre-COVID. I mean, yeah, that's pretty surprising. No one would predict that, but you know, that does happen with momentum stuff once once the stock gets a lot of momentum that way.
Obviously, it also earned it. The market was completely wrong and at the market thought this would be worse than ever for it and actually it's been better than ever, right?
显然它也赚了钱。市场完全错了,市场认为这会比以往更糟,但实际上它比以往任何时候都要好,对吧?
Okay, so do you have any main thoughts on the dealers' investment, what asymmetry means, finding investments with asymmetric upside? I mean, what comes to mind for me, sort of like the power law, right? Of what, how venture capitalists think about it? You invest a very small amount, perhaps one of them hits on the roulette table.
But is this different because there was real estate value there. If it gets valued on a pre-cashable basis, there's still ways you could win there. Really the way that I interpret this. Now, of course, you got to take out what has happened and what the thoughts were at the time, all the noise around this investment. There were many ways to win, right?
And do you think it has actually become way more successful than to have ever thought it could? Oh, I'm sure the stock has been more successful than he thought it could. Yeah, and such a short period of time. Yeah, I've never had a good, well, I probably never had a good investment where the stock didn't go up faster than I thought. I've had good investments where the business didn't do as well as I thought and the stock went up more than I thought. Yeah.
So, you know, you get lucky with those things. I don't know. I think there's some differences with it just being like asymmetric, like we're talking about, about having some real safety to it. Mm-hmm.
However, so if you think about the business at the time that he was investing in it, could it fail? It's a retailer. What would that look like? Yes, it could. But it would happen slowly. It would be like seers. Seers was always an interesting case that way. But also, you know, JC Penning, that's what I was saying. So, I said, by I said, and that's where you could look at like seers, seretage, JC Penning, all these other ones. I mean, the graveyard is a mile long of retailers.
But they were particularly dumb. They were like aggressively dumb. In that, they had to keep doing bad things year after year after year, not change what they were doing and make a lot of bad decisions that way. And if he knew that what management was doing here made a lot more sense, then it would be fine.
So, yeah, there are ways to fail, but it would be hard to feel quickly. That's always the scary thing about these retail things where seers are anything else. If seers was going to operate as a retailer all that time and double down on everything, then yeah, it could, all your, you could lose everything and you did eventually in that. Even though there was a lot of value there.
Several of the, so, you know, but on the other hand, the thing I would compare it to in terms of how it was valued before this was Best Buy. But this wasn't as bad as Best Buy. Best Buy would have required more looking into who was going to turn the company around and stuff and understand it as a turnaround. This didn't require all that kind of thing.
So, in a sense, it looks like a simpler investment than that, even though it was valued a lot at the same sort of prices. But it is hard to sometimes tell them apart that way. And I don't know that the future will be, we don't know what this stock will look like, what this business will look like in 10 years either.
You probably got lucky in some things in that there's probably a realization, this is what I mean, with like comparing to Best Buy, that the market was totally wrong. So, as it turns out, Dylan probably doesn't need as much selling space in the future as it did in the past because it could sell a lot online. And the space that it has is probably has some value that you get rid of over time too. So, it's even better than people thought. And then the things with like the Amazon and all of that turned out that they've not done that well, you know, versus them since then.
So, it's totally reversed. And you wouldn't have guessed it like the pandemic would have helped these companies in any way, but it certainly didn't hurt them. And we're on trends and stuff where I don't think that we've in any way been pushed to more of the giant online companies being a bigger issue than they were before. And that was hard to see at the time in the middle of the pandemic for people.
So, it's weird because in a sense, it was already, right, it was already like a cheap stock. It was already disliked strongly that category and then it got even cheaper because of a one-time thing. So, it had a long-term stigma attached to it for a better part of a decade. And then it also had this one-time thing happen to it.
And you think it was too small to do in the portfolio that he manages for Berkshire. So, if he's managing $10 or $20 million, he made a $30 million dollar bet. Clearly, that's not something he would do. But it kind of reminds me a lot of, you know, Buffett's personal count, right? I mean, you just, you're reading all this different information. You're soaking in all this different information. Sometimes you just come across an idea.
