This speech was the first in a series sponsored by the Graham-Buffett Teaching Endowment, established in 1997 by a \$1 million gift from (1970 UF graduate) Mason Hawkins.
这场演讲是由Graham-Buffett教学基金会资助的系列讲座中的第一场，该基金由佛罗里达大学1970届校友Mason Hawkins于1997年捐赠100万美元设立。
Introduction:
引言：
The Graham-Buffett Course sequence is important to this college because it enables us to attract students who want this perspective on investing and managing corporations—a perspective that has been successfully employed by Mr. Buffett, Mr. Hawkins and before them, Benjamin Graham.
Graham-Buffett课程体系对本学院意义重大，因为它能够吸引那些希望学习这种投资与企业管理理念的学生——这种理念正是巴菲特先生、霍金斯先生，以及在他们之前的本杰明·格雷厄姆成功运用的投资方式。
This perspective is quite simple but is sometimes lost in the complexity of our University analysis. The perspective is that you have to understand the underlying economics of the businesses that you invest in, work in. You have to be clear-eyed and not be swayed by the crowd or passing fancies of the moment. And you have to learn and stick to disciplined principles of business valuation.
这种理念其实非常简单，但在大学中复杂的分析体系中有时会被忽略。这个理念的核心是：你必须理解你所投资或所服务企业的基本经济状况。你必须保持清醒的头脑，不被人群或一时的流行所左右。同时，你还必须学习并坚守严谨的企业估值原则。
In the long run this disciplined approach will more often than not bring success or more importantly avoid spectacular failures.
从长期来看，这种有纪律的方式更有可能带来成功，更重要的是，它能帮助你避免灾难性的失败。
Hopefully at the University of Florida we can successfully convey those principles and create a program for the very best students and in time the very best employers as well.
希望在佛罗里达大学，我们能成功传授这些原则，打造一个吸引最优秀学生的项目，并最终吸引最优秀的雇主。
We thank Mr. Hawkins for his gift (\$1 million) and share his thoughts today.
我们感谢霍金斯先生的慷慨捐赠（100万美元），并在今天共同学习他的思想。
Mason Hawkins: He is someone I have admired tremendously for the last 30 years. In addition, he is someone each of us could pattern our lives after as a role model. It is my honor to introduce our lifetime's best long-term investor……
梅森·霍金斯：在过去30年中，他是我非常敬佩的人。此外，他也是我们每个人都可以效仿的人生榜样。今天我很荣幸地向大家介绍我们这个时代最出色的长期投资者……
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Buffett: (holds mike) Testing: One million \$, two million \$….three million \$.
巴菲特：（拿着麦克风）测试中：一百万美元，二百万美元……三百万美元。
I would like to say a few words primarily and then the highlight for me will be getting your questions. I want to talk about what is on your mind.
我想先讲几句话，接下来对我来说最精彩的部分是回答你们的问题。我想谈谈你们关心的事情。
Your Future
你们的未来
I would like to talk for just one minute to the students about your future when you leave here. Because you will learn a tremendous amount about investments, you all have the ability to do well; you all have the IQ to do well. You all have the energy and initiative to do well or you wouldn't be here. Most of you will succeed in meeting your aspirations.
我想花一分钟时间，和在座的学生谈谈你们离开这里之后的未来。你们将会学到大量关于投资的知识，你们每个人都有能力取得好成绩；你们都有足够的智商去成功。你们也都有足够的精力和主动性，否则你们不会坐在这里。你们中的大多数人将能够实现自己的抱负。
But in determining whether you succeed there is more to it than intellect and energy. I would like to talk just a second about that. In fact, there was a guy, Pete Kiewit in Omaha, who used to say, he looked for three things in hiring people: integrity, intelligence and energy. And he said if the person did not have the first two, the later two would kill him, because if they don't have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy.
但决定你是否成功，不只是智力和精力那么简单。我想简单谈一下这一点。事实上，在奥马哈有个人叫皮特·基威特（Pete Kiewit），他常说，在招聘时他看重三件事：诚信、智慧和精力。他说，如果一个人没有前两者，后两者反而会害了他，因为如果一个人没有诚信，那你宁愿他又蠢又懒。
We want to talk about the first two because we know you have the last two. You are all second-year MBA students, so you have gotten to know your classmates. Think for a moment that I granted you the right--you can buy 10% of one of your classmate’s earnings for the rest of their lifetime. You can't pick someone with a rich father; you have to pick someone who is going to do it on his or her own merit. And I gave you an hour to think about it.
我们来谈谈前两项，因为我们知道你们都有后两项。你们都是MBA二年级的学生，已经对同班同学有了一定了解。现在假设我赋予你一个权利——你可以购买你某位同学未来一生收入的10%。你不能选一个靠着有钱老爸的，你只能选一个凭借自己能力打拼的人。我给你一个小时考虑这件事。
Will you give them an IQ test and pick the one with the highest IQ? I doubt it. Will you pick the one with the best grades? The most energetic? You will start looking for qualitative factors, in addition to (the quantitative) because everyone has enough brains and energy. You would probably pick the one you responded the best to, the one who has the leadership qualities, the one who is able to get other people to carry out their interests. That would be the person who is generous, honest and who gave credit to other people for their own ideas. All types of qualities. Whomever you admire the most in the class. Then I would throw in a hooker. In addition to this person you had to go short one of your classmates.
你会先给大家测个智商，然后选那个智商最高的人吗？我怀疑你会这么做。你会选成绩最好的吗？最有活力的吗？你可能会开始考虑一些定性因素，而不是单纯量化因素，因为大家都有足够的头脑和精力。你很可能会选择那个你最欣赏、最愿意共事的人，那个人有领导才能，能让他人愿意支持他、实现他的目标。那个人可能是慷慨的、诚实的、会把功劳归于他人的人。这些都是你会欣赏的品质。你会挑选班上你最敬佩的同学。然后我会给你加一个条件：除了选择这个人之外，你还必须“做空”班上的另一个人。
That is more fun. Who do I want to go short? You wouldn't pick the person with the lowest IQ, you would think about the person who turned you off, the person who is egotistical, who is greedy, who cuts corners, who is slightly dishonest.
这更有意思了。那么我想“做空”的人会是谁？你不会去选智商最低的那个，而是会考虑那个让你反感的人——那个自我中心、贪婪、做事投机取巧、稍有不诚实的人。
As you look at those qualities on the left and right hand side, there is one interesting thing about them, it is not the ability to throw a football 60 yards, it is not the ability the run the 100 yard dash in 9.3 seconds, it is not being the best looking person in the class, they are all qualities that if you really want to have the ones on the left hand side, you can have them.
当你比较“左边”和“右边”的这些特质时，有一件很有趣的事——它们不是像掷出60码橄榄球那样的能力，不是百米跑9.3秒的体能，也不是班上最帅/最漂亮的外貌。这些都是你如果真想拥有，就能拥有的品质。
They are qualities of behavior, temperament, character that are achievable, they are not forbidden to anybody in this group. And if you look at the qualities on the right hand side the ones that turn you off in other people, there is not a quality there that you have to have. You can get rid of it. You can get rid of it a lot easier at your age than at my age, because most behaviors are habitual. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. There is no question about it. I see people with these self- destructive behavior patterns at my age or even twenty years younger and they really are entrapped by them.
这些是行为、气质、性格上的特质，是人人都能培养出来的东西。而如果你看那些让你反感的“右边”的特质，没有一个是你必须拥有的。你完全可以摆脱它们。而且你们这个年纪要比我现在这个年纪容易得多。因为大多数行为都是习惯性的——“习惯的锁链轻到你感觉不到，直到它重得无法挣脱。”这是真的。我看到很多人在我这个年纪，甚至比我年轻二十岁时，还被这些自毁性的行为模式困住。
They go around and do things that turn off other people right and left. They don't need to be that way but by a certain point they get so they can hardly change it. But at your age you can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It is simply a question of which you decide.
他们到处让人讨厌，做出让人反感的行为。他们本不需要那样，但到了某个年纪就几乎改不了了。但你们这个年纪，可以培养任何你想要的习惯和行为模式。这只取决于你做出什么决定。
If you did this… Ben Graham looked around at the people he admired and Ben Franklin did this before him. Ben Graham did this in his low teens and he looked around at the people he admired and he said, "I want to be admired, so why don't I behave like them?" And he found out that there was nothing impossible about behaving like them. Similarly he did the same thing on the reverse side in terms of getting rid of those qualities. I would suggest is that if you write those qualities down and think about them a while and make them habitual, you will be the one you want to buy 10% of when you are all through.
如果你愿意这样做……本·格雷厄姆曾观察他所敬佩的人——在他之前，本杰明·富兰克林也做过同样的事。格雷厄姆在十几岁时观察那些他尊敬的人，然后对自己说：“我想成为一个值得别人尊敬的人，那为什么不去模仿他们的行为呢？”后来他发现，模仿他们并没有什么不可能的。同样地，他也努力去改掉那些他不喜欢的品质。我建议你把这些特质写下来，思考一段时间，把它们变成你的习惯。到头来，你会成为那个你愿意买下10%未来收益的那个人。
And the beauty of it is that you already own 100% of yourself and you are stuck with it. So you might as well be that person, that somebody else.
而最美妙的是——你已经100%拥有你自己了，而且你也无法换掉。所以你不如就成为那样的一个人，那个值得拥有的人。
Well that is a short little sermon. So let's get on with what you are interested in. Let's start with questions………..
好了，这是一段简短的小“布道”。现在我们回到你们真正感兴趣的话题——开始提问吧……
Question: What about Japan? Your thoughts about Japan?
问题：日本怎么样？您对日本有什么看法？
Buffett: My thoughts about Japan? I am not a macro guy. Now I say to myself Berkshire Hathaway can borrow money in Japan for 10 years at one percent. One percent! I say gee, I took Graham's class 45 years ago and I have been working hard at this all my life maybe I can earn more than 1% annually, it doesn't seem impossible. I wouldn't want to get involved in currency risk, so it would have to be Yen-denominated. I would have to be in Japanese Real Estate or Japanese companies or something of the sort and all I have to do is beat one percent. That is all the money is going to cost me and I can get it for 10 years. So far I haven't found anything. It is kind of interesting. The Japanese businesses earn very low returns on equity - 4% to 5% - 6% on equity and it is very hard to earn a lot as an investor when the business you are in doesn't earn very much money.
巴菲特：关于日本？我对日本的看法？我不是搞宏观的。现在我想，伯克希尔·哈撒韦可以在日本以 1% 的利率借 10 年期的资金。1%！我就想，天哪，我 45 年前上过格雷厄姆的课，一辈子都在努力，也许我每年能赚超过 1%，这看起来并非不可能。我不想承担汇率风险，所以贷款必须以日元计价。我得把钱投向日本房地产或日本公司之类的资产，而我所要做的就是跑赢 1%。这就是这笔钱的全部成本，而且我能拿到 10 年。到目前为止我还没找到合适的标的。这很有意思。日本企业的股本回报率非常低——4% 到 5% 到 6%，当你所持有的企业本身挣不了多少钱时，作为投资者要赚大钱是非常难的。
Now some people do it. In fact, I have a friend, Walter Schloss, who worked at Graham at the same time I did. And it was the first way I went at stocks to buy stocks selling way below working capital. A very cheap, quantitative approach to stocks. I call it the cigar butt approach to investing. You walk down the street and you look around for a cigar butt someplace. Finally you see one and it is soggy and kind of repulsive, but there is one puff left in it. So you pick it up and the puff is free--it is a cigar butt stock. You get one free puff on it and then you throw it away and try another one. It is not elegant. But it works. Those are low return businesses.
当然也有人能做到。事实上，我有位朋友沃尔特·施洛斯，他和我同在格雷厄姆手下工作。这也是我最初买股票的方法：买入价格远低于流动资产的股票，一种非常便宜、量化的选股方式。我把它称为“烟蒂投资法”。你沿着街道走，四处寻找一只烟蒂，终于看到一只，又湿又令人厌恶，但还剩一口烟，于是你捡起来，那一口是免费的——它就是烟蒂股。你免费吸完这一口，然后把它扔掉，再去找下一只。这不优雅，但行之有效。这些都是低回报的业务。
But time is the friend of the wonderful business; it is the enemy of the lousy business. If you are in a lousy business for a long time, you will get a lousy result even if you buy it cheap. If you are in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little bit too much going in you will get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.
然而，时间是优秀企业的朋友，却是糟糕企业的敌人。若你长期持有一家糟糕企业，即使买得再便宜，最终也只能得到糟糕的结果；若你长期持有一家优秀企业，即使起初多付了一点钱，最终仍会获得出色的回报。
I find very few wonderful businesses in Japan at present. They may change the culture in some way so that management gets more share holder responsive over there and stock returns are higher. At the present time you will find a lot of low return businesses and that was true even when the Japanese economy was booming. It is amazing; they had an incredible market without incredible companies. They were incredible in terms of doing a lot of business, but they were not incredible in terms of the return on equity that they achieved and that has finally caught up with them. So we have so far done nothing there. But as long as money is 1% there, we will keep looking.
我目前在日本找到的优秀企业非常少。他们也许会通过某种方式改变企业文化，使管理层对股东更具回应性，进而提高股票回报。就当前而言，你会发现许多低回报企业，即便在日本经济繁荣时期也是如此。令人惊讶的是，他们拥有令人难以置信的市场，却没有同样卓越的公司——业务规模惊人，但实现的股本回报率并不惊人，如今这一点终于显现出来。因此我们迄今为止在那边未采取任何行动。不过，只要资金成本仍为 1%，我们就会继续寻找机会。
Question: You were rumored to be one of the rescue buyers of Long Term Capital, what was the play there, what did you see?
问题：据传您是长期资本管理公司（LTCM）救助收购的潜在买家之一，当时您看中了什么？您看到了什么机会？
Buffett: The Fortune Magazine that has Rupert Murdoch on the cover. It tells the whole story of our involvement; it is kind of an interesting story. I got the really serious call about LTCM on a Friday afternoon that things were getting serious. I know those people most of them pretty well--most of them at Salomon when I was there. And the place was imploding and the FED was sending people up that weekend. Between that Friday and the following Wed. when the NY Fed, in effect, orchestrated a rescue effort but without any Federal money involved. I was quite active but I was having a terrible time reaching anybody.
