年轻的大亨

Buffett’s office, on the top floor of a modern building about 15 minutes from the centre of Omaha, is clean and anonymous, with framed documents on the walls and a box of fudge on a table, to which Buffett helps himself from time to time. It’s delicious - made by a company he owns. A bookshelf on the wall holds, with other financial volumes, several editions of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis. Buffett, a genial, ruddy, muscular man with a wide, humorous mouth and an inquisitive expression behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, put his feet on the desk, poured himself a Pepsi Cola, and, in the somewhat toneless manner characteristic of Mid-westerners, cheerfully began to babble about what was on his mind. He speaks with a wry earnestness and gives an impression of complete intellectual honesty. His delivery is so casual, rapid, allusive, and clever that unless you pay attention a lot could slip by.

Buffett 的办公室位于一栋现代建筑的顶层，距 Omaha 市中心约15分钟路程。办公室干净而不起眼，墙上挂着装框文件，桌上放着一盒软糖，Buffett 不时自己拿来吃。软糖味道很好——由他拥有的一家公司生产。墙边的书架上，除了其他金融书籍外，还摆着几版 Graham 和 Dodd 的《证券分析》。Buffett 是个亲切、面色红润、体格结实的人，嘴巴宽大而带着幽默感，角框眼镜后是一副好奇的神情。他把脚搁在桌上，给自己倒了一杯 Pepsi Cola，然后用美国中西部人特有的那种略显平板的语调，愉快地开始滔滔不绝地谈起脑子里正在想的事情。他说话时带着一种带反讽意味的认真感，给人以完全智识诚实的印象。他表达得非常随意、快速、充满暗示又机敏，如果不集中注意力，很多东西会从耳边溜过去。

Says Buffett: “When I was a kid at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, another kid and I started the Wilson Coin-Operated Machine Co. I was 15 years old. We put reconditioned pinball machines in barber shops. In Washington, you were supposed to buy a tax stamp to be in the pinball machine business. I got the impression we were the only people who ever bought one. The first day we bought an old machine for $25 and put it out in a shop. When we came back that night it had $4 in it! I figured I had discovered the wheel. Eventually we were making $50 a week. I hadn’t dreamed life could be so good”.

Buffett 说：“我小时候在 Washington 的 Woodrow Wilson High School 上学，另一个孩子和我创办了 Wilson Coin-Operated Machine Co.。那时我15岁。我们把翻新过的弹球机放进理发店。在 Washington，如果你想经营弹球机生意，按规定应该买一张税票。我感觉我们可能是唯一真正买过税票的人。第一天，我们花25美元买了一台旧机器，把它放到一家店里。当天晚上回来时，里面已经有4美元！我觉得自己发现了轮子。后来我们每周能赚50美元。我从没想过生活可以这么美好。”

Even before that, Buffett was well along in his career as a tycoon. At the age of 11, he made his debut as a market technician. Soon after, we find him in the business of retrieving and reselling golf balls and running several paper routes for the Washington Post. Delivery of papers accounted for most of his original stake of $9,000 with which he finished his college career. At 12, Warren became fond of handicapping horse races and compiled and sold a tip sheet called “Stable Boy Selection”. He found few aspects of commercial life beyond his grasp, even at that age. “I always knew I was going to be rich,” he has said.

甚至在那之前，Buffett 作为大亨的生涯就已经相当有进展了。11岁时，他以市场技术分析师的身份首次登场。不久之后，我们看到他开始捡回并转售高尔夫球，还经营着几条 Washington Post 的送报路线。他大学毕业时原始本金为9,000美元，其中大部分来自送报收入。12岁时，Warren 开始喜欢给赛马做让分预测，并编写、出售一份名为《Stable Boy Selection》的赛马提示单。即使在那个年纪，商业生活中几乎没有多少方面超出他的理解范围。他曾说：“我一直知道自己会变富。”

Graham 的影响

As a boy, Buffett was fascinated by stock market technical analysis. He developed his own market indexes and the like but it all made no real sense to him. He discarded this approach in 1949, after reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham while attending the University of Nebraska. The following year he went to Columbia University because both Graham and Dodd (of Security Analysis) were teaching there. Buffett noticed in Who’s Who that Ben Graham, was a director of Government Employees Insurance Co. (GEICO), which sold automobile insurance directly by mail, bypassing the brokers. He went down to the company’s office on a Saturday and pounded on the door. Eventually, a janitor opened up, and Buffett asked if there was anybody around he could talk to about the company. The janitor took him upstairs, where one man was in his office, L.A. Davidson, later chief executive officer. Buffett questioned him for five hours, then went away very excited about its stock.