Yeah. And sometimes you can identify it at the time and everything. And that time had a lot of ones ahead of a lot of potential upside. This was extreme in terms of how much it's gone up, right? Yeah. So, that's the thing that's remarkable. You can come up with a bunch of examples of things that are gone up three times or something. We can't come up with a bunch of examples of stocks that are gone up 13 times.
What are your thoughts on, like, again, right? Munger and him, what they communicate, how they preach to investors. I know a certain framework to, you know, follow for investing. Would you put this dealers investment within that framework? Was this something different?
Well, I don't know. I mean, I think people here, whether they hear what they want here or whatever from things where Munger talks about something, Munger is willing to make very big bets on things that he thinks are going to pay off in a big way. And he hasn't always said that that is only in the really good businesses.
So, I think a lot of that is ignored that they've invested in these other things. I mean, if you think about it, what was Munger in, we know some things about what his partnership was in, right? So, like, we know when it wrapped up, what it was in. It was in mostly a trading stamps company, which is investment portfolio. And it was in a close end fund, both very, very cheap versus their net asset values. And so they were both trading at way below liquidation value.
We know that the biggest bet he ever made in terms of percentage of his portfolio, because he put 100% into it was, you know, presumably he borrowed and not that he sold everything at 100% of it, but was in a single arbitrage deal with not a huge spread on it and stuff. But one that was almost certain to go through for specific reasons that would be hard to imagine it not going through.
So, there shouldn't have been any spread on it, basically. But so we know about those. And then we also, you know, we talked about one in this podcast. So, you know, and people forget, you know, Buffett wrote up a bunch of things in Arbitrush. Right. I mean, he took the time, the Arcada thing, that deal, he described that in great detail. The whoops bonds, the power of bonds with the nuclear power. He went into long description of that. If you go back to the past annual report, past shareholder letter. So like they've talked about some of that.
Yeah. So, I think that those, you know, get overlooked in terms of the other things that they do, what they've said more, they've never said that the way to get rich from a small amount of money is to buy and hold great businesses. They've said the way to invest large sums of money for a long period of time is buying and holding great businesses. Because you have to keep reinvesting when you have these, you know, shorter term, you know, because you have to rotate the portfolio more.
And because there aren't great, there aren't as many opportunities and very big things. But you know, when we was asked how do you make 50% a year, you know, like put that with Buffett, he said that, you know, he'd go A through Z and very small stocks. And he didn't say very, the best very small stocks. He said very small stocks, you know. So, and they've told stories like the Duck Club story. And, you know, so they do tell these stories.
Or how about Charlie, what was his biggest mistake ever, right? His biggest mistake ever, he said is an oil company. And again, that's a net asset value thing because that is a really good example. Now it wasn't even higher than he could have ever imagined because it became part of a huge like one of the biggest ever bidding wars at the time for an oil company. But it was well known that the oil that company controlled was worth way, way, way more than the stock was trading for. Like so in terms of the market value at the time versus the stock, it was already high. And then he benefited from oil prices went up and then oil companies were willing to pay a lot to take out other oil companies. But everyone agreed that the stock was trading for less than, you know, oil.
Then a controlling stake in it would be. So like he knew when he turned down those extra shares that he was, which is what he said was the biggest mistake is he was turned down something where other oil companies were happily by the whole company for more than he was turning down the offer at, you know, that the shares has been offered at. So same sort of thing. Those are all net asset value type bargains. It's very hard to find large net asset value bargains. And again, we see that problem here.
What was the market cap on this at the time that this was available? 600 million, right? Something like that. Yeah, 600 million had a tangible book value of 800 million. And then he thought if you said whether you take the price on the books, so the real estate 1.4 billion minus the 561 million of net debt, you're looking at a tangible book value of 800 million. So that's, yeah, I mean on a liquidation basis, I mean we could, do they say they said it had how much in debt do you remember? About 500, he says right there, 560 million.
