........
I had a grandfather who was very useful to me, my mother’s grandfather, and he was a pioneer. He came out to Iowa with no money but youth and health and took it away from the Indians. He fought in the Black Hawk…he was a Captain in the Black Hawk Wars, and he stayed there and he bought cheap land and he was aggressive and intelligent and so forth and eventually he was the richest man in the town and owned the bank, and highly regarded, and a huge family, and a very happy life. He had the attitude…having come out to Iowa when the land was not much more than a dollar an acre, and having stayed there until that black topsoil created a modern rich civilization, and some of the best land in the world…His attitude was that in a favored life like his, when you were located in the right place, you just got a few opportunities if you lived to be about 90. And that the trick in coming out well was seizing a few opportunities that were your fair share that came along when they did. And he told that story over and over again to the grandchildren that hung around him all summer, and my mother who had no interest in money remembered the story and told it to me. But I’m not my mother’s natural imitator and I knew Grandpa Ingham was right. And so I always knew from…when I was a little boy that the opportunities that were important…that were gonna come to me…were few and the trick was to prepare myself for seizing the few that came. This is not the attitude that they have at a big investment counseling thing. They think if they study a million things they can know a million things. And of course the result is that almost nobody can outperform an index. Whereas I sit here with my Daily Journal stock, my Berkshire Hathaway stock, my holdings in Li Lu’s Asian fund, my Costco stock, and of course I’m outperforming everybody. (laughter) And I’m ninety-five years old. And I practically never have a transaction. And the answer is that I’m right and they’re wrong. And that’s why it’s worked for me and not for them. And now the question is do you want to be more like me or more like them?
The idea of diversification makes sense to a point if you don’t know what you’re doing and you want the standard result and not be embarrassed, why course you can widely diverse. Nobody’s entitled to a lot of money for recognizing that because it’s a truism it’s like knowing that two and two equals four. But the investment professionals think they’re helping you by arranging diversification. An idiot could diversify a portfolio! Or a computer for that matter. But the whole trick of the game is to have a few times when you know that something is better than average and to invest only where you have that extra knowledge. And then if you get just a few opportunities that’s enough. What the hell do you care if you own three securities and J.P. Morgan Chase owns a hundred? What’s wrong with owning a few securities? Warren always says that if you lived in a growing town and you owned stock in three of the best enterprises in the town, isn’t that diversified enough? The answer is of course it is…if they’re all wonderful places. And that Fortune’s formula which got so famous which was a formula to tell people how much to bet on each transaction if you had an edge. And of course the bigger your edge, the more close the transaction was to a certain winner, the more you should bet…And of course there’s mathematics behind it…But of course it’s true. It’s perfectly possible to buy only one thing because the opportunity is so great and it’s such a cinch. There are only two or three. So the whole idea of diversification when you’re looking for excellence, is totally ridiculous. It doesn’t work. It gives you an impossible task. What fun is it to do an impossible task over and over again? I find it agony. Who would want to do it? And I don’t see a way…
My father had a client, he was a lawyer in Omaha, he had a client whose husband had a little soap company. The guy died and my father’s sold the soap company. This woman was one of the richest people in town in the middle of the depression, and what she had was a little soap company and the biggest mansion in Omaha’s best neighborhood. When they sold the soap company she had a mansion in the best neighborhood and three hundred thousand dollars. But three hundred thousand dollars in nineteen thirty something was an incredible amount of money. A little hamburger it was a nickel a big hamburger was a dime, and the all you can eat cafe in Omaha would feed you all needed to stay alive for two bits a day. I mean 300,000… Well she didn’t hire an investment counselor, she didn’t do anything, she’s a wonderful old woman. She just took that, she divided it into five chunks, and she bought five stocks. I remember three of them because I probated her estate. One of them was General Electric, one was Dow, one was Dupont, and I forget the other two. Then she never changed those stocks. She never paid any adviser. She never did anything, and she bought some municipal bonds, she never spent her income, and she bought some municipal bonds from time to time with the (inaudible). By the time she died in the 50s she had a million and a half dollars. No cost. No expenses. I said, “How did you decide to do that?” And “Well…” she said, “I thought electricity and chemistry were the coming things.” She just chucked it all in and sat on her ass. I always liked that little old woman. My kind of a girl. But it’s rare!
But if you stop to think about it, think of all the expense and palaver that she didn’t have to listen to and all the trouble she avoided, and zero costs. And of course what people don’t realize, because they’re so mathematically illiterate, is if you make 5 percent and pay 2 of it to your advisors, you’re not losing 40 percent of your future you’re losing 90 percent. Because over a long period of time that little difference causes a 90 percent disadvantage to you. So it’s hugely important for somebody who’s a long term holder not to be paying a big annual toll out of the performance. And of course there are a few big time advisors now who are using indexation very heavily. And of course they’re prospering mightily. And of course every time they get somebody it’s just agony for the rest of the investment counseling business. This is a very serious problem. And I think these people who were used to winning as old-time value investors who are now just quitting the profession. That’s a very understandable thing to do. I regarded it as more noble than staying in…you know…playing along with the denial. It’s an interesting problem.