少年时期，Buffett 曾着迷于股市技术分析。他设计过自己的市场指数之类的东西，但这一切对他来说并没有真正的道理。1949年，在 University of Nebraska 就读期间，他读了 Benjamin Graham 的《聪明的投资者》之后，便抛弃了这种方法。第二年，他去了 Columbia University，因为 Graham 和 Dodd（《证券分析》的作者）都在那里任教。Buffett 在《Who’s Who》中注意到，Ben Graham 是 Government Employees Insurance Co.（GEICO）的董事。这家公司通过邮寄方式直接销售汽车保险，绕开经纪人。一个星期六，他来到这家公司办公室，敲打大门。最后，一名清洁工打开了门，Buffett 问公司里有没有人可以和他聊聊这家公司。清洁工把他带到楼上，那里有一个人还在办公室里，那就是 L.A. Davidson，后来他成为公司的首席执行官。Buffett 向他提问了五个小时，然后带着对这只股票的极大兴奋离开。

After skimping to buy some shares, he discussed GEICO with two brokers who specialised in insurance issues: both pooh-poohed it since the company didn’t look cheap in their tables of insurance stock values. What the tables didn’t show was that the company was making 20% on its underwriting activities as against a normal margin of 5%. At that time the entire company was selling for less than $7 million in the market; later it went to a billion and became a Wall Street favourite. Some 25 years after Buffett made his initial investment in the company, mismanagement brought GEICO to the edge of bankruptcy. During that crisis, Buffett bought 15% of the company and thinks that it again has a bright future. Since Buffett believed in going to work for the smartest person available, on graduating from Columbia he offered his services to Graham for nothing. When Graham declined, Buffett went back to Omaha and entered his father’s stockbroking firm. Buffett kept in touch with Graham, however, sending him ideas in the hope of receiving stock exchange business.

他省吃俭用买了一些股票后，和两位专门研究保险股的经纪人讨论 GEICO；两人都对它不以为然，因为在他们的保险股估值表中，这家公司看起来并不便宜。但这些表格没有显示的是，这家公司在承保业务上的利润率达到20%，而正常利润率只有5%。当时整家公司在市场上的售价不到700万美元；后来它涨到10亿美元，并成为 Wall Street 的宠儿。在 Buffett 首次投资这家公司大约25年后，管理不善把 GEICO 推到破产边缘。在那场危机中，Buffett 买下了公司15%的股份，并认为它再次拥有光明前景。由于 Buffett 相信应该为能找到的最聪明的人工作，所以从 Columbia 毕业后，他主动提出免费为 Graham 工作。Graham 拒绝后，Buffett 回到 Omaha，进入父亲的证券经纪公司。不过，Buffett 一直与 Graham 保持联系，不断把投资想法寄给他，希望能因此获得一些证券交易业务。

Graham, in turn, was generous with his time and thoughts, and in 1954, he suggested that Buffett come to see him. Buffett went to New York and was hired to work for Graham-Newman Corp., where he spent two instructive years. Today he finds it hard to describe what he did there, but it must have included analysing hundreds of companies to see if they met Graham’s investment criteria. Ben Graham didn’t distinguish between franchises. He never would have been able to buy American Express during the salad oil scandal, or Disney, two of Buffett’s great coups. He did not believe in “qualitative” analysis - studying a company’s products, how it operates and its apparent future outlook. He never talked to managements. He believed in doing all his work by exhaustively studying figures generally available. This technique was immensely profitable for Graham and his investors, but did not really satisfy Buffett, who finds such mechanical investing all too similar to filling out an application for group life insurance. After his two years of apprenticeship in the workshop of the master, Buffett was glad to set forth into the great world as a master himself. For the second time he returned to Omaha, where he bought a roomy house - to which he has been adding sporadically ever since - on a wooded corner, and started on his own. In retrospect, one is not too surprised that, given such mental equipment, such fascination for the subject and such a thorough academic and practical preparation, Buffett should have done exceedingly well. Nobody, however, could have foreseen his record.