Wait, is that right? Yep, 561 million of net debt. Okay, so let's see. Do you have the exact amount of square feet of the own? Yeah, 43.7 million. Okay. Knowing that at the time, now it was probably losing or about to lose money negative cash flows during actual COVID times, or you would have assumed that it was about to be. But putting that aside, you could do an estimate on that basis, which is you can say, okay, well, what is 44 million square feet of that kind of retail space worth? We don't know exactly. It's cheaper to put out to build out something like a department store, then it is because there's not a lot to it, then it is still like a supermarket or something, which would be the most expensive. But the replacement cost is still very high on that. So you can see how much of that is over the 561 million.
So like for instance, we know that after you're getting more than 10 to $15 per square foot, so let's say $15 to be conservative. After the first $15 per square foot, the rest of it is going to the equity holders. So you can think the first $15 per square foot is going to the to cover the debt and stuff and then the rest is going to the equity holders. And then how much is that? Is it nine times more than that or something? Yeah, it could be.
Sure. I mean, it's probably close to $150 a square foot than 15. So that shows you how much margin of safety there is.
当然。我是说,每平方英尺的价格可能接近150美元而不是15美元。这表明了有多少保障的余地。
Now of course, it's even higher now because it's impossible to build. I mean, in the economy that we have now and stuff, it became very difficult to build out any of those things.
I mean, to give an idea within a year of this, him buying this, it probably cost houses where I live now, probably cost 10 times, more than 10 times, 15 times, what the market was valuing this company square footage at to build houses out here. And this is obviously in desirable locations, this retail space, it's also highly productive, whatever.
So I'm basically saying you couldn't build anything for the kind of price that it was being put out there. So an inflation help with that and everything.
我想说的是,你根本无法用那种价格建造任何东西。因此,通货膨胀可以帮助解决这个问题。
I mean, if you have an asset thing like this, that helps. And then you have the business on top of it. There's sort of two ways of looking at it.
So one is on the real estate basis, was it worth more than it was trading for? And the answer is yes. So how much more and how well covered is it? It's extremely well covered. We don't know exactly.
So like on a liquidation basis, yes, check. It could be liquidated for more than it was trading for. We know that. Right.
就像在清算基础上,是的,检查一下。它可能被清算为比交易时更高的价格。我们知道这一点。没错。
So and then we ask the question of like on an ongoing basis, how she was it. So let's say you liquidate and that's your best use of it. And then you just ask the questions at the best use and would that be what happens?
So on a liquidation basis, yes, it would be many times more. I don't know the exact amount, but probably you have a five bagger, at least, just liquidating it.
从清算的角度来看,它的价值确实会多几倍。我不知道具体数额,但仅仅通过清算就可以得到至少五倍的收益。
And then on like a cash flow basis, like we were saying, if you assume that went back to earning what it was earning before, let's say that was like 200 million or something in like after tax, owner earning type cash, you know, then you had something that again, the debt, it diverse three times of that goes to the debt, right?
And then you ask, okay, how much goes to other things? Well, if it's trading at, if you said most things, this is going to trade at a lower than most stocks and stuff, okay, well, maybe I'll trade at 10 times.
Then we take, you know, the 10 times we subtract out three times for the debt because 10 times free cash flow debt, enterprise value is pretty low evaluation. Most things are going for more than 50% higher than that.
But you take that out, you say, okay, we'll give it to the debt the first three times is to just, you know, pay out the debt three years, basically debt is three years for free cash flow. And then the, you know, it would be valued the rest of it would be valued at what we say.
And that's a 1.4 billion, probably 1.4, 1.5 billion market cap. And what do we say the market cap on this was when he bought in you said 600, 600 ish. Yeah. Yeah. So 660 times.
Yeah. So two to three times your money if it's on very cheap on an ongoing basis, again, saying 10 times enterprise value to free cash flow. And that's, and, and of course, the liquidation value is many times that.
I would say the liquidation value presumably is double the on, like we've just valued the company alive at half of what it would be valued dead. But there are costs associated with liquidating something like this. This is so big, right, that the market would have trouble absorbing that much department store space.