巴菲特：《财富》杂志那期封面是鲁珀特·默多克，里面完整讲述了我们参与 LTCM 的故事，非常有意思。那年周五下午，我收到一通严肃电话，说 LTCM 情况十分危急。我认识那帮人中的大多数——大多是在我任职所罗门时期就认识的。公司正在崩溃，美联储那个周末就派人过去。从那周五到接下来周三期间，纽约联储实际上主导了 一次没有动用联邦资金的救助行动。在这期间我非常积极，但却很难联系到任何人。
We put in a bid on Wednesday morning. I talked to Bill McDonough at the NY Fed. We made a bid for 250 million for the net assets but we would have put in 3 and 3/4 billion on top of that. \$3 billion from Berkshire, \$700 mil. from AIG and \$300 million. from Goldman Sachs. And we submitted that but we put a very short time limit on that because when you are bidding on 100 billion worth of securities that are moving around, you don't want to leave a fixed price bid out there for very long.
我们在周三早上提交了一个报价。我同纽约联储的比尔·麦克多诺通了话。我们为净资产报价 2.5 亿美元，并愿意再注入 37.5 亿美元——其中伯克希尔出 30 亿，AIG 出 7 亿，高盛出 3 亿。我们提交了报价，但设定了非常短的有效期，因为当你要对 1000 亿美元规模、价格不断波动的证券出价时，你不会希望一个固定价格的报价悬在那里太久。
In the end the bankers made the deal, but it was an interesting period. The whole LTCM is really fascinating because if you take Larry Hillenbrand, Eric Rosenfeld, John Meriwether and the two Nobel prize winners. If you take the 16 of them, they have about as high an IQ as any 16 people working together in one business in the country, including Microsoft. An incredible amount of intellect in one room. Now you combine that with the fact that those people had extensive experience in the field they were operating in. These were not a bunch of guys who had made their money selling men’s clothing and all of a sudden went into the securities business. They had in aggregate, the 16, had 300 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing and then you throw in the third factor that most of them had most of their very substantial net worth’s in the businesses. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of their own money up (at risk), super high intellect and working in a field that they knew. Essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating.
最终，银行家们敲定了交易，但那段时期相当有趣。整个 LTCM 事件非常令人着迷：如果把拉里·希伦布兰德、埃里克·罗森菲尔德、约翰·梅里韦瑟以及两位诺贝尔奖得主算在内，一共 16 个人，他们的智商组合大概是全国任何一个企业团队中最高的，包括微软——在同一个房间里聚集了如此惊人的智力。再加上他们在自身领域的丰富经验——他们并不是靠卖男装发家然后突然进入证券业的一群人。这 16 个人合计拥有 300 到 400 年的相关从业经验。第三个因素是，他们中的大多数人把自身巨额净资产的大部分都投在了该业务中：数亿甚至数十亿美元的真金白银在风险中，高智商、加上在熟悉领域工作，但最终他们还是破产了。对我来说，这非常耐人寻味。
If I ever write a book it will be called, Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. My partner says it should be autobiographical. But this might be an interesting illustration. They are perfectly decent guys. I respect them and they helped me out when I had problems at Salomon. They are not bad people at all.
如果我哪天写本书，书名将是《聪明人为何会做蠢事》。我的合伙人说这应该是一部自传。不过这或许是一个有趣的例证。他们都是正派的人，我尊重他们，在我于所罗门遇到麻烦时，他们也曾帮过我。他们一点也不是坏人。
But to make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and what they did need. That is just plain foolish; it doesn’t matter what your IQ is. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t care if the odds you succeed are 99 to 1 or 1000 to 1 that you succeed. If you hand me a gun with a million chambers with one bullet in a chamber and put it up to your temple and I am paid to pull the trigger, it doesn’t matter how much I would be paid. I would not pull the trigger. You can name any sum you want, but it doesn’t do anything for me on the upside and I think the downside is fairly clear. Yet people do it financially very much without thinking.
但是，为了赚取自己并没有、也并不需要的钱，他们拿自己已经拥有且真正需要的钱去冒险。这纯粹是愚蠢；智商高低毫无关系。若你为了一些对你无关紧要的事而冒险失去对你至关重要的东西，那就毫无意义。无论成功概率是99比1还是1000比1，我都不在乎。若你递给我一把有一百万个弹膛而仅一膛有子弹的枪，让我把枪口抵在太阳穴上并付钱让我扣动扳机，不论价码多高，我都不会扣动扳机。你可以开出任何金额，但对我而言，上行收益毫无意义，而下行风险显而易见。然而，许多人在财务上却在毫无思考地这么做。
There was a lousy book with a great title written by Walter Gutman—You Only Have to Get Rich Once. Now that seems pretty fundamental. If you have \$100 million at the beginning of the year and you will make 10% if you are unleveraged and 20% if you are leveraged 99 times out of a 100, what difference if at the end of the year, you have \$110 million or \$120 million? It makes no difference. If you die at the end of the year, the guy who makes up the story may make a typo, he may have said 110 even though you had a 120. You have gained nothing at all. It makes absolutely no difference. It makes no difference to your family or anybody else.
沃尔特·古特曼写过一本内容糟糕却标题极佳的书——《你只需要富一次》。这听起来再基本不过。若你年初有1亿美元，如果不加杠杆便可赚10%，而在100次里有99次加杠杆能赚20%，那么年末是1.1亿还是1.2亿有什么区别？毫无区别。如果你年末去世，替你写故事的人也可能写错，把1.2亿写成1.1亿。你根本没有多得到任何东西。这绝对没有任何差异，对你的家庭或任何人都无关紧要。
The downside, especially if you are managing other people’s money, is not only losing all your money, but it is disgrace, humiliation and facing friends whose money you have lost. Yet 16 guys with very high IQs entered into that game. I think it is madness. It is produced by an over reliance to some extent on things. Those guys would tell me back at Salomon; a six Sigma event wouldn’t touch us. But they were wrong. History does not tell you of future things happening. They had a great reliance on mathematics. They thought that the Beta of the stock told you something about the risk of the stock. It doesn’t tell you a damn thing about the risk of the stock in my view.
下行风险，尤其当你管理他人资金时，不仅是失去所有钱，还包括耻辱、羞辱以及面对那些你亏损了他们钱财的朋友。然而，16位高智商者仍然加入了这场游戏。我认为这是疯狂。在某种程度上，这是对一些事物的过度依赖。当年在所罗门，他们告诉我：“六西格玛事件都伤不到我们。”但他们错了。历史并不能告诉你未来。 他们过度依赖数学，他们认为股票的贝塔值能说明股票的风险。在我看来，贝塔对股票风险毫无启示。
Sigma’s do not tell you about the risk of going broke in my view and maybe now in their view too. But I don’t like to use them as an example. The same thing in a different way could happen to any of us, where we really have a blind spot about something that is crucial, because we know a whole lot of something else. It is like Henry Kauffman said, “The ones who are going broke in this situation are of two types, the ones who know nothing and the ones who know everything.” It is sad in a way.
在我看来，西格玛指标并不能告诉你破产风险，也许现在他们也这么看。但我并不想把他们当作例子。同样的事情可能以不同方式发生在我们任何人身上——我们可能对某个至关重要的问题存在盲点，只因为在其他方面知道得太多。正如亨利·考夫曼所言：“在这种情况下破产的人有两种：一无所知者和无所不知者。”某种程度上，这令人悲哀。
I urge you. We basically never borrow money. I never borrowed money even when I had \$10,000 basically, what difference did it make. I was having fun as I went along it didn’t matter whether I had \$10,000 or \$100,000 or \$1,000,000 unless I had a medical emergency come along.
我敦促各位：我们基本从不借钱。我从来不借钱，即便我只有1万美元，这又有什么差别？我一路上都在享受过程；除非遇到医疗急需，否则我手里是1万美元、10万美元还是100万美元，都无关紧要。
Steve Ballmer因为这种心态赚到了大钱，天道奖励不容易紧张的人。
I was going to do the same things when I had a little bit of money as when I had a lot of money. If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically (SunTrust gives me mine), we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or better yet, Dairy Queen, and we live in a house that is warm in winter and cool in summer. We watch the Nebraska (football) game on big screen TV. You see it the same way I see it. We do everything the same—our lives are not that different. The only thing we do is we travel differently. What can I do that you can’t do?
无论我钱少还是钱多，我都会做同样的事情。如果你想想我和你之间的差别，我们基本穿一样的衣服（SunTrust 送我的），我们吃的食物也差不多——大家都去麦当劳，或者更好的是 Dairy Queen；我们住的房子冬暖夏凉。我们在大屏幕电视上看内布拉斯加橄榄球比赛，你看到的跟我看到的一样。我们做的事都一样——我们的生活并没有那么不同。唯一不同的是我们的旅行方式。我能做的事情，你有什么不能做的吗？
I get to work in a job that I love, but I have always worked at a job that I loved. I loved it just as much when I thought it was a big deal to make \$1,000. I urge you to work in jobs that you love. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. I was with a fellow at Harvard the other day who was taking me over to talk. He was 28 and he was telling me all that he had done in life, which was terrific. And then I said, “What will you do next?” “Well,” he said, “Maybe after I get my MBA I will go to work for a consulting firm because it will look good on my resume.” I said, “Look, you are 28 and you have been doing all these things, you have a resume 10 times than anybody I have ever seen. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
我能从事一份自己热爱的工作，但事实上我一直都在做自己热爱的工作。过去当我觉得赚到 1000 美元就了不起时，我也一样热爱我的工作。我鼓励你们去做自己热爱的工作。如果你因为想让简历好看就不停接受自己不喜欢的工作，我觉得你简直疯了。前几天我在哈佛遇到一位带我去演讲的年轻人，他 28 岁，向我展示了他人生中做过的所有精彩事情。然后我问他：“接下来你打算做什么？”他说：“嗯，也许拿到 MBA 后我会去咨询公司，因为那能让我的简历更好看。”我说：“听着，你 28 岁就已经做了这么多事，你的简历是我见过的十倍优秀。难道这不就像把性生活攒到老年再享用吗？”
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. When I first got out of Columbia Business School, I wanted to go to work for Graham immediately for nothing. He thought I was over-priced. But I kept pestering him. I sold securities for three years and I kept writing him and finally I went to work for him for a couple of years. It was a great experience. But I always worked in a job that I loved doing. You really should take a job that if you were independently wealthy that would be the job you would take. You will learn something, you will be excited about, and you will jump out of bed. You can’t miss. You may try something else later on, but you will get way more out of it and I don’t care what the starting salary is.
总有一天你应该开始做自己想做的事。找一份你热爱的工作。那样每天早晨你都会跳下床。我刚从哥伦比亚商学院毕业时，就想立即去给格雷厄姆白干。他觉得我要价太高。但我一直缠着他。我卖了三年证券，不停地给他写信，最终我在他那里工作了两年，那是段极好的经历。但我一直都在做自己热爱的工作。你真的应该找一份即使你已经财务自由也愿意去做的工作。你会学到东西，会兴奋得一早跳起。你不会错的。以后你也许会尝试别的事情，但你会从中获得更多，我一点也不在乎起薪是多少。
When you get out of here take a job you love, not a job you think will look good on your resume. You ought to find something you like.
当你离开这里时，要选择一份你热爱的工作，而不是一份看起来能让简历好看的工作。你应该找到自己喜欢的事情。
If you think you will be happier getting 2x instead of 1x, you are probably making a mistake. You will get in trouble if you think making 10x or 20x will make you happier because then you will borrow money when you shouldn’t or cut corners on things. It just doesn’t make sense and you won’t like it when you look back.
如果你认为赚 2 倍而不是 1 倍能让你更快乐，你很可能在犯错。如果你觉得赚 10 倍或 20 倍会让你更快乐，你就会在不该借钱的时候去借钱，或者在事情上偷工减料，这样会惹上麻烦。这根本说不通，将来回头看时你也不会喜欢那样的自己。
作死的都是紧张的人，这样的人太多了以至于认为都是正常的，事实上这些都是鸡。
Question: What makes a company something that you like?
问题：是什么让一家公司值得您喜欢？
Buffett: I like businesses that I can understand. Let’s start with that. That narrows it down by 90%. There are all types of things I don’t understand, but fortunately, there is enough I do understand. You have this big wide world out there and almost every company is publicly owned. So you have all American business practically available to you. So it makes sense to go with things you can understand.
巴菲特：我喜欢我能理解的生意。让我们从这一点开始。这样一来就能排除掉 90% 的公司。有很多事情我不懂，但幸运的是，也有很多我能理解。外面的世界很广阔，几乎每家公司都是上市公司，所以几乎整个美国的商业都摆在你面前可供选择。因此，选择那些你能够理解的业务是合理的。
I can understand this, anyone can understand this (Buffett holds up a bottle of CocaCola). Since 1886, it is a simple business, but it is not an easy business—I don’t want an easy business for competitors. I want a business with a moat around it. I want a very valuable castle in the middle and then I want the Duke who is in charge of that castle to be very honest and hard working and able. Then I want a moat around that castle. The moat can be various things: The moat around our auto insurance business, Geico, is low cost.
我能理解这一点，任何人都能理解这一点（巴菲特举起一瓶可口可乐）。自 1886 年以来，它是一门简单的生意，但并不是对竞争对手来说容易的生意——我可不想要一门让竞争对手觉得容易的生意。我想要的是一座周围有护城河的生意。我希望在城堡中央有一座非常宝贵的城堡，然后负责这座城堡的公爵诚实、勤奋且能力出众。接着我希望城堡周围有护城河。护城河可以有多种形式：比如我们汽车保险业务 Geico 的护城河就是低成本。
People have to buy auto insurance so everyone is going to have one auto insurance policy per car basically. I can’t sell them 20, but they have to buy one. I can sell them 1. What are they going to buy it on? (based on what criteria?) They (customers) will buy based on service and cost. Most people will assume the service is identical among companies or close enough. So they will do it on cost. So I have to be a low cost producer--that is my moat. To the extent that my costs are further below the other guy, I have thrown a couple of sharks into the moat. All the time you have this wonderful castle, there are people out there who are going to attack it and try to take it away from you. I want a castle I can understand, but I want a castle with a moat around it.