Graham 反过来也很慷慨，愿意把时间和想法交给 Buffett。1954年，他建议 Buffett 去见他。Buffett 前往 New York，并被 Graham-Newman Corp. 录用，在那里度过了很有启发性的两年。今天，他很难具体描述自己当时做了些什么，但其中必然包括分析数百家公司，看看它们是否符合 Graham 的投资标准。Ben Graham 并不区分特许经营权。他绝不可能在色拉油丑闻期间买入 American Express，也不可能买入 Disney，而这两笔都是 Buffett 的伟大战果。Graham 不相信“定性”分析——也就是研究一家公司的产品、运营方式及其看起来的未来前景。他从不与管理层交谈。他相信，所有工作都应该通过详尽研究公开可得的数字来完成。这种方法为 Graham 及其投资者带来了巨大收益，但并不能真正满足 Buffett；在 Buffett 看来，这种机械式投资太像填写一份团体寿险申请表。在这位大师的工作室里当了两年学徒之后，Buffett 很高兴以大师身份独自走向广阔世界。他第二次回到 Omaha，在一个树木繁茂的街角买下一栋宽敞的房子——此后他一直断断续续地给它扩建——然后开始独立经营。回头看，考虑到这样的心智装备、对这个课题的强烈着迷，以及如此扎实的学术和实践准备，Buffett 取得极佳成绩并不太令人意外。然而，没有人能够预见他的投资纪录会达到那种程度。

Buffett understands the companies he owns stock in as businesses: living organisms, with hearts, lungs, bones, muscles, arteries and nervous systems. It is madness, he would say, for an investor buying stock to have anything else in mind other than the operating realities of the underlying business. Buffett believes that those on Wall Street who talk of the stock trend or institutional sponsorship are ridiculous, combining laziness with ignorance, and compares them with astronomers, setting aside their telescopes to consult the astrology page. He thinks of a stock only as a fractional interest in a business and always begins by asking himself, “How much would I pay for all of this company? And on that basis, what will I pay for 1% of it?”. There are very few companies he considered interesting enough to buy at all, and even those he will look at only when they are very unpopular.

Buffett 把自己持有股票的公司理解为企业：一种有心脏、肺、骨骼、肌肉、动脉和神经系统的活体。他会说，一个投资者在买股票时，如果脑子里想的不是底层企业的经营现实，那就是疯狂。Buffett 认为，Wall Street 上那些谈论股票趋势或机构支持的人非常荒唐，把懒惰和无知结合在一起；他把这些人比作天文学家，放下望远镜不用，却去查星座运势版。他只把股票看成一家企业的一部分权益，并且总是从一个问题开始：“如果我要买下整家公司，我愿意付多少钱？在这个基础上，我愿意为它1%的权益付多少钱？”他认为真正有意思到值得买入的公司极少，而即便是这些公司，他也只会在它们非常不受欢迎时才去看。

In 1956, at the age of 25, Buffett started a family partnership with $100,000 in it, after a while adding all his own capital. As management, he received 25% of the profits above a 6% annual return on capital. As the partnership increased in value and his reputation spread, more money poured in. Homer Dodge, a physicist and former college president who excelled at picking stock-pickers, came to see Buffett, then 26, while on a canoe trip, with the canoe itself perched on top of the car. Long a friend and partner of Ben Graham, who had just retired, Dodge became Buffett’s first partner outside the family, simply writing out a check to join the partnership after a brief talk. Every year Buffett wrote his co-investors:

1956年，25岁的 Buffett 创办了一个家族合伙企业，初始资金为100,000美元；过了一段时间，他又把自己的全部资本投入进去。作为管理人，他收取年化6%资本回报以上利润的25%。随着合伙企业价值上升、他的声誉传播开来，更多资金涌入。Homer Dodge 是一位物理学家，也曾任大学校长，擅长挑选股票投资人。他在一次独木舟旅行途中来到 Omaha 见当时26岁的 Buffett，那条独木舟就架在车顶上。Dodge 长期以来一直是 Ben Graham 的朋友和合伙人，而 Graham 刚刚退休。与 Buffett 简短交谈后，Dodge 直接开出一张支票加入合伙企业，成为 Buffett 家族以外的第一位合伙人。每年，Buffett 都会给共同投资人写道：