And in a recession depression, whatever people could have been afraid of at the time. The easier explanation, of course, is that in the middle of COVID, no one wanted to buy something like dealers at any price.
Yeah. The stock that's back to owners of panic time, right? When he was just talking about the benefit of purchasing public securities, sometimes you get the other person across the table, it's just like take it at any price. Right.
And so this was happening for two reasons, one stock reasons that just people wanted out of stocks and didn't want stocks that were, you know, not doing well in whatever.
所以这是有两个原因的,一个是股票方面的原因,人们只是想退出股票市场,不想持有那些表现不佳的股票。
But there's also another reason which is the 1990s bubble reason. And that may explain the dealer's thing, not only were people not wanting stocks and trying to get out of that in general at the time. But if they were getting into stocks, they were selling things like dealers, so they could buy things like Amazon.
Remember, the argument was sell everything offline that they stocks were put into two buckets instead of being like value and growth or something like that.
记得,争论的重点是将所有内容线下出售,而不是像价值和成长等分类。
The two buckets were the online and the offline, right? The pandemic winners and the pandemic losers. Those are literally the words people were using as the pandemic winners, pandemic losers, right?
And so that was how we divided up the world. You know, and of course makes no sense because you know that it's a temporary event.
所以那就是我们如何分配这个世界的。当然,这毫无意义,因为你知道这只是暂时的事件。
It'd be like saying winners, you know, winners in a war, you know, these stocks will be the winners in this war that's going on right now.
这就像说获胜者,你们知道,在一场战争中的获胜者,你知道,这些股票将会是正在进行的这场战争中的赢家。
These stocks will be the losers. Well, we don't know what will happen with the outcome will be, but we know that it won't continue forever. And if the outcome is horrible, well, we're all just screwed anyways, right? So what's there? It's your asymmetry right there.
But I mean, we know that it, yeah, we know that it can't continue indefinitely. So, but that was an obsession that people had at the time, obviously. So you have both of those things happening at the same time. So it was even better, even more extreme than like investing in other kinds of stocks.
Because like I talked about, I knew someone who knows the exact time, but like, you know, I've that this dealers investors made, but somewhere around the same time because March of 2020 put a lot of money into frauds, right?
But that is because took out that is correct. Yeah. So to kind of go all in there, you know, it didn't matter how much money you have you borrow or whatever to be able to buy at that price. And that's not as good a deal as dealers simply because people weren't really bailing specifically on banks at that time.
So for us, it was kind of similar in that it had been cheapish for 10 years, not as hated or something as dealers, but it had been cheap for a while because the low, the no interest rate thing, right? And then it declined. It fell off a cliff on that as you can see there briefly for like a month or whatever. And it started going out.
But obviously it's not going to go by some huge amount from there because it wasn't specifically hated in the same way. I mean, we can look at the the dealers one, but the stock was really not expensive before, which is the interesting thing because of course you could have justifiably, right? Because you make money have been in the stock well before the pandemic thought it was a cheap stock. And you eventually would make a lot of money. But in the meantime, you watch that stock go down a lot. Call it from like a row 70 bucks to you know, low of, let me he bought it from 25 to 30.
So yeah, think about yeah. So you could you could have had a really cheap stock that dropped more than 50%. But then it went up a lot. So you'd still be up five times or whatever in the stock. And that's what happens when you have a really cheap stock. I mean, we looked at the quick I've asked up. It was pretty cheap year after year, right? Certainly it was cheap on like price to earnings and things like that. But there are other I feel like there are other department stores at times that have been fairly cheap too.
So like I said though, this one failed quickly. And I think it would be a judgment about management and their decision making. You could get stuck in it for a very long time. You know, so that was basically what the question was, is could this be a value trap? Right. How do you know it would be a value trap? And I don't know that you don't know that.
I think you're a lot of times the investment things without knowing that it couldn't be a value trap. I don't that's a weird, you know, but even that you don't know about that word, right? Even if you discounted it 50%. The tangible equity was basically what you were paying at a discount if you're really like implementing even more margin of safety. Yeah.