人们必须购买汽车保险，所以基本上每辆车都会有一份保险单。我不能卖给他们 20 份，但他们必须买一份，我可以卖给他们这一份。他们会依据什么来选择？（选择标准是什么？）他们会根据服务和价格来买。大多数人会认为各家公司的服务都差不多，或者说足够接近，因此他们会以价格为主。所以我必须成为低成本生产者——这就是我的护城河。只要我的成本比对手更低一点，我就算是在护城河里放进了几条鲨鱼。无论何时，你拥有这座美妙的城堡，总会有人想来攻打并夺走它。我想要的是一座我能理解的城堡，但更想要一座周围有护城河的城堡。
Kodak
柯达
30 years ago, Eastman Kodak’s moat was just as wide as Coca-Cola’s moat. I mean if you were going to take a picture of your six-month old baby and you want to look at that picture 20 years from now or 50 years from now. And you are never going to get a chance—you are not a professional photographer—so you can evaluate what is going to look good 20 or 50 years ago. What is in your mind about that photography company (Share of Mind) is what counts. Because they are promising you that the picture you take today is going to be terrific 20 to 50 years from now about something that is very important to you. Well, Kodak had that in spades 30 years ago, they owned that. They had what I call share of mind. Forget about share of market, share of mind. They had something—that little yellow box—that said Kodak is the best. That is priceless. They have lost some of that. They haven’t lost it all.
30 年前，伊士曼柯达的护城河和可口可乐的一样宽。举例来说，如果你给自己 6 个月大的宝宝拍照片，并希望 20 年后或 50 年后再看这张照片。你永远不会有第二次机会——你不是专业摄影师，无法评估什么样的照片在 20 年或 50 年后会看起来最好。此时，你脑海中对那家摄影公司的印象（心智份额）才是关键。因为他们向你承诺，今天拍下的这张对你非常重要的照片在 20 到 50 年后依然会很棒。30 年前，柯达对此了如指掌，他们拥有这种优势。他们拥有我所说的心智份额。忘掉市场份额吧，最重要的是心智份额。他们拥有的——那个小小的黄色盒子——告诉你“柯达就是最好的”。那是无价的。如今他们已经丢掉了其中一部分，但还没全部失去。
It is not due to George Fisher. George is doing a great job, but they let that moat narrow. They let Fuji come and start narrowing the moat in various ways. They let them get into the Olympics and take away that special aspect that only Kodak was fit to photograph the Olympics. So Fuji gets there and immediately in people’s minds, Fuji becomes more into parity with Kodak.
这并不是乔治·费舍尔（George Fisher）的错。乔治做得很好，但他们却让那条护城河变窄了。他们让富士进来，用各种方式开始缩小护城河；他们让富士进入奥运会，夺走了只有柯达才适合为奥运会拍照的特殊地位。于是富士一登场，人们心目中富士与柯达立刻拉近到了同一水平。
You haven’t seen that with Coke; Coke’s moat is wider now than it was 30 years ago. You can’t see the moat day by day but every time the infrastructure that gets built in some country that isn’t yet profitable for Coke that will be 20 years from now. The moat is widening a little bit. Things are, all the time, changing a little in one direction or the other. Ten years from now, you will see the difference. Our managers of the businesses we run, I have one message to them, and we want to widen the moat. We want to throw crocs, sharks and gators—I guess—into the moat to keep away competitors. That comes about through service, through quality of product, it comes about through cost, some times through patents, and/or real estate location. So that is the business I am looking for.
你不会在可口可乐身上看到这种情况；可口可乐如今的护城河比 30 年前更宽。你无法每天都看到护城河在变化，但每当可口可乐在一个暂时尚未盈利、但 20 年后将产生利益的国家建立基础设施时，护城河就稍稍加宽了一点。事物总在朝着某个方向细微变化。十年之后，你就能看出差别。对于我们经营的企业，我只给经理们一个信息：我们要拓宽护城河。我们要把鳄鱼、鲨鱼、短吻鳄——大概是这样的东西——投进护城河里，阻挡竞争者。这靠的是服务、产品质量、成本，有时也靠专利或地理位置。因此，这就是我寻找的那类企业。
Now what kind of businesses am I going to find like that? Well, I am going to find them in simple products because I am not going to be able to figure what the moat is going to look like for Oracle, Lotus or Microsoft, ten years from now. Gates is the best businessman I have ever run into and they have a hell of a position, but I really don’t know what that business is going to look like ten years from now. I certainly don’t know what his competitors will look like ten years from now. I know what the chewing business will look like ten years from now. The Internet is not going to change how we chew gum and nothing much else is going to change how we chew gum. There will lots of new products. Is Spearmint or Juicy Fruit going to evaporate? It isn’t going to happen. You give me a billion dollars and tell me to go into the chewing gum business and try to make a real dent in Wrigley’s. I can’t do it. That is how I think about businesses. I say to myself, give me a billion dollars and how much can I hurt the guy? Give me \$10 billion dollars and how much can I hurt Coca-Cola around the world? I can’t do it. Those are good businesses.
那么，我会上哪儿找到这样的企业呢？我会在简单的产品里找到，因为我无法判断十年后的甲骨文、Lotus 或微软的护城河会是什么样子。盖茨是我见过的最优秀的商人，他们的地位极其稳固，但我真的不知道十年后的那门生意会是什么样，更不知道十年后他的竞争对手会是什么样。我却知道十年后的口香糖生意会是什么样。互联网不会改变人们嚼口香糖的方式，也没有什么别的东西会改变。会有很多新产品，但 Spearmint 或 Juicy Fruit 会消失吗？那不可能。给我 10 亿美元，让我进入口香糖行业并真正撼动箭牌，我做不到。这就是我看待生意的方式。我会问自己：给我 10 亿美元，我能给那家公司造成多大伤害？给我 100 亿美元，我能在全世界范围内给可口可乐造成多大伤害？我做不到。那些才是好生意。
Now give me some money and tell me to hurt somebody in some other fields, and I can figure out how to do it.
如果你给我钱，让我去某些其他领域打击别人，我倒能想办法做到。
So I want a simple business, easy to understand, great economics now, honest and able management, and then I can see about in a general way where they will be ten (10) years from now. If I can’t see where they will be ten years from now, I don’t want to buy it. Basically, I don’t want to buy any stock where if they close the NYSE tomorrow for five years, I won’t be happy owning it. I buy a farm and I don’t get a quote on it for five years and I am happy if the farm does OK. I buy an apartment house and don’t get a quote on it for five years, I am happy if the apartment house produces the returns that I expect. People buy a stock and they look at the price next morning and they decide to see if they are doing well or not doing well. It is crazy. They are buying a piece of the business. That is what Graham—the most fundamental part of what he taught me.
因此，我要找的是简单易懂、当前经济效益优异、管理层诚实且有能力的生意，然后我能大致判断它们十年后的状态。如果我看不清十年后它们会怎样，我就不想买。基本上，如果明天纽约证券交易所关闭五年，而我持有的股票令我不安心，那我就不买。我买下一块农场，五年都没有报价，只要农场经营状况良好，我就开心。我买下一栋公寓楼，五年都没有报价，只要公寓产生预期收益，我就满意。可有人买股票，第二天早上就看股价，决定自己表现好不好，这太疯狂了。他们买的是生意的一部分。这就是格雷厄姆教给我最根本的一课。
You are not buying a stock, you are buying part ownership in a business. You will do well if the business does well, if you didn’t pay a totally silly price. That is what it is all about. You ought to buy businesses you understand. Just like if you buy farms, you ought to buy farms you understand. It is not complicated.
你买的不是一张股票，而是企业的部分所有权。如果企业经营得好，而你没付出一个完全荒唐的价格，你就会做得好。所有的关键就在于此。你应该买自己理解的生意，就像买农场一样，你得买自己了解的农场。这并不复杂。
Incidentally, by the way, in calling this Graham-Buffett, this is pure Graham. I was very fortunate. I picked up his book (The Intelligent Investor) when I was nineteen; I got interested in stocks when I was 6 or 7. I bought my first stock when I was eleven. But I was playing around with all this stuff—I had charts and volume and I was making all types of technical calculations and everything. Then I picked up a little book that said you are not just buying some little ticker symbol, that bounces around every day, you are buying part of a business. Soon as I started thinking about it that way, everything else followed. It is very simple. So we buy businesses we think we can understand. There is no one here who can’t understand Coke………….. (end of first side.)
顺便说一句，把这套方法称为格雷厄姆-巴菲特，其实完全是格雷厄姆的理念。我非常幸运，十九岁时读到他的《聪明的投资者》；六七岁时我就对股票感兴趣，十一岁买了第一支股票。但那时我只是胡乱操作——看图表、盯成交量、做各种技术计算。后来我读到一本小书，它告诉我：你买的不仅是每天上下波动的代号，而是企业的一部分。一旦用这种思维去看待股票，一切就豁然开朗。这非常简单。因此我们只买自己能理解的企业。没有人会不懂可口可乐……（第一面结束）
If I was teaching a class at business school, on the final exam I would pass out the information on an Internet company and ask each student to value it. Anybody that gave me an answer, I’d flunk (Laughter).
如果我在商学院教书，期末考试我会发给学生一家互联网公司的资料让他们估值。任何敢给出答案的人我都会让他不及格（笑）。
I don’t know how to do it. But people do it all the time; it is more exciting. If you look at it like you are going to the races--that is a different thing--but if you are investing…. Investing is putting out money to be sure of getting more back later at an appropriate rate.
And to do that you have to understand what you are doing at any time. You have to understand the business. You can understand some businesses but not all businesses.
我不会这么做。但人们常常这么干，因为更刺激。如果你把它当赛马看待，那另当别论；可如果你在投资……投资就是投入资金，以确保日后以适当的收益率拿回更多的钱。要做到这一点，你必须随时明白自己在做什么，必须理解那家企业。你可以理解一些企业，但不可能理解所有企业。
Question: You covered half of it which is trying to understand a business and buying a business. You also alluded to getting a return on the amount of capital invested in the business. How do you determine what is the proper price to pay for the business?
提问：您已经谈到一半——了解并买入企业。您还提到要获得与投入资本相匹配的回报。那您如何判断该为这家企业支付什么样的合理价格？
Buffett: It is a tough thing to decide but I don’t want to buy into any business I am not terribly sure of. So if I am terribly sure of it, it probably won’t offer incredible returns. Why should something that is essentially a cinch to do well, offer you 40% a year? We don’t have huge returns in mind, but we do have in mind not losing anything. We bought See’s Candy in 1972, See’s Candy was then selling 16 m. pounds of candy at a \$1.95 a pound and it was making 2 bits a pound or \$4 million pre-tax. We paid \$25 million for it—6.25 x pretax or about 10x after tax. It took no capital to speak of. When we looked at that business—basically, my partner, Charlie, and I—we needed to decide if there was some untapped pricing power there. Where that \$1.95 box of candy could sell for \$2 to \$2.25. If it could sell for \$2.25 or another \$0.30 per pound that was \$4.8 on 16 million pounds. Which on a \$25 million purchase price was fine. We never hired a consultant in our lives; our idea of consulting was to go out and buy a box of candy and eat it.
巴菲特：这个决定确实很难，但我不会买入自己没有十足把握的生意。如果我有十足把握，那它大概也不会给你 40% 的惊人年回报。为什么一门稳稳当当的好生意会让你年赚 40% 呢？我们不奢望巨额回报，但首先要保证不亏钱。1972 年我们收购喜诗糖果，当时它年销 1600 万磅，每磅 1.95 美元，每磅利润 0.25 美元，税前利润 400 万美元。我们支付了 2500 万美元，相当于税前利润 6.25 倍、税后约 10 倍，而且几乎不需追加资本。当我和查理评估这家公司时，我们要判断它是否还有未开发的定价能力——看那盒 1.95 美元的糖是否能涨到 2 美元或 2.25 美元。如果能卖到 2.25 美元，也就是每磅多赚 0.30 美元，那 1600 万磅就能多赚 480 万美元，对 2500 万的收购价来说非常合算。我们这辈子从没请过顾问；我们对“咨询”的理解就是买一盒糖，然后把它吃掉。
What we did know was that they had share of mind in California. There was something special. Every person in Ca. has something in mind about See’s Candy and overwhelmingly it was favorable. They had taken a box on Valentine’s Day to some girl and she had kissed him. If she slapped him, we would have no business. As long as she kisses him, that is what we want in their minds. See’s Candy means getting kissed. If we can get that in the minds of people, we can raise prices. I bought it in 1972, and every year I have raised prices on Dec. 26th, the day after Christmas, because we sell a lot on Christmas. In fact, we will make \$60 million this year. We will make \$2 per pound on 30 million pounds. Same business, same formulas, same everything--\$60 million bucks and it still doesn’t take any capital.
我们知道的是，他们在加州拥有“心智占有率”。这很特别。每个加州人对 See’s Candy 都有自己的印象，而且几乎都是正面的。有人在情人节那天拿一盒糖送给女孩，女孩就亲了他一下；要是她给了他一巴掌，我们的生意就完了。只要她亲他一下，这就是我们想要植入人们脑海的概念：See’s Candy 就意味着被亲吻。如果能把这种认知深植人心，我们就能提价。我在 1972 年收购这家公司，此后每年都在圣诞节后的 12 月 26 日提价，因为我们的销售高峰在圣诞节。事实上，今年我们将赚到 6000 万美元——以每磅 2 美元的利润卖出 3000 万磅糖果。生意、配方、一切都没变，却能赚 6000 万，而且基本上不需要资本投入。
And we make more money 10 years from now. But of that \$60 million, we make \$55 million in the three weeks before Christmas. And our company song is: “What a friend we have in Jesus.” (Laughter). It is a good business. Think about it a little. Most people do not buy boxed chocolate to consume themselves, they buy them as gifts— somebody’s birthday or more likely it is a holiday. Valentine’s Day is the single biggest day of the year. Christmas is the biggest season by far. Women buy for Christmas and they plan ahead and buy over a two or three week period. Men buy on Valentine’s Day. They are driving home; we run ads on the Radio. Guilt, guilt, guilt—guys are veering off the highway right and left. They won’t dare go home without a box of Chocolates by the time we get through with them on our radio ads. So that Valentine’s Day is the biggest day.
