The financial calculus that Charlie and I employ would never permit our trading a good night's sleep for a shot at a few extra percentage points of return. I've never believed in risking what my friends and family have and need in order to pursue what they don't have and don't need.
As an investor with small capital, one should prefer businesses that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow.
We have learned to turn out lots of goods and services, but we haven't learned as well how to have everybody share in the bounty. The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.
When 40 billion of treasury bills are sold like, seven day treasury bills, at a yield of 1/20th of one percent, that means the whole country is basically at the point virtually, or a lot of the country is at the point of putting the money under the mattress.
I'm always interested in understanding the math of things and understanding as much as I can about all aspects of business. And what I learn today may be useful to me two years from now. That's really the wonderful thing about investments is your knowledge is cumulative.
As of 1992, in fact-though the picture would have improved since then-the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country's airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero.
If you know how to value businesses, it's crazy to own 50 stocks or 40 stocks or 30 stocks, probably because there aren't that many wonderful businesses understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. To forego buying more of some super-wonderful business and instead put your money into #30 or #35 on your list of attractiveness just strikes Charlie and me as madness.
And people really behaved in a fraudulent way or something, we'll go back and find the culprits later on. But that really isn't the problem we have. I mean that's where it came from, though. We leveraged up and if you have a 20 percent fall in value of a $20 trillion asset, that's $4 trillion. And when $4 trillion lands - losses land in the wrong part of this economy, it can gum up the whole place.
There is one thing of which I can assure you. If good performance of the fund is even a minor objective, any portfolio encompassing one hundred stocks (whether the manager is handling one thousand dollars or one billion dollars) is not being operated logically. The addition of the one hundredth stock simply can't reduce the potential variance in portfolio performance sufficiently to compensate for the negative effect its inclusion has on the overall portfolio expectation.
When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.