Do you think this falls in the bucket of muggers? You get a few opportunities in your lifetime and you have to seize them? Or do you think this that's not the right lesson? Right? Because I'm always trying to like, what's the correct lesson in real time from the situation? Yes, it's worked out well, right? But so like the Buffett or monger with with Ollie Balbo, right? And he talked about how he was the biggest mistake he's ever made, one of them. And how he said he forgot that it was still in his words like a damn retailer. And he got seduced by the idea of their position and the China market and blah, blah, blah.
And when I heard that, I was like, I don't know if that's the right lesson. Is that it's just a retailer? And that's why you know, he invested in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I was like, I don't know if that's the right lesson. So what do you think is the right lesson from Dillard's? Obviously it's been tremendously successful.
Well, it's, I think it depends on who you are and what you know. So Charles, Ted probably knew a lot more about Dillard's than Charlie knew about Ollie Balbo. It's a lot closer to his circle of competence, probably than his Ollie Balbo to mongers. There's also things which we talked about in like the quick FS type stuff that's concerning about what was happening with Ollie Balbo when Munger bought in that does not appear with Dillard's.
So the actual track record was rapidly deteriorating in a concerning way for Ollie Balbo. In a way that is beyond just normally, oh, it's just a retailer, but just that it's incredibly competitive because you have very rapid growth and rapidly declining margins, returns on capital things like that. That mean the incremental ones are really, really bad.
So it depends on how well he knew the situation, right? The thing is there's not a lot of, it's hard. If we can look at quick FS to look at this, but there wasn't a ton of evidence in the past record to suggest that you were doing something particularly risky here. There was like no evidence. There was fear that the future would be a lot different than the past and there was a lot of fear that this would happen. That it was deteriorating stuff, but this was more narrative about it than we can see in the numbers.
Because if we look at the numbers, what was the operating income each year? What was the cash flow each year for many years before this? I mean, do you think he expected that one? We'd look at, okay, so 2021 negative 83 million in EBIT, but then 2022, 1.1 billion, they have never done that in their history. At least from 2014, so I'm going to assume in their history, maybe whatever, but I definitely did not think that would happen. No, no, no, definitely not. No.
If we're looking at the record of companies and saying, do we think that would happen? Usually, almost always with the really good results, where it came out better than you expected. Yes. But when you asked about the asymmetry thing, I said, am I personal? I never thought that I could go up by that amount.
Kwan and I had looked at encore wire, and we talked about encore wire, that if they ever got to be a more meaningful spread in terms of volatility and copper and all that, and copper got more expensive, then they make a lot of money, and the people might have been unresturing how much it was poor copper pricing that was contributing to the returns and capital being muted. They were earning good, and then if something big happened, they'd earn a lot. We never thought it would go up as much in a single year that they would earn so much.
That's probably true that you wouldn't expect that. But what I'm saying is the argument, here's the thing. We just did two different calculations of conservatively what it would be worth, based on the record from before.
We said, liquidation value might be five times or something like you're paying. You're paying 20% of liquidation value, something 80% of the actual state of book value, maybe something like that. There's some leverage in there, so it's a little more complicated in that. It's not like your margin of safety is 80%. But your margin of safety is big, it's half or something. Then you have the issue of the free cash flow we talked about. In a sense, you have two defenses. If the free cash flow doesn't disappear, the stock is worth two to three times, at least what it's trading at. Some people would say it's more like five times. We used a low multiple for that. It's several times more valuable. You have a 50% plus margin of safety on free cash flow. If the free cash flow disappeared and they were willing to liquidate, you have more than 50% margin of safety in liquidation.
That's what I mean about. It's not like you took some huge risk that way. Alibaba is very different in that it showed deteriorating financial results and it was expensive. This was super cheap and no deterioration yet, but feared deterioration.
It looked at their diluted chairs outstanding. When he talked about there's really nothing in the past that could have scared you in a crazy way. They've continuously bought back stock.