再过十年，我们会赚得更多。但 6000 万美元中的 5500 万是在圣诞节前的三周里赚到的。我们的公司歌曲是《我们在耶稣里有位好朋友》（笑）。这是一门好生意。想一想，大多数人买盒装巧克力并不是自己吃，而是作为礼物——生日，或者更常见的是节日。情人节是全年最大的单日销售日，圣诞节则是最大的销售季。女性为圣诞节提前计划，在两三周内陆续购买；男性则在情人节当天购买。他们开车回家时，我们在收音机里投放广告——“内疚、内疚、再内疚”——男人们听完广告纷纷从高速路上转出去。在我们的广告攻势下，他们不敢空手回家；因此情人节成为销量最高的一天。
Can you imagine going home on Valentine’s Day—our See’s Candy is now \$11 a pound thanks to my brilliance. And let’s say there is candy available at \$6 a pound. Do you really want to walk in on Valentine’s Day and hand—she has all these positive images of See’s Candy over the years—and say, “Honey, this year I took the low bid.” And hand her a box of candy. It just isn’t going to work. So in a sense, there is untapped pricing power—it is not price dependent.
想象一下情人节那天回家——由于我的“高明”，See’s Candy 现在卖 11 美元一磅，而旁边有每磅 6 美元的糖果。难道你真想在情人节走进家门，把一盒廉价糖果递给她——要知道，多年来她对 See’s Candy 积累了那么多美好印象——然后跟她说：“亲爱的，今年我选了最低价。”？这绝对行不通。所以从某种意义上说，这里面还有尚未开发的定价能力——购买决策并非取决于价格。
Think of Disney. Disney is selling Home Videos for \$16.95 or \$18.95 or whatever. All over the world—people, and we will speak particularly about Mothers in this case, have something in their mind about Disney. Everyone in this room, when you say Disney, has something in their mind about Disney. When I say Universal Pictures, if I say 20th Century Fox, you don’t have anything special in your mind. Now if I say Disney, you have something special in your mind. That is true around the world.
再想想迪士尼。迪士尼把家庭录像带卖 16.95、18.95 美元之类的价格。在全球范围内——这里尤其指母亲们——人们对迪士尼都有特定的联想。这里的每个人一听到“迪士尼”，脑海里都会浮现某种特别的形象；如果我说“环球影业”或“20 世纪福克斯”，你们心里却不会有什么特别的印象。但说到迪士尼，你们就会有特殊的联想——这在全世界都是如此。
Now picture yourself with a couple of young kids, whom you want to put away for a couple of hours every day and get some peace of mind. You know if you get one video, they will watch it twenty times. So you go to the video store or wherever to buy the video. Are you going to sit there and premier 10 different videos and watch them each for an hour and a half to decide which one your kid should watch? No. Let’s say there is one there for \$16.95 and the Disney one for \$17.95—you know if you take the Disney video that you are going to be OK. So you buy it. You don’t have to make a quality decision on something you don’t want to spend the time to do. So you can get a little bit more money if you are Disney and you will sell a lot more videos. It makes it a wonderful business. It makes it very tough for the other guy.
现在想象你有几个年幼的孩子，每天想让他们安静两个小时好让自己清净一下。你知道一盘录像带他们能看二十遍。于是你去录像店买带子。你会坐在那里试玩 10 盘不同的录像带，每盘看一个半小时，以决定孩子该看哪一盘吗？当然不会。假设店里有一盘卖 16.95 美元，而迪士尼的卖 17.95 美元——你知道只要买迪士尼的就不会出错，于是就买了。你无需在不愿花时间的事情上做质量判断。所以如果你是迪士尼，就能多卖一点钱，而且还能卖出更多录像带。这让它成为一门极好的生意，也让竞争对手难以招架。
How would you try to create a brand—Dreamworks is trying—that competes with Disney around the world and replaces the concept that people have in their minds about Disney with something that says, Universal Pictures? So a mother is going to walk in and pick out a Universal Pictures video in preference to a Disney. It is not going to happen.
试想，你要如何打造一个品牌——梦工厂正在尝试——在全球范围内与迪士尼竞争，并把人们心中关于迪士尼的观念替换成“环球影业”？让一个母亲走进商店，放着迪士尼不买，却拿起环球影业的录像带？这根本不可能发生。
Coca-Cola is associated with people being happy around the world. Everyplace – Disneyland, the World Cup, the Olympics—where people are happy. Happiness and Coke go together. Now you give me—I don’t care how much money—and tell me that I am going to do that with RC Cola around the world and have five billion people have a favorable image in their mind about RC Cola. You can’t get it done. You can fool around, you can do what you want to do. You can have price discounts on weekends. But you are not going to touch it. That is what you want to have in a business. That is the moat. You want that moat to widen.
可口可乐与全球人们的快乐联系在一起。无论在迪士尼乐园、世界杯还是奥运会——只要有欢乐的地方，就有可口可乐。快乐与可乐相伴。现在，假如让我用RC Cola在全球做到这一点，让五十亿人对RC Cola心怀好感——无论给我多少钱，你都做不到。你可以折腾、想怎么玩就怎么玩，也可以周末搞打折促销，但还是触及不了这一点。这正是一门好生意所必须具备的——护城河。你要让那道护城河不断拓宽。
If you are See’s Candy, you want to do everything in the world to make sure that the experience basically of giving that gift leads to a favorable reaction. It means what is in the box, it means the person who sells it to you, because all of our business is done when we are terribly busy. People come in during those weeks before Christmas, Valentine’s Day and there are long lines. So at five o’clock in the afternoon some woman is selling someone the last box candy and that person has been waiting in line for maybe 20 or 30 customers. And if the salesperson smiles at that last customer, our moat has widened and if she snarls at ‘em, our moat has narrowed. We can’t see it, but it is going on everyday. But it is the key to it. It is the total part of the product delivery. It is having everything associated with it say, See’s Candy and something pleasant happening. That is what business is all about.
如果你经营的是喜诗糖果，你就要竭尽所能，确保赠送这份礼物的体验最终带来积极反馈。这不仅取决于盒子里的糖果，也取决于卖糖的人，因为我们的生意都是在最繁忙的时候完成。圣诞节前的几周、情人节前的几周，人们蜂拥而至，排起长队。下午五点，一位女士把最后一盒糖果卖给某位顾客，那位顾客可能已排了二三十人的队。如果售货员对最后的顾客报以微笑，我们的护城河就加宽了；如果她板着脸，我们的护城河就变窄了。虽然我们看不见，但这种变化每天都在发生。这才是关键所在——这是产品交付的整体体验。让与之相关的一切都在说“喜诗糖果”，并带来愉快的感受。这就是生意的全部意义。
Question: If I have every bought a company where the numbers told me not to. How much is quantitative and how much is qualitative?
问题：有没有遇到财务数字告诉您不要买、但您仍然买下的公司？其中定量分析与定性分析各占多大比重？
Buffett: The best buys have been when the numbers almost tell you not to. Because then you feel so strongly about the product. And not just the fact you are getting a used cigar butt cheap. Then it is compelling. I owned a windmill company at one time. Windmills are cigar butts, believe me. I bought it very cheap, I bought it at a third of working capital. And we made money out of it, but there is no repetitive money to be made on it. There is a one-time profit in something like that. And it is just not the thing to be doing. I went through that phase. I bought streetcar companies and all kinds of things. In terms of the qualitative, I probably understand the qualitative the moment I get the phone call.
巴菲特：最佳的收购往往发生在财务数字几乎劝你别买的时候，因为这时你对产品本身的认可已经非常强烈，而不仅仅是贪图那个便宜的“烟蒂”。那才真正具有吸引力。我曾买过一家风车公司，风车绝对是烟蒂投资。我以极低价格入手，仅为其营运资本的三分之一。我们确实赚到钱，但只能赚这一次；此类生意没有持续收益可言。这事不值得长期做。我也经历过那段阶段，买过有轨电车公司等各种资产。至于定性判断，我往往在接到电话的瞬间就能看明白。
Almost every business we have bought has taken five or ten minutes in terms of analysis. We bought two businesses this year.
我们几乎每笔并购的分析都只花五到十分钟。今年我们就买了两家企业。
General Re is a \$18 billion deal. I have never been to their home office. I hope it is there. (Laughter) “There could be a few guys there saying what numbers should we send Buffett this month?” I could see them going once a month and saying we have \$20 billion in the bank instead of \$18 billion. I have never been there.
通用再保是笔 180 亿美元的大交易。我从未去过他们总部，希望那地方确实存在（笑）。也许那里有几个人每月商量：“这月给巴菲特报什么数字？”我想象他们每月汇报：“我们账上有 200 亿，不是 180 亿。”可我从未亲自去看过。
Before I bought Executive Jet, which is fractional ownership of jets, before I bought it, I had never been there. I bought my family a quarter interest in the program three years earlier. And I have seen the service and it seems to develop well. And I got the numbers. But if you don’t know enough to know about the business instantly, you won’t know enough in a month or in two months. You have to have sort of the background of understanding and knowing what you do or don’t understand. That is the key. It is defining your circle of competence.
在收购Executive Jet 之前，我也从未去过其总部。三年前我先为家人买了该计划四分之一的份额，亲自体验服务并看着它顺利发展，再拿到财务数据。但如果你无法在瞬间弄清一门生意，那么一个月、两个月后也未必弄得清。关键是事先具备必要的行业背景，清楚自己懂什么、不懂什么——这就是划定自己的能力圈。
Everybody has got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is, the important thing is the size of the circle; the important thing is staying inside the circle. And if that circle only has 30 companies in it out of 1000s on the big board, as long as you know which 30 they are, you will be OK. And you should know those businesses well enough so you don’t need to read lots of work.
每个人的能力圈都不同。关键不在于圈子大小，而在于始终留在圈内。即便在数千家上市公司中，你的圈子里只有 30 家，只要你清楚是哪 30 家就行。你应当对这些公司熟悉到无需查阅大量资料。
Now I did a lot of work in the earlier years just getting familiar with businesses and the way I would do that is use what Phil Fisher would call, the “Scuttlebutt Approach.” I would go out and talk to customers, suppliers, and maybe ex-employees in some cases. Everybody. Every time I was interested in an industry, say it was coal, I would go around and see every coal company. I would ask every CEO, “If you could only buy stock in one coal company that was not your own, which one would it be and why?” You piece those things together, you learn about the business after awhile.
早年间，为了熟悉各行各业，我做了大量功课，采用的是菲利普·费雪所谓的“闲聊法”。我会去和客户、供应商，甚至有时是前员工聊天——和所有相关人士交流。每当我对某个行业感兴趣，比如煤炭，我就走访所有煤炭公司，问每位 CEO：“如果只能买一家除自己公司以外的煤炭企业股票，你会选哪家？为什么？”把这些信息拼凑起来，过一阵子你就对行业了然于胸。
Funny, you get very similar answers as long as you ask about competitors. If you had a silver bullet and you could put it through the head of one competitor, which competitor and why? You will find who the best guy is in the industry. So there are a lot of things you can learn about a business. I have done that in the past on the business I felt I could understand so I don’t have to do that anymore. The nice thing about investing is that you don’t have to learn anything new. You can do it if you want to, but if you learn Wrigley’s chewing gum forty years ago, you still understand Wrigley’s chewing gum. There are not a lot of great insights to get of the sort as you go along. So you do get a database in your head.
有趣的是，只要你问竞争对手的问题，你会得到非常相似的答案。如果你有一颗银弹，可以射穿一个竞争对手的脑袋，你会选择哪一个，为什么？这样你就会发现行业里最强的那个人。因此，你可以通过这种方式学到很多关于一门生意的东西。过去在那些我觉得能理解的业务上，我也做过这种事，所以现在不用再做了。投资的好处在于你不必学任何新东西；你愿意的话当然可以学，但如果你四十年前了解了箭牌口香糖，你现在仍然了解它。随着时间推移，这类重大新洞见并不多，于是你的脑海就积累起一个数据库。
I had a guy, Frank Rooney, who ran Melville for many years; his father-in-law died and had owned H.H. Brown, a shoe company. And he put it up with Goldman Sachs. But he was playing golf with a friend of mine here in Florida and he mentioned it to this friend, so my friend said “Why don’t you call Warren?” He called me after the match and in five minutes I basically had a deal.
我认识一个叫弗兰克·鲁尼的人，他多年经营梅尔维尔；他的岳父去世，留下了鞋企 H.H. Brown，于是他交给高盛挂牌出售。但他在佛罗里达和我的一位朋友打高尔夫时提到这事，我的朋友就说：“你何不打电话给沃伦？”他赛后给我打电话，基本五分钟内我们就谈成了。
But I knew Frank, and I knew the business. I sort of knew the basic economics of the shoe business, so I could buy it. Quantitatively, I have to decide what the price is. But, you know, that is either yes or no. I don’t fool a lot around with negotiations. If they name a price that makes sense to me, I buy it. If they don’t, I was happy the day before, so I will be happy the day after without owning it.
但我了解弗兰克，也了解这门生意。我大致清楚制鞋业的基本经济特性，所以可以买下它。从量化角度看，我只需决定价格；这无非是“买”还是“不买”。我不喜欢在谈判上兜圈子；如果他们开出的价格对我合理，我就买；如果不合理，我前一天很开心，没有买到它后一天我也一样开心。
Question: The Asian Crisis and how it affects a company like Coke that recently announced their earnings would be lower in the fourth quarter.