You can see I’m not trying to make your morning. I’m just trying to describe things the way they are. But this business… Why does Li Lu succeed so mightily? Well partly he’s sort of a Chinese Warren Buffet. That really helps. And partly he’s fishing in China! Not in this over-searched, over-populated, highly competitive American market, and there’s still pockets of ignorance and lassitude in China that gave him so unusual opportunities.The first rule in fishing has always been fish where the fish are. And the second rule of fishing has always been ‘Don’t forget rule number one’. And Li Lu just went where the fishing was good and the rest of us are like cod fishermen who are trying to catch cod where the fish have been fished out. It doesn’t matter how much you work, when there’s that much competition. Every little idea I see in the world some are going after. I sat once on an investment committee at the University of Michigan and in came one of their successful investors located in London. And what had this investor done in London? He decided to invest in sub-Saharan Africa. And the only marginal securities were a few banks that traded in the Pink Sheets, so he would buy very tiny quantities of these banks. And every time some poor person got tired of having their money in the mattress and put it in a bank he did a little better. And of course he made a lot of money. Nobody else was investing in little tiny banks in Africa. But the niche was soon filled. What the hell do you do for an encore after you put your client’s money in a bunch of little tiny banks in sub-Saharan Africa? The niche gets filled quickly. How many wonderful niches are there going to be when some guy in London is buying all these tiny little bank stocks in Africa? It’s hard.
Then if you take the modern world where people are trying to teach you how to come in and trade actively in stocks. Well I regard that as roughly equivalent to trying to induce a bunch of young people to start off on heroin. It is really stupid. And when you’re already rich to make your money by encouraging people to get rich by trading? And then there are people on the TV, another wonderful place, and they say, “I have this book that will teach you how to make 300 percent a year. All you have to do is pay for shipping and I will mail it to you!” (laughter) How likely is it that a person who suddenly found a way to make 300 percent a year would be trying to sell books on the internet to you! (laughter) It’s ridiculous. And yet I’ve described modern commerce. And the people who do this all day think they’re useful citizens. The advertising agents who invent the lingo. In insurance they say, “Well” they say, “the two people who shifted from Geico to the Glotz insurance company save four hundred dollars each.” But what they don’t tell is that there are only two such people in the whole United States and they were both nuts. But they mislead you on purpose. I get tired of it and I don’t think it’s right that we deliberately mislead people as much as we do.
Let me tell you another story that I think is an interesting one about the modern life, but this goes back to a different time. This man has this wonderful horse. And it’s just a marvelous horse. It’s got an easy gait, good looking, and everything. It just works wonderfully. But also occasionally it just gets so he’s dangerous and vicious and causes enormous damage and trouble and breaks arms and legs for his rider and so on. And he goes to vet and says, “What can I do about this horse?” And the vet says, “That’s a very easy problem and I’m glad to help you.” And he says, “What should I do?” And the man says, “The next time your horse is behaving well, sell it.” (laughter) Think about it immoral that is. And haven’t I just described what private equity has to do? (laughter) When private equity has to sell something that’s really troublesome, they hire an investment banker. And what does investment banker do? He makes a projection! I have never seen such expertise in my whole life, as is created in making projections in investment banking. There is no business so lousy that it can’t get a wonderful projection. But is that a great way to make a living to have phony projections and use it to make money out of people you look right into their eyes of? I would say no.
By and large Warren and I, we never tried to make money out…stupidity of our dumb buyers. We tried to make money by buying, and if we were selling horseshit we didn’t want to pretend it was a cure for arthritis. (laughter) And I think it’s better to go through life our way instead of theirs. I think it’s always been this way, I think there’s always been chicanery. Think of the carnivals, the carny operator. Think of how much trickery there is in a carny operation. People just seek out the weaknesses of their fellow man and take advantage. And you have to get wise enough so you avoid them all.And you can’t avoid them if they’re in your family. I have no solution to that one. (laughter) But where you have a fair choice, there are just so many people that should be avoided.
My father had this best friend and client and he also had this other client who is a big blowhard and he was always working for the big blowhard and he wasn’t ever working for his wonderful client whom I admired. And I said, “Why do you do this?” And he said, “Charlie you idiot…” He says, “the big blowhard is an endless source of legal troubles. He’s always in trouble. Overreaching and misbehaving and so forth. Whereas Grant McFadden treats everybody right. The employees, the customers, everything. And if he gets involved with some psychotic he walks over there and makes a graceful exit immediately. A man like that doesn’t need a lawyer.” My father was trying to teach me something and it really worked. I spent my whole life trying to be like Grant McFadden and I want to tell you it works. It really works. Peter Kaufman is always telling me if the crooks only knew how much money you could make by being honest, they’d all behave differently. Warren has a wonderful saying that I like, he says, “You take the high road. It’s never crowded.” And it’s worked.
Take the Daily Journal Corporation. We made quite a few millions of dollars out of the foreclosure boom because we published legal notices and we dominated the publication of foreclosure notices in the worst real estate depression in the history of modern times. And we could have raised our prices at the time and made more tens of millions of dollars. But we didn’t do it. You know what your fellow citizens are losing their damn houses in the worst recession…’Charlie Munger billionaire raises prices’. It would look lousy on the front page of the paper (if people read the story). Should you do it? And the answer is no of course not. Warren always said it’s probably always a mistake to marry for money and it’s really stupid if you’re already rich.
And it’s really stupid when you’re already rich to get a reputation of being a total nogoodnik. Rick Guerin always loved the story about the guy who had been a total miscreant all his life, and (when) he died the minister said, “Now is the time in the funeral ceremony when somebody says something nice about the deceased.” And nobody came forward and nobody came forward and nobody came forward. Finally one guy stood up and he said, “Well” he said, “His brother was worse.” (laughter) Well you can laugh but there are people like that. When Harry Cohn died here the saying was that everybody went to the funeral to make sure he was dead.