I always find it interesting though. Here we are in 2022 to 2023 on an average at 6.8 billion in revenue, but just the drastic difference in that revenue converting to EBIT or cash flow is huge. It's a good lesson for other companies. It's like this is what could happen. The value creation you can have if you really hone in and whether it was a pricing thing or they cut their expenses or what, there's a drastic difference there in the revenue converting to EBIT, that income, cash flow, etc.
Yeah. I mean some of those just leverage effects that you have. That's the issue department stores have for instance. It's just a huge amount of real estate that you have no matter what. If you sell a lot, it's a lot better business than if you don't.
That's why they don't look that great. They managed to not have operating income in the early 2000s at one point. If you have a bad economic year, you can run into that. There's a lot of leverage in that because you can look at the ratios. The gross numbers are good. If we look at gross profitability or something, you'll see that they're much higher than they are with other retailers that you're used to looking at. The gross margins here, especially considering what they're selling, they were 10% or more higher than Walmart for instance.
It's just interesting. You look at these numbers. You look at S&A 2018 to 2019, 1.7 billion. Then you look at 2022, 2023. You're kind of 2022, 1.559, 2023, 1.698. But then you look at revenue, which is up a little bit, but how drastically that could affect your earnings?
Yeah. Well, the other thing you'll remember from COVID is that we had those unusual is some companies cut expenses, did everything they could to get ready for a drastic decline, and instead they had the biggest boom that they'd ever seen. If companies knew, let's cut as much as we can right ahead of a giant boom.
Yeah, your profitability is going to be amazing. Because normally what you have is more like what you saw with Alibaba or something, which is when you see a boom, you also see a lot of increase in costs and also, I mean, look what happened to Amazon. They're less profitable than ever in like every way. They've got more assets, earning less than cash and stuff because they went into, as did many other tech companies, but Amazon is just a retailer that's tech.
They went the opposite way and said, oh, we have to really, this is a big boom and it turned out not to be such a big, you know, it went away faster. So, it's not even a question of shrinking and stuff. They went to like flat just being about flat, and it has a drastic drop-off in your results.
So this is a company that, what, for like 10 years, something you have been expecting like flat type growth, right? Like in terms of top line and stuff. They're just buy back or stock kind of like gainable, right? Yeah, so what's interesting is, let's see. So what was sales in 2020, what do you have there? 2014, $6.6 billion or $6.7 billion. That was in 2019. $6.7, 2014, 2019, $6.5. So it's decline. Okay, decline.
Yeah. So, you know, about that. Now, the interesting thing though was like, what have we seen in gross profits? Gross margin from 2014 to 2019. Do you have the gross margin? Yeah, it went down. 37% 2014, 34% in 2019. Which is like what you see in line with some other companies too.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any way that you thought it would have gone up as much as it did obviously, but we did a few different ways of doing the math where it looked cheap. It is now presumably being valued at not such a cheap value though. Like what was 2019 sales? You said we're 6.5 billion. So let's say 6.5 billion EV now.
Well, I don't know if that calculation is correct though. Is that calculation correct? I'm not sure if it's correct on the EV and market cap. But let's take market cap plus debt or whatever. We're still at levels that are like one times. So, not super cheap or anything like that, but actually it's not really value in much.
It's gone to a value which is more in line with other companies, but that's about it. Because it's free cash flow margin is probably 5% or something in the years before COVID. So basically, if you're valuing it at one time, it's like 20 times free cash flow or something.
And like we said, it may have more real estate than it needs or whatever. That's just like in line with the market. I mean, it may turn out to be way too expensive because it's a particularly good time for them and then things are going to get negative from here, you know. And their future may not be as bright as other companies and whatever.
But you're talking about something that went up more than 10 times right, the stock. And it's just to what I would say is a fairly normal valuation. I certainly wouldn't call it cheap, but it's not some usually going to look at things that went up 10 times.
We noticed that the price to sales is, you know, 14 times. Yeah, here we have something where the price to sales is like a price to pre pandemic sales. In fact, that was, you know, gone back and everything. But it is like one times.