问题：亚洲金融危机及其对可口可乐等公司（该公司最近宣布第四季度盈利将下滑）的影响如何？
Buffett: Well, basically I love it, but because the market for Coca-Cola products will grow far faster over the next twenty years internationally than it will in the United States. It will grow in the U.S. on a per capita basis. The fact that it will be a tough period for who knows—three months or three years—but it won’t be tough for twenty years. People will still be going to be working productively around the world and they are going to find this is a bargain product in terms of a portion of their working day that they have to give up in order to have one of these, better yet, five of them a day like I do.
巴菲特：从根本上说，我反而乐见其成，因为未来二十年，可口可乐产品在国际市场上的增长速度将远快于美国。在美国，人均消费仍会增长。也许会有一段艰难时期，谁知道是三个月还是三年，但它不会持续二十年。世界各地的人们仍将继续高效工作，他们会发现，为了喝上一罐——或者像我一天喝五罐那样——所需付出的工作时间只是很划算的一小部分。
This is a product that in 1936 when I first bought 6 of those for a quarter and sold them for a nickel each. It was in a 6.5 oz bottle and you paid a two cents deposit on the bottle. That was a 6.5 oz. bottle for a nickel at that time; it is now a 12 oz. can which if you buy it on Weekends or if you buy it in bigger quantities, so much money doesn’t go to packaging—you essentially can buy the 12 ozs. for not much more than 20 cents. So you are paying not much more than twice the per oz. price of 1936. This is a product that has gotten cheaper and cheaper relative to people’s earning power over the years. And which people love. And in 200 countries, you have the per capita consumption use going up every year for a product that is over 100 years old that dominates the market. That is unbelievable.
1936 年，我第一次用一枚二十五分硬币买了六瓶，再以一瓶五分卖掉。当时是 6.5 盎司的玻璃瓶，还得另外付两分钱押金。那时 6.5 盎司卖五分，现在是一听 12 盎司，如果在周末或大包装购买，包装成本更低，基本只需二十多美分就能买到 12 盎司。也就是说，你现在每盎司支付的价格不过是 1936 年的两倍多一点。多年来，相对于人们的收入水平，这款产品实际上越来越便宜，而且人们喜爱它。在 200 个国家里，这种已有百年历史、占据主导地位的产品，人均消费量每年都在增长。这令人难以置信。
One thing that people don’t understand is one thing that makes this product worth 10s and 10s of billions of dollars is one simple fact about really all colas, but we will call it Coca-Cola for the moment. It happens to be a name that I like. Cola has no taste memory. You can drink one of these at 9 O’clock, 10 O’clock, 1 O’clock and 5 O’clock. The one at 5 o’clock will taste as good to you as the one you drank early in the morning, you can’t do that with Cream Soda, Root Beer, Orange, Grape. All of those things accumulate on you. Most foods and beverages accumulate; you get sick of them after a while. And if you eat See’s Candy—we get these people who go to work for us at See’s Candy and the first day they go crazy, but after a week they are eating the same amount as if they were buying it, because chocolate accumulates on you. There is no taste memory to Cola and that means you get people around the world who will be heavy users—who will drink five a day, or for Diet Coke, 7 or even 8 a day. They will never do that with other products. So you get this incredible per capita consumption. The average person in this part of the world or maybe a little north of here drinks 64 ozs. of liquid a day. You can have 64 ozs. of that be Coke and you will not get fed up with Coke if you like it to start with in the least. But if you do that with anything else; if you eat just one product all day, you will get a little sick of it after a while.
人们不太明白，可口可乐等可乐饮料之所以价值数百亿美元，关键在于一个简单事实——这里先以可口可乐为例，因为我喜欢这个名字：可乐没有“味觉记忆”。你可以在早上九点、十点、下午一点、五点各喝一罐，下午五点那罐的味道仍然和早上第一罐一样好；而奶油汽水、根汁啤、橙味或葡萄汽水做不到这一点。这些饮料会让味觉“累积”，大多数食物和饮品都是如此，吃久了会腻。即便是喜诗糖果也是如此——新员工第一天会疯狂吃巧克力，但一周后就和平常买糖时吃得一样多，因为巧克力味道会累积。可乐却没有味觉记忆，所以全球会出现大量“重度用户”，一天可以喝五罐，可口可乐零度甚至可达七八罐，而其他饮品没人会这样喝。于是可口可乐的单位人均消费量惊人。本地区乃至更北一些，人均每日饮液约 64 盎司；如果这 64 盎司全部是可乐，只要你本来就喜欢可乐，也完全不会感到厌倦。但任何其他单一食品若整天进食，你迟早都会觉得腻。
It is a huge factor. So today over 1 billion of Coca-Cola product servings will be sold in the world and that will grow year by year. It will grow in every country virtually, and it will grow on a per capita basis. And twenty years from now it will grow a lot faster internationally than in the U.S., so I really like that market better, because there is more growth there over time. But it will hurt them in the short term right now, but that doesn’t mean anything. Coca-Cola went public in 1919; the stock sold for \$40 per share. The Chandler family bought the whole business for \$2,000 back in the late 1880s. So now he goes public in 1919, \$40 per share. One year later it is selling for \$19 per share. It has gone down 50% in one year. You might think it is some kind of disaster and you might think sugar prices increased and the bottlers were rebellious. And a whole bunch of things. You can always find reasons that weren't the ideal moment to buy it. Years later you would have seen the Great Depression, WW II and sugar rationing and thermonuclear weapons and the whole thing—there is always a reason.
这是一项巨大优势。因此今天全球将售出逾十亿份可口可乐产品，并且年年增长；几乎每个国家都会增长，人均消费也会增长。二十年后，可口可乐在国际市场的增速将远快于美国，所以我更喜欢海外市场，因为长期增长潜力更大。短期内当然会受挫，但那无关紧要。可口可乐于 1919 年上市，发行价每股 40 美元；早在 1880 年代末，钱德勒家族仅用 2000 美元买下整家公司。1919 年上市后，一年内股价跌到 19 美元，跌幅 50%。当时你可能认为这是灾难，怪糖价上涨、装瓶商闹事等，总能找到“不该买”的理由。其后又有大萧条、二战、糖配给、核武阴影……永远都有理由不买。
But in the end if you had bought one share at \$40 per share and reinvested the dividends, it would be worth \$5 million now (\$40 compounding at 14.63% for 86 years!). That factor so overrides anything else. If you are right about the business you will make a lot of money. The timing part of it is very tricky thing so I don’t worry about any given event if I got a wonderful business what it does next year or something of the sort. Price controls have been in this country at various times and that has fouled up even the best of businesses. I wouldn’t be able to raise prices Dec 31st on See’s Candy. But that doesn’t make it a lousy business if that happens to happen, because you are not going to have price controls forever. We had price controls in the early 70s.
可最终，如果你当年以 40 美元买入一股并把股息再投资，如今市值将达 500 万美元（40 美元按 14.63% 复利 86 年的结果）。这一因素足以战胜其他一切。如果你对一门生意判断正确，终会大赚。择时极其困难，所以当我拥有一家优秀企业时，不会担心明年发生什么。这个国家曾多次实施价格管制，连最好的企业也被牵累；如果 12 月 31 日我无法给喜诗糖果涨价，那也不会让它变成差生意，因为价格管制不会永远存在——上世纪 70 年代初我们就经历过价格管制。
The wonderful business—you can figure what will happen, you can’t figure out when it will happen. You don’t want to focus too much on when but you want to focus on what. If you are right about what, you don’t have to worry about when very much.
对于一家卓越企业，你可以判断“会发生什么”，却难预测“何时发生”。不要过度关注时间点，而要关注事件本身；只要方向正确，就无需太担忧时点。
Question: What about your business mistakes?
问题：那您的业务失误呢？
Buffett: How much time do you have? The interesting thing about investments for me and my partner, Charlie Munger, the biggest mistakes have not been mistakes of commission, but of omission. They are where we knew enough about the business to do something and where, for one reason or another, sat they're sucking out thumbs instead of doing something. And so we have passed up things where we could have made billions and billions of dollars from things we understood, forget about things we don’t understand. The fact I could have made billions of dollars from Microsoft doesn’t mean anything because I never could understand Microsoft. But if I can make billions out of healthcare stocks, then I should make it. And I didn’t when the Clinton health care program was proposed and they all went in the tank. We should have made a ton of money out of that because I could understand it. And didn’t make it.
巴菲特：你有多少时间听我说？对我和我的合伙人查理·芒格来说，投资中最有趣的是，我们最大的错误不是行动失误，而是遗漏失误。也就是说，我们本来足够了解某个业务、应该出手，却因种种原因只是“吮着大拇指”什么也没做。结果我们错过了那些本可赚几十亿美元的机会——而且是我们懂得的生意，更别提那些我们不懂的。比如说，我本可以在微软上赚上几十亿美元，但那并不算错，因为我从未真正理解微软。可如果我能够在医疗保健股上赚几十亿，那我就该去赚；当年克林顿医改方案提出、医疗板块全线下挫时，我本应大赚一笔，因为那是我能看懂的，却没有行动。
I should have made a ton of money out of Fannie Mae back the mid-1980s, but I didn’t do it. Those are billion dollar mistakes or multi-billion dollar mistakes that generally accepted accounting principles don’t pick up. The mistakes you see. I made a mistake when I bought US Air Preferred some years ago. I had a lot of money around. I make mistakes when I get cash. Charlie tells me to go to a bar instead. Don’t hang around the office. But I hang around the office and I have money in my pocket, I do something dumb. It happens every time. So I bought this thing. Nobody made me buy it. I now have an 800 number I call every time I think about buying a stock in an airline. I say, “I am Warren and I am an air-aholic.” They try to talk me down, “Keep talking don’t do anything rash.” Finally I got over it. But I bought it. And it looked like we would lose all our money in it. And we came very close to losing all our money in it. You can say we deserved to lose our money it.
我在上世纪八十年代中期本可以从房利美大赚一笔，但我没有去做。这些都是十亿、甚至数十亿美元级别的失误，一般会计准则压根儿反映不出来。我曾在若干年前买过美国航空优先股，那也是个错误。当时手头现金很多，我一有现金就容易犯错。查理劝我去酒吧别呆办公室，可我偏偏留在办公室，兜里揣着钱就干蠢事，每次都是如此。于是我买了那玩意儿，没人逼我买。现在每当我想买航空股，就拨一个 800 热线，自报家门说：“我是沃伦，我对航空上瘾。”那边就劝我：“继续聊，别冲动。”好不容易戒掉了。但我还是买了，而且一度眼看要血本无归，确实差点亏个精光——可以说，这钱亏得不冤。
We bought it because it was an attractive security. But it was not in an attractive industry. I did the same thing in Salomon. I bought an attractive security in a business I wouldn’t have bought the equity in. So you could say that is one form of mistake. Buying something because you like the terms, but you don’t like the business that well. I have done that in the past and will probably do that again. The bigger mistakes are the ones of omission. Back when I had \$10,000 I put \$2,000 of it into a Sinclair Service Station which I lost, so the opportunity cost on that money is about \$6 billion right now-- fairly big mistakes. It makes me feel good when my Berkshire goes down, because the cost of my Sinclair Station goes down too. My 20% opportunity cost. I will say this, it is better to learn from other people’s mistakes as much as possible. But we don’t spend any time looking back at Berkshire. I have a partner, Charlie Munger; we have been pals for forty years—never had an argument. We disagree on things a lot but we don’t have arguments about it.
买它是因为证券条款很诱人，可行业却不诱人。我在所罗门也犯过同样的错：在一家我根本不会买普通股的公司里，却买了条件诱人的证券。这是一种错误：因为喜欢条款而买下它，却并不那么喜欢这门生意。我过去干过，将来大概还会干。更大的错误仍是遗漏。当年我只有一万美元，却拿两千美元去投辛克莱加油站并亏光，如今这笔钱的机会成本大约是六十亿美元——误差可不小。所以当伯克希尔股价下跌时我反倒觉得安慰，因为辛克莱加油站的机会成本也减少了 20%。尽量从别人的错误中学习当然更好。但在伯克希尔我们从不回头看。我和查理·芒格合作四十年，从未吵过架；我们常常意见不同，却从不争论。
We never look back. We just figure there is so much to look forward to that there is no sense thinking of what we might have done. It just doesn’t make any difference. You can only live life forward. You can learn something perhaps from the mistakes, but the big thing to do is to stick with the businesses you understand. So if there is a generic mistake outside your circle of competence like buying something that somebody tips you on or something of the sort. In an area you know nothing about, you should learn something from that which is to stay with what you can figure out yourself. You really want your decision making to be by looking in the mirror. Saying to yourself, “I am buying 100 shares of General Motors at \$55 because……..” It is your responsibility if you are buying it. There’s gotta be a reason and if you can’t state the reason, you shouldn’t buy it. If it is because someone told you about it at a cocktail party, not good enough. It can’t be because of the volume or a reason like the chart looks good. It has to be a reason to buy the business. That we stick to pretty carefully. That is one of the things Ben Graham taught me.
我们从不回头。我们认为未来还有太多事情值得期待，没必要去想“本可以怎样”。那根本无关紧要，人生只能向前。你或许能从错误中学点东西，但最重要的是坚持做自己懂的生意。如果有一种通用错误发生在你的能力圈之外——比如听人推荐去买你完全不了解的东西——那么你应该吸取的教训就是：只做自己能看懂的。你的决策应该面对镜子进行，自问：“我以 55 美元买 100 股通用汽车，因为……”既然是你买，就得有理由；如果说不出理由，就不该买。如果只是因为鸡尾酒会上有人提到，远远不够；也不能因为成交量大、图形好看就买，而必须有买下这门生意的理由。我们对此坚持得非常严格。这正是本·格雷厄姆教给我的核心之一。
从错误中总结经验有点扯，能力圈以外的错误没什么好总结的。
Question: The current tenuous economic situation and interest rates? Where are we going?
问题：当前经济局势脆弱、利率走势如何？我们将何去何从？
Buffett: I don’t think about the macro stuff. What you really want to in investments is figure out what is important and knowable. If it is unimportant and unknowable, you forget about it. What you talk about is important but, in my view, it is not knowable. Understanding Coca-Cola is knowable or Wrigley’s or Eastman Kodak. You can understand those businesses that are knowable. Whether it turns out to be important depends where your valuation leads you and the firm’s price and all that. But we have never not bought or bought a business because of any Macro feeling of any kind because it doesn’t make any difference. Let’s say in 1972 when we bought See’s Candy, I think Nixon put on the price controls a little bit later, but so what! We would have missed a chance to buy something for \$25 million that is producing \$60 million pre-tax now. We don’t want to pass up the chance to do something intelligent because of some prediction about something we are no good on anyway. So we don’t read or listen to in relation to macro factors at all. The typical investment counselor organization goes out and they bring out their economist and they trot him out and he gives you this big macro picture. And they start working from there on down. In our view that is nonsense.
巴菲特：我从不思考宏观问题。投资真正要做的是弄清哪些事情既重要又可知；若既不重要也不可知，就该抛诸脑后。你提到的问题固然重要，但在我看来并不可知。可口可乐、箭牌或伊士曼柯达是可知的——你能理解这些业务，而能否重要取决于你的估值、股价等因素。但我们从未因为任何宏观感受而买或不买一家企业，因为那根本无关紧要。就拿 1972 年收购喜诗糖果来说，我记得后来尼克松还实施了物价管制，但那又怎样？若因此退缩，我们就会错失以 2500 万美元买下一家如今税前赚 6000 万的公司。我们不想因对自己并不擅长的宏观预测而放弃做明智之事。所以我们根本不读、不听宏观因素。典型的投资顾问机构会请出经济学家给你宏观蓝图，再自上而下操作；在我们看来，这毫无意义。
If Alan Greenspan was on the one side of me and Robert Rubin on the other side and they both were whispering in my ear exactly what they were going to do the next twelve months, it wouldn’t make any difference to me what I would pay for Executive Jet or General Re or anything else I do.
即便艾伦·格林斯潘坐我一边、罗伯特·鲁宾坐另一边，两人轮流在我耳边低语未来十二个月的政策动向，我为 Executive Jet、通用再保或其他任何业务支付的价格也不会因此改变。
Question: What is the benefit of being an out-of-towner as opposed to being on Wall Street?
问题：与身处华尔街相比，身居外地有什么好处？
Buffett: I worked on Wall Street for a couple of years and I have my best friends on both coasts. I like seeing them. I get ideas when I go there. But the best way to think about investments is to be in a room with no one else and just think. And if that doesn’t work, nothing else is going to work. The disadvantage of being in any type of market environment like Wall Street in the extreme is that you get over-stimulated. You think you have to do something every day. The Chandler family paid \$2,000 for this company (Coke). You don’t have to do much else if you pick one of those. And the trick then is not to do anything else. Even not to sell at 1919, which the family did later on. So what you are looking for is some way to get one good idea a year. And then ride it to its full potential and that is very hard to do in an environment where people are shouting prices back and forth every five minutes and shoving reports in front of your nose and all that. Wall Street makes its money on activity. You make your money on inactivity.
巴菲特：我曾在华尔街工作过几年，东西海岸都有我最好的朋友。我喜欢去见他们，也能从那儿获得一些灵感。但思考投资的最佳方式就是一个人待在房间里静静思考，如果这样都想不通，其他办法也无济于事。像华尔街这种极端的市场环境的缺点在于过度刺激，你会觉得自己每天都得做点什么。钱德勒家族当年花两千美元买下可口可乐，如果你抓到那样的机会，几乎再无需多做其他操作，诀窍就是之后什么都别做，甚至别像他们后来那样在 1919 年卖出。所以你要寻找的是每年拿到一个好主意，然后把它的潜力完全发挥出来；可在一个每五分钟就有人高喊报价、不断把报告塞到你面前的环境里，这事极难做到。华尔街靠“忙”赚钱，你却要靠“不忙”赚钱。
If everyone in this room trades their portfolio around every day with every other person, you will all end up broke. And the intermediary will end up with all the money. If you all own stock in a group of average businesses and just sit here for the next 50 years, you will end up with a fair amount of money and your broker will be broke. He is like the Doctor who gets paid on how often to get you to change pills. If he gave you one pill that cures you the rest of your life, he would make one sale, one transaction and that is it. But if he can convince you that changing pills every day is the way to great health, it will be great for him and the prescriptionists. You won’t be any healthier and you will be a lot worse off financially. You want to stay away from any environment that stimulates activity. And Wall Street would have the effective of doing that.
如果在座每个人每天都和别人频繁调换手中的组合，你们最终都会破产，而中介机构会拿走所有的钱。相反，如果你们都持有一篮子普通公司的股票，然后在接下来的 50 年里什么也不做，你们最终会赚到不少钱，而你的经纪人会破产。经纪人就像按换药次数收费的医生；如果他给你一颗终身见效的药，他只能做一笔生意、完成一次交易就完了。但如果他能说服你每天换药才有益健康，那他和药剂师就能大赚一笔，而你的健康并不会因此更好，财务状况还会更糟。所以你应远离任何鼓励频繁操作的环境，而华尔街正是这样一种环境。
When I went back to Omaha, I would go back with a whole list of companies I wanted to check out and I would get my money’s worth out of those trips, but then I would go back to Omaha and think about it.
我每次离开华尔街回到奥马哈时，都会带回一大串想要研究的公司名单，那趟行程的价值也就到此为止；接着我回到奥马哈，再静下心来思考。
Question: How to evaluate Berkshire or MSFT if it does not pay dividends?
问题：如果伯克希尔或微软都不分红，应该如何评估它们？
Buffett: It won’t pay any dividends either. That is a promise I can keep. All you get with Berkshire, you stick it in your safe deposit box and then every year you go down and fondle it. You take it out and then you put it back. There is enormous psychic reward in that. Don’t underestimate it.
巴菲特：它也不会发任何股息——这一点我可以保证。拥有伯克希尔的全部意义，就是把股票锁进保险箱，每年取出来抚摸一下，再放回去。这能带来巨大的精神满足，千万别小看这种满足感。
The real question is if we can retain dollar bills and turn them into more than a dollar at a decent rate. That is what we try to do. And Charlie Munger and I have all our money in it to do that. That is all we will get paid for doing. We won’t take any options or we won’t take any salaries to speak of. But that is what we are trying to do. It gets harder all the time. The more money we manage the harder it is to do that. We would do way better percentage wise with Berkshire if it was 1/100th the present size. It is run for its owners, but it isn’t run to give them dividends because so far every dollar that we earned or could have paid out, we have turned into more than a dollar. It is worth more than a dollar to keep it. Therefore, it would be silly to pay it out. Even if everyone was tax-free that owned it. It would have been a mistake to pay dividends at Berkshire. Because so far the dollar bills retained have turned into more than a dollar. But there is no guarantee that happens in the future. At some point the game runs out on that. That is what the business is about. Nothing else about the business do we judge ourselves by. We don’t judge it by the size of its home office building or anything the like the number of people working there. We have 12 people working at headquarters and 45,000 employees at Berkshire, 12 people at HQ and 3,500 sq ft. and we won’t change it.
真正的问题是：我们是否能把留下的一美元以合适的收益率变成超过一美元的钱。这正是我们努力做的事情。查理·芒格和我把全部资金都投在里面，我们的报酬也仅此而已——既不拿期权，也几乎不领薪水。但这件事越来越难，资金越大，做到这一点就越困难。如果伯克希尔规模只有现在的百分之一，我们的回报率会高得多。公司是为股东运营的，却不是为了分红，因为迄今为止，我们每留下一美元，就能把它变成超过一美元，留在公司比分出去更有价值，所以发放股息反而愚蠢。即使所有股东都免税也是如此——过去若是派息就错了，因为保留下来的每一美元都增值了。但未来并无保证，终有一天这局游戏会结束。这就是我们的经营核心，我们不会以总部大楼的大小或员工数量来评判自己。伯克希尔共有 4.5 万名员工，总部只有 12 个人、3500 平方英尺，这一点永远不会变。
But we will judge ourselves by the performance of the company and that is the only way we will get paid. But believe me, it is a lot harder than it used to be.
我们只用公司业绩来检验自己，那也是我们唯一的报酬来源。但请相信，现在要做到这一点比过去难多了。
Question: What tells you when an investment has reached its full potential?
问题：是什么告诉您一项投资已达到其全部潜力？
Buffett: I don’t buy Coke with the idea it will be out of gas in 10 years or 50 years. There could be something that happens by I think the chances are almost nil. So what we really want to do is buy businesses that we would be happy to own forever. It is the same way I fell about people who buy Berkshire. I want people who buy Berkshire to plan to hold it forever. They may not for one reason or the other but I want them at the time they buy it to think they are buying a business they are going to want to own forever.
巴菲特：我买可口可乐时并不会认为它在十年或五十年后就会江郎才尽。当然可能会发生什么事，但我认为概率微乎其微。所以，我们真正想做的是购买那些我们乐于永远持有的企业。我对购买伯克希尔的投资者也持同样态度。我希望买入伯克希尔的人计划一直持有它。也许他们最终会因某些原因卖出，但我希望他们在买入时认为自己买的是一项将终身拥有的生意。
And I don’t say that is the only way to buy things. It is just the group to join me because I don’t want to have a changing group all the time. I measure Berkshire by how little activity there is in it. If I had a church and I was the preacher and half the congregation left every Sunday. I wouldn’t say, “It is marvelous to have all this liquidity among my members.”
我并不是说这就是买股票的唯一方法；这只是希望加入到我这边的投资者方式，因为我不想股东群体经常更换。我衡量伯克希尔的一条标准就是看它的交易活动有多少。如果我是一名牧师，而每个星期日都有一半的教众离开，我不会说：“成员之间的流动性真是太棒了。”
Terrific turnover… I would rather go to church where all the seats are filled every Sunday by the same people. Well that is the way we look at the businesses we buy. We want to buy something virtually forever. And we can’t find a lot of those. And back when I started, I had way more ideas than money so I was just constantly having to sell what was the least attractive stock in order to buy something I just discovered that looked even cheaper. But that is not our problem really now. So we hope we are buying businesses that we are just as happy holding five years from now as now. And if we ever found a huge acquisition, then maybe we would have to sell something. Maybe to make that acquisition but that would be a very pleasant problem to have.
高换手率……我更愿意去那种每个星期日都是同一批人坐满座位的教堂。我们看待所购企业也是如此——想要几乎永远持有的生意。但这类企业并不多。早年我点子多、资金少，只能不断卖掉最不吸引人的股票去买新发现的更便宜股票。现在这已不再是问题。所以我们希望买下的企业，在五年后仍像今天一样让我们满意。如果将来出现一次巨额收购，我们也许会卖掉某些持股来完成收购，不过那将是一个令人愉快的难题。
We never buy something with a price target in mind. We never buy something at 30 saying if it goes to 40 we’ll sell it or 50 or 60 or 100. We just don’t do it that way. Anymore than when we buy a private business like See’s Candy for \$25 million. We don’t ever say if we ever get an offer of \$50 million for this business we will sell it. That is not the way to look at a business.
我们从不带着价格目标买东西。我们不会在 30 美元买入，只为了涨到 40、50、60 或 100 美元就卖出。我们根本不是那样操作的。就像当初用 2500 万美元收购喜诗糖果，我们也从未说过将来有人出价 5000 万就卖——看待企业不该这样。
The way to look at a business is this going to keep producing more and more money over time? And if the answer to that is yes, you don’t need to ask any more questions.
正确的方式是问：这家企业能否持续不断地创造越来越多的利润？如果答案是肯定的，就无需再问其他问题了。
Questions: How did you decide to invest in Salomon?
问题：您是如何决定投资所罗门兄弟的？
Buffett: Salomon like I said, I went into that because it was a 9% security in 1987 in September 1987 and the Dow was up 35% and we sold a lot of stuff. And I had a lot of money around and it looked to me like we would never get to do anything, so I took an attractive security form in a business I would never buy the common stock of. I went in because of that and I think generally it is a mistake. It worked out OK finally on that. But it is not what I should have been doing. I either should have waited in which case I could have bought more Coca-Cola a year later or thereabouts or I should have even bought Coke at the prices it was selling at even though it was selling at a pretty good price at the time. So that was a mistake.
巴菲特：就像我说过的，我买入所罗门兄弟，是因为 1987 年 9 月它发行了一只 9% 的高收益证券，而当时道指已上涨 35%，我们也抛售了不少持股，手头有很多现金，似乎无处可投。于是我在一家我绝不会买其普通股的公司里，选择了一个条件诱人的证券形式。我这么做，事后看来基本算是个错误。虽然最终还算收场不错，但那并非我应该做的事。我本该等待——大约一年后我就能买到更多可口可乐；或者即便当时可口可乐价格不低，我也应该买可口可乐。总之，那是一次失误。
On Long-Term Capital that is—we have owned other businesses associated with securities over the years-–One of them is arbitrage. I’ve done arbitrage for 45 years and Graham did it for 30 years before that. That is a business unfortunately I have to be near a phone for. I have to really run it (arbitrage operations) out of the office myself, because it requires being more market-attuned because I don’t want to do that anymore. So unless a really big arbitrage situation came along that I understood, I won’t be doing much of that. But I’ve probably participated in about 300 arbitrage situations at least in my life maybe more. It was a good business, a perfectly good business.
谈到长期资本管理——这些年我们也涉足过其他与证券相关的业务，其中之一就是套利。我做套利已 45 年，格雷厄姆在我之前做了 30 年。这门生意可惜得紧贴电话、亲自坐镇办公室，时刻关注市场，我如今已不想再这样操劳。除非出现一个我看得懂且规模很大的套利机会，否则我不会再频繁参与。但我一生中至少参与过 300 桩套利，也可能更多。那是一门很不错、完全正当的生意。
LTCM has a bunch of positions, they have tons of positions, but the top ten are probably 90% of the money that is at risk, and I know something about those ten positions. I don’t know everything about them by a long shot, but I know enough that I would feel OK at a big discount going in and we had the staying power to hold it out. We might lose money on something on that, but the odds are with us. That is a game that I understand. There are few other positions we have that are not that big because they can’t get that big. But they could involve yield curve relationships or on the run/off the run governments that are just things you learn over time being around securities markets. They are not the base of our business. Probably on average, they have accounted for ½ - ¾ a percentage point of our return a year. They are little pluses you get for actually having been around a long time.
LTCM 拥有一大堆头寸，但前十名恐怕占了风险资金的 90%，而那十个头寸我多少了解一些。虽然称不上了如指掌，但了解得足以让我在大幅折价时敢于介入，并有实力长期持有。我们也可能在某些点位亏钱，但整体胜算在我们这边。这是一场我能看懂的游戏。我们还有少量其他仓位，规模很小，因为它们本来就不可能做大，可能涉及收益率曲线关系、在跑/非在跑国债价差之类——这些都是多年来在证券市场摸爬滚打学来的。它们并非我们业务的核心，平均每年大概贡献 0.5—0.75 个百分点的回报，是多年经验带来的小额加分。
Arbitrage
套利
One of the first arbitrages I did involved a company that offered cocoa beans in exchange for their stock. That was in 1955. I bought the stock, turned in the stock, got warehouse certificates for cocoa beans and they happen to be a different type but there was a basis differential and I sold them. That was something I was around at the time, so I learned about it. There hasn’t been a cocoa deal since. 40 odd years, I have been waiting for a cocoa deal. I haven’t seen it. It is there in my memory if it ever comes along. LTCM is that on a big scale.
我最早做的一笔套利之一，是一家用可可豆换取自家股票的公司。那是 1955 年。我买入股票，上交股票后拿到可可豆仓单，恰好是另一种可可豆，两种之间存在基差，我就把豆子卖了。这件事发生时我人在现场，因此我学到了这一招。此后四十多年再没出现过可可豆套利，我一直等着，都没等到。但这段经历仍在我脑海，若它再度出现我会记得。长期资本管理就是把这种套利放大到很大规模而已。
Question: Diversification?
问题：多元化？
Buffett: The question is about diversification. I have a dual answer to that. If you are not a professional investor. If your goal is not to manage money to earn a significantly better return than the world, then I believe in extreme diversification. I believe 98% - 99% who invest should extensively diversify and not trade, so that leads them to an index fund type of decision with very low costs. All they are going to do is own part of America. And they have made a decision that owning a part of America is worthwhile. I don’t quarrel with that at all. That is the way they should approach it unless they want to bring an intensity to the game to make a decision and start evaluating businesses. Once you are in the businesses of evaluating businesses and you decide that you are going to bring the effort and intensity and time involved to get that job done, then I think diversification is a terrible mistake to any degree. I got asked that question the other day at SunTrust. If you really know businesses, you probably shouldn’t own more than six of them.
巴菲特：问题是关于多元化的。我对此有两种回答。如果你不是职业投资者，如果你的目标并不是要取得显著超越市场的回报，那么我主张极度分散投资。我认为 98%-99% 的投资者都应广泛分散且少交易，因此他们应当选择成本极低的指数基金。他们所做的只是拥有美国的一部分，而他们已决定拥有美国的一部分是值得的。我对此完全不反对。这就是他们应采取的方式，除非他们愿意投入大量精力来做决定并开始评估企业。一旦你走上评估企业的道路，并决定投入相应的努力、热情和时间去完成这项工作，那么我认为在任何程度上的分散投资都是一个可怕的错误。前几天在 SunTrust 有人问我同样的问题。如果你真的了解企业，你大概不应该持有超过六家公司的股票。
If you can identify six wonderful businesses, that is all the diversification you need. And you will make a lot of money. And I can guarantee that going into a seventh one instead of putting more money into your first one is gotta be a terrible mistake. Very few people have gotten rich on their seventh best idea. But a lot of people have gotten rich with their best idea. So I would say for anyone working with normal capital who really knows the businesses they have gone into, six is plenty, and I probably have half of what I like best. I don’t diversify personally. All the people I’ve known that have done well with the exception of Walter Schloss, Walter diversifies a lot. I call him Noah, he has two of everything.
如果你能找到六家出色的企业，那就足够分散了，你将赚很多钱。我可以保证，去买第七家而不是把更多资金投入到最初那几家，将是一个严重的错误。很少有人靠自己排名第七的好点子致富，但很多人靠他们最好的点子致富。所以我会说，对于那些资金规模正常、且真正了解自己所投资企业的人来说，持有六家就足够了，而我个人大概只持有其中最喜欢的一半。我本人不做分散投资。在我认识的成功人士中，除了沃尔特·施洛斯之外，其他人都不分散。沃尔特倒是分散很多，我叫他诺亚，他什么都要配两份。
Question: How do you distinguish the Cokes of the world from the Proctor & Gambles of this world?
问题：如何区分世界上的可口可乐公司与宝洁公司？
Buffett: Well, P\&G is a very, very good business with strong distribution capability and lots of brand names, but if you ask me and I am going to go away for twenty years and put all my family’s net worth into one business, would I rather have P\&G or Coke? Actually P\&G is more diversified among product line, but I would feel more sure of Coke than P\&G. I wouldn’t be unhappy if someone told me I had to own P\&G during the twenty-year period. I mean that would be in my top 5 percent. Because they are not going to get killed, but I would feel better about the unit growth and pricing power of a Coke over twenty or thirty years.
巴菲特：嗯，宝洁是一家非常非常好的企业，拥有强大的分销能力和众多品牌。但如果你问我：我要离开二十年，并把全家的净资产投进一家公司，我会选宝洁还是可口可乐？实际上，宝洁的产品线更为多元化，可我对可口可乐的信心更足。要是有人告诉我，在这二十年里必须持有宝洁，我也不会介意——它肯定排进我的前 5%。因为宝洁不会轻易出局，但在二三十年的单位销量增长和定价能力方面，我对可口可乐感觉更好。
Right now the pricing power might be tough, but you think a billion servings a day for a penny each or \$10 million per day. We own 8% of that, so that is \$800,000 per day for Berkshire Hathaway. You could get another penny out of the stuff. It doesn’t seem impossible. I think it is worth a penny more. Right now it would be a mistake to try and get it in most markets. But over time, Coke will make more per serving than it does now. Twenty years from now I guarantee they will make more per serving, and they will be selling a whole lot more servings. I don't know how many or how much more, but I know that.
眼下要提价或许不易，但想想看——一天 10 亿份饮料，每份只涨一分钱，就是日增 1,000 万美元。我们持有 8%，伯克希尔每天就能多赚 80 万美元。再多拿一分钱并非不可能，我认为它至少值这多出的那一分钱。现在在大多数市场这么做可能不明智，但从长期看，可口可乐每份的盈利会比现在高。二十年后，我保证他们每份都会赚得更多，而且销量也会大幅增长。我不知道具体会增加多少，但我确定会增加。
P\&G's main products--I don't think they have the kind of dominance, and they don't have the kind of unit growth, but they are good businesses. I would not be unhappy if you told me that I had to put my family's net worth into P\&G and that was the only stock I would own. I might prefer some other name, but there are not 100 other names I would prefer.
宝洁的主要产品——我认为它们没有那种绝对主导地位，单位销量也没有那种增长潜力，但它们依旧是好生意。如果你告诉我必须把家族的净资产全部投进宝洁这唯一的股票，我也不会不高兴。我或许会更偏爱其他几个名字，但这样的名字绝不会有 100 个。
Question: Would you buy McDonald’s and go away for twenty years?
问题：如果让您买入麦当劳然后离开二十年，您会这样做吗？
Buffett: McDonald’s has a lot of things going for it, particularly abroad again. Thee position abroad in many countries is stronger than it is here. It is a tougher business over time. People don't want to be eating--exception to the kids when they are giving away beanie babies or something--at McDonald’s every day. If people drink five Cokes a day, they probably will drink five of them tomorrow. The fast food business is tougher than that but if you had to pick one hand to have in the fast food business, which is going to be a huge business worldwide, you would pick McDonald’s. I mean it has the strongest position.
巴菲特：麦当劳有许多优势，尤其是在海外市场。它在许多国家的海外地位甚至比在美国本土还要强。不过从长远看，这仍是一门较为艰难的生意。人们并不会每天都去麦当劳吃饭——除非对孩子来说，他们在派送豆豆娃之类的赠品。如果一个人每天喝五罐可乐，他明天大概率还会再喝五罐。快餐业可不像那样简单，但如果你必须在全球快餐业这块巨大蛋糕里挑选一个最强的选手，你会选麦当劳。毕竟它占据着最强势的地位。
It doesn't win taste test with adults. It does very well with children and it does fine with adults, but it is not like it is a clear winner. And it is gotten into the game in recent years of being more price promotional--you remember the experiment a year ago or so. It has gotten more dependent on that rather than selling the product by itself. I like the product by itself. I feel better about Gillette if people buy the Mach 3 because they like the Mach 3 than if they get a Beanie Baby with it. So I think fundamentally it is a stronger product if that is the case. And that is probably the case.
在成人的口味测试中，麦当劳并非夺冠者。它在孩子群体中表现非常好，在成人中则还算可以，但并不是那种一骑绝尘的赢家。近年来它越来越依赖价格促销——你们还记得大约一年前的那个实验吧？它对促销的依赖度上升，而不是单纯依靠产品本身。我更喜欢产品本身具备吸引力的模式。如果人们购买吉列 Mach 3 是因为喜欢这款剃须刀，而不是因为得到一只豆豆娃赠品，我会更有信心。若事实如此，那从根本上说产品就更强大；而情况大概也确实如此。
We own a lot of Gillette and you can sleep pretty well at night if you think of a couple billion men with their hair growing on their faces. It is growing all night while you sleep. Women have two legs, it is even better. So it beats counting sheep. And those are the kinds of business…(you look for). But what type of promotion am I going to put out there against Burger King next month or what if they sign up Disney and I don't get Disney? I like the products that stand alone absent price promotion or appeals although you can build a very good business based on that. And McDonald’s is a terrific business. It is not as good a business as Coke. There really hardly are any. It is a very good business and if you bet on one company in that field bet on (garbled) McDonald’s. We bought Dairy Queen a while back that is why I am plugging it shamelessly here.
我们持有大量吉列股票——当你想到世界上有几十亿男性的胡须在夜里不停生长时，你会睡得很香；女性还有两条腿，就更妙了，比数羊管用。这就是我们寻找的那类生意。但如果下个月我要针对汉堡王搞什么促销，或者他们和迪士尼合作我却签不到迪士尼怎么办？我更喜欢无需价格促销或花哨噱头也能站得住脚的产品，尽管靠促销也能做成一家很不错的公司。麦当劳就是一家出色的企业，但它不如可口可乐那么好——实际上几乎没有哪家公司能比得上可口可乐。不过麦当劳依然非常优秀，如果要在快餐领域押注一家，那就押麦当劳吧。前阵子我们收购了 Dairy Queen，所以我才在这里毫不害臊地为它打广告。
Question: What do I think about the utility industry?
问题：我对公用事业行业怎么看？
Buffett: I have thought about that a lot because you can put big money in it. I have even thought of buying the entire businesses. There is a fellow in Omaha actually that has done a little of that through Cal Energy. But I don't quite understand the game in terms of how it is going to develop with deregulation. I can see how it destroys a lot of value through the high cost producer once they are not protected by a monopoly territory.
巴菲特：我一直在认真思考这个行业，因为它能容纳巨额资金。我甚至想过直接收购整个企业。在奥马哈确实有人通过 Cal Energy 做过类似的尝试。但我还不太明白，在放松管制后这盘棋会如何发展。我能看到，一旦高成本生产商失去垄断地域的保护，价值就会被大量摧毁。
I don't for sure see who benefits and how much. Obviously the guy with very low cost power or some guy has hydro-power at two cents a KwH has a huge advantage. But how much of that he gets to keep or how extensively he can send that outside his natural territory, I haven't been able to figure that out so I really know what the Industry will look like in ten years. But it is something I think about and if I ever develop any insights that call for action, I will act on them. Because I think I can understand the attractiveness of the product. All the aspects of certainty of users need and the fact it is a bargain and all of that. I understand. I don't understand who is going to make the money in ten years. And that keeps me away.
我还不能确定谁会受益，以及受益多少。显然，拥有极低成本电力的人，或者以每千瓦时两美分的水电发电的人，具有巨大的优势。但他究竟能保留多少利润，或者在多大程度上能把电力输送到自己原有地域之外，我还想不明白，所以我确实不知道十年后行业会是什么样子。但这是我思考的问题，如果我有了足够明确的见解并需要采取行动，我会付诸行动。因为我可以理解这种产品的吸引力——用户需求的确定性，以及它的性价比等等，我都理解。我只是弄不清楚谁在十年后能赚到钱。这让我保持观望。
Whatever the case at Berkshire, the final result for the utility industry may be ominous: Certain utilities might no longer attract the savings of American citizens and will be forced to adopt the public-power model. Nebraska made this choice in the 1930s and there are many public-power operations throughout the country. Eventually, voters, taxpayers and users will decide which model they prefer.
无论伯克希尔如何，电力行业的最终局面或许令人担忧：部分公用事业公司可能再无法吸引美国民众的储蓄，被迫转向公共电力模式。内布拉斯加州在 20 世纪 30 年代便已作此选择，全国也有众多公共电力机构。最终，选民、纳税人和用户将决定他们偏好的模式。
在 20 世纪 30 年代的大萧条时期，内布拉斯加州决定 全面放弃以股东盈利为目的的私营电力公司（private-power systems），转而由公共机构或非营利合作社来拥有和运营电力系统，即采纳 public-power model。
When the dust settles, America’s power needs and the consequent capital expenditure will be staggering. I did not anticipate or even consider the adverse developments in regulatory returns and, along with Berkshire’s two partners at BHE, I made a costly mistake in not doing so.
当尘埃落定时，美国对电力的需求及其引发的资本支出将达到惊人规模。我当初既未预见、更未考虑监管回报的不利变化，与伯克希尔在 BHE 的两位合作伙伴一样，这一忽视让我付出了昂贵的代价。
问题：为什么大盘股跑赢小盘股（1998年）？
Buffett: We don't care if a company is large cap, small cap, middle cap, micro cap. It doesn't make any difference. The only questions that matter to us:
巴菲特：我们并不在乎一家公司的市值规模是大盘股、小盘股、中盘股还是微盘股。这一点没有任何区别。对我们来说，唯一重要的问题是：
• Do we understand the business?
• 我们是否理解这项业务？
• Do we like the people running it?
• 我们是否喜欢公司的管理层？
• And does it sell for a price that is attractive?
• 它的价格是否足够吸引人？
From my personal standpoint running Berkshire now because we got, pro forma for Gen. Re, \$75 to \$80 billion to invest in and I only want to invest in five things, so I am really limited to very big companies. But if I were investing \$100,000, I wouldn't care whether something was large cap or small cap or anything. I would just look for businesses I understood.
从我个人目前管理伯克希尔的角度来看，按与通用再保合并后的备考口径，我们有大约750亿到800亿美元可以投资，而我只想投五个标的，所以实际上只能选择非常大的公司。但如果我只是在投资10万美元，我根本不会在意目标是大盘股还是小盘股。我只会寻找自己理解的业务。
Now, I think, on balance, large cap companies as businesses have done extraordinarily well the last ten years--way better than people anticipated they would do. You really have American businesses earning close to something 20% on equity. And that is something nobody dreamed of and that is being produced by very large companies in aggregate. So you have had this huge revaluation upwards because of lower interest rates and much higher returns on capital. If America business is really a disguised bond that earns 20%, a 20% coupon it is much better than a bond with a 13% coupon. And that has happened with big companies in recent years, whether it is permanent or not is another question. I am skeptical of that. I wouldn't even think about it--except for questions of how much money we run--I wouldn't even think about the size of the business. See's Candy was a \$25 million business when we bought it. If I can find one now, as big as we are, I would love to buy it. It is the certainty of it that counts.
现在回头看，作为企业实体的大盘公司在过去十年表现得异常出色——远超人们的预期。如今美国企业的股本回报率接近20%，这是无人敢想的水平，而这一成绩主要由众多大型公司共同创造。由于利率走低且资本回报率大幅提高，市场对它们进行了巨大重估。如果把美国企业视为一只隐形债券，年息高达20%，当然比票息13%的债券好得多。近几年这种情况发生在大公司身上，但它是否具有持续性仍需观察。我对此持怀疑态度。除了考虑我们管理的资金规模，我甚至不会去想企业规模问题。我们买入 See’s Candy 时，它只是一家2500万美元的企业。如果现在还能找到类似的标的，哪怕我们已这么大，我也乐意收购。关键在于它的确定性。
Question: The securitization of real estate?
问题：房地产证券化？
Buffett: There has been enormous securitization of the debt too of real estate and that is one of the items right now that is really clogging up the capital markets. The mortgage back securities are just not moving, commercial, not residential mortgage backs. But I think you are directing your question at equities probably. The equities, if you leave out the corporate form, have been a lousy way to own equities. You have interjected a corporate income tax into something that people individually have been able to own with a single tax, and to have the normal corporate form you have a double taxation in there. You really don't need it and it takes too much of the return.
巴菲特：房地产债务同样被大量证券化，而这正是目前堵塞资本市场的因素之一。商业性质的抵押贷款支持证券几乎无人问津，住宅按揭支持证券也一样。我想你的问题大概是针对股权层面的。如果不采用公司结构，通过股权来持有房地产一直是糟糕的途径。你把原本只需缴一次税的资产引入公司所得税体系，结果形成双重课税，既没必要又吞噬了过多收益。
REITS have, in effect, created a conduit so you don't get the double taxation, but they also generally have fairly high operating expenses. If you get real estate, let's just say you can buy fairly simple types of real estate at an 8% yield, or thereabouts, and you take away close to 1% to 1.5% by the time you count stock options and everything, it is not a terribly attractive way to own real estate. Maybe the only way a guy with a \$1,000 or \$5,000 can own it but if you have \$1 million or \$10 million, you are better off owning the real estate properties yourself instead of sticking some intermediary in between who will get a sizable piece of the return for himself. So we have found very little in that field.
REITs 在某种程度上提供了避免双重课税的渠道，但它们的运营成本通常也相当高。假设你以 8% 左右的收益率买入一类简单的房地产，扣除股票期权等费用后要减少约 1% 到 1.5%，这种持有方式并不十分吸引人。也许这是只有一两千美元或五千美元的人能够参与的唯一方式；但如果你有一百万或一千万美元，直接拥有房产而不是让中间机构分走大块收益会更好。因此在这一领域我们难得看到令我们兴奋的机会。
You will see an announcement in the next couple of weeks that may belie what I am telling you today. I don't want you to think I am double crossing you up here. But generally speaking we have seen very little in that field that gets us excited. People sometimes get very confused about--they will look at some huge land company, like Texas Pacific Land Trust, which has been around over 100 years and has got a couple of million acres in Texas. And they will sell 1% of their land every year and they will take that (as income? Garbled) and come up with some huge value compared to the market value. But that is nonsense if you really own the property. You can't move. You can't move 50% of the properties or 20% of the properties, it is way worse than an illiquid stock. So you get these, I think, you get some very silly valuations placed on a lot of real estate companies by people who really don't understand what it is like to own one and try to move large quantity of properties.
接下来几周你们可能会看到一则公告，与我今天说的话似乎相矛盾。我并非故意兜圈子；总体而言，这一领域很少有东西能激起我们的兴趣。人们有时会被一些大型土地公司弄得迷糊，例如拥有德州数百万英亩土地、存在逾百年的 Texas Pacific Land Trust。他们每年会卖出 1% 的土地，把这笔（收入？听不清）拿来对比市值，得出一个远高于市场价的巨大价值。但如果你真正拥有这些地产就会发现，那根本行不通。你无法一次性处置 50% 或 20% 的资产，这比流动性差的股票还糟糕。因此，我认为许多人在给房地产公司估值时，完全没有体会到大宗地产交易的难度，从而出现了非常荒唐的估值。
REITS have behaved horribly in this market as you know and it is not at all inconceivable that they become a class that would get so unpopular that they would sell at significant discounts from what you could sell the properties for. And they could get interesting as a class and then the question is whether management would fight you in that process because they would be giving up their income stream for managing things and their interests might run counter to the shareholders on that. I have always wondered about REITS that have managements they say their assets are so wonderful, and they are so cheap and then they (management) go out and sell stock. There is a contradiction in that. They say our stock is very cheap at \$28 and then they sell a lot of stock at \$28 less an underwriting commission. There is a disconnect there. But it is a field we look at.
正如你所知，REITs 在当前市场表现糟糕，完全可能变得极不受欢迎，以至于其股价会远低于资产本身可售出的价格。如果真到那一步，作为一个整体它们可能变得有趣；但问题在于管理层是否会阻挠，因为那意味着他们要放弃管理费收入，其利益可能与股东相冲突。我一直很好奇那些 REITs 的管理层——他们声称资产优质、股价便宜，却又去发行股票。这充满矛盾：他们说 28 美元的股价很便宜，却在扣除承销佣金后大量卖股，二者脱节。不过，这仍然是我们关注的领域。
Charlie and I can understand real estate, and we would be open for very big transactions periodically. If there was a LTCM situation translated to real estate, we would be open to that, the trouble is so many other people would be too that it would unlikely go at a price that would get us really get us excited.
查理和我都懂房地产，也愿意不时参与规模很大的交易。如果房地产领域出现类似 LTCM 的机会，我们也会乐于介入；但问题是愿意出手的人太多，价格很难低到让我们真正感到兴奋。
Question: A down market is good for you?
问题：下跌的市场对你有利吗？
Buffett: I have no idea were the market is going to go. I prefer it going down. But my preferences have nothing to do with it. The market knows nothing about my feelings. That is one of the first things you have to learn about a stock. You buy 100 shares of General Motors (GM). Now all of a sudden you have this feeling about GM. It goes down, you may be mad at it. You may say, "Well, if it just goes up for what I paid for it, my life will be wonderful again." Or if it goes up, you may say how smart you were and how you and GM have this love affair. You have got all these feelings. The stock doesn't know you own it.
巴菲特：我不知道市场会走向何方。我倒更喜欢它下跌，但我的偏好并不会左右市场。市场对我的感受一无所知——这是你必须学习的第一课。你买了100股通用汽车（GM），突然之间就对GM产生情感。股价下跌时，你可能会生气，甚至想：“只要它回到我的买入价，我的生活就会再次美好。”股价上涨时，你又会觉得自己聪明，仿佛与GM陷入爱恋。你对它充满种种情绪，可股票并不知道你拥有它。
The stock just sits there; it doesn't care what you paid or the fact that you own it. Any feeling I have about the market is not reciprocated. I mean it is the ultimate cold shoulder we are talking about here. Practically anybody in this room is probably more likely to be a net buyer of stocks over the next ten years than they are a net seller, so everyone of you should prefer lower prices. If you are a net eater of hamburger over the next ten years, you want hamburger to go down unless you are a cattle producer. If you are going to be a buyer of Coca-Cola and you don't own Coke stock, you hope the price of Coke goes down. You are looking for it to be on sale this weekend at your Supermarket. You want it to be down on the weekends not up on the weekends when you tend the Supermarket.
股票就静静地躺在那里；它既不关心你的买入成本，也不在乎你是否持有它。我对市场的任何感受都得不到回应——这是终极的冷遇。这里的几乎每个人，在未来十年都更可能是股票的净买家而非净卖家，所以你们都应该希望价格走低。如果在未来十年你是汉堡的净消费者，除非你是养牛户，你就希望汉堡价格下跌。如果你要买可口可乐而并未持股，你当然希望可乐价格下跌；就像周末去超市时，你盼着可乐打折，而不是涨价。
The NYSE is one big supermarket of companies. And you are going to be buying stocks, what you want to have happen? You want to have those stocks go down, way down; you will make better buys then. Later on twenty or thirty years from now when you are in a period when you are dis-saving, or when your heirs dis-save for you, then you may care about higher prices. There is Chapter 8 in Graham's Intelligent Investor about the attitude toward stock market fluctuations, that and Chapter 20 on the Margin of Safety are the two most important essays ever written on investing as far as I am concerned. Because when I read Chapter 8 when I was 19, I figured out what I just said but it is obvious, but I didn't figure it out myself. It was explained to me. I probably would have gone another 100 years and still thought it was good when my stocks were going up. We want things to go down, but I have no idea what the stock market is going to do. I never do and I never will. It is not something I think about at all.
纽约证券交易所就像一家巨大的公司超市。既然你要买股票，你希望发生什么？当然是股价下跌，跌得越多越好，这样你才能买得更划算。二三十年后，当你进入“负储蓄”阶段，或当你的继承人为你“负储蓄”时，你才会在意高价。格雷厄姆《聪明的投资者》第8章讨论了对待股市波动的态度，加上第20章的安全边际论，这两篇文章在我看来是有史以来最重要的投资论文。我19岁读到第8章时才弄明白自己刚才说的这些——这些道理显而易见，却并非我自悟，而是书中教给我的。要不然我可能再活一百年，仍会觉得股价上涨才是好事。我们希望价格下跌，但我对股市将如何表现一无所知，从来如此，也永远如此——这根本不是我会去思考的事情。
When it goes down, I look harder at what I might buy that day because I know there is more likely to be some merchandise there to use my money effectively in.
当市场下跌时，我会更仔细地寻找当天可买的标的，因为我知道更有可能出现能让我有效运用资金的“商品”。
Moderator: Ok, Warren, we will let you take one more question from the audience….
主持人：好的，沃伦，我们再让你从观众那里接最后一个问题……
Buffett: I will let you pick who get it. You can be the guy…(laughter).
巴菲特：我让你来挑谁来问。你可以当那个家伙……（笑声）
Question: What would you do to live a happier life if you could live over again?
问题：如果你能重来一次，你会做什么让自己活得更幸福？
Buffett: This will sound disgusting. The question is how would I live my life over again to live a happier life? The only thing would be to select a gene pool where people lived to 120 or something where I came from.
巴菲特：这听起来也许令人不适。要让我重过一次、活得更幸福，我唯一会做的，就是挑一个基因池——那里的族人能活到一百二十岁左右之类的地方。
I have been extraordinarily lucky. I mean, I use this example and I will take a minute or two because I think it is worth thinking about a little bit. Let's just assume it was 24 hours before you were born and a genie came to you and he said, "Herb, you look very promising and I have a big problem. I got to design the world in which you are going to live in. I have decided it is too tough; you design it. So you have twenty-four hours, you figure out what the social rules should be, the economic rules and the governmental rules and you and your kids and their kids will live under those rules.
我一直都是幸运至极。我喜欢用一个例子，需要一两分钟，因为它值得我们稍加思考。假设现在是你出生前24小时，一个精灵来到你面前说：“Herb，你前途无量，但我遇到个大问题：我得设计你将要生活的世界。我决定这太难了，就让你来设计。所以你有24小时，想出社会规则、经济规则和政府规则，你以及你的孩子、孙辈都将在这些规则下生活。”
You say, "I can design anything? There must be a catch?" The genie says there is a catch. You don't know if you are going to be born black or white, rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, bright or retarded. All you know is you are going to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion (balls). You are going to participate in the ovarian lottery. And that is going to be the most important thing in your life, because that is going to control whether you are born here or in Afghanistan or whether you are born with an IQ of 130 or an IQ of 70. It is going to determine a whole lot. What type of world are you going to design?
你说：“我可以随意设计？一定有陷阱吧？”精灵说：“确实有陷阱。你不知道自己将生为黑人还是白人、富人还是穷人、男性还是女性、体弱还是健康、聪明还是迟钝。你只知道自己要从一个装有58亿个球的桶里抽出一个——你将参加卵巢彩票。这将是你一生最重要的事情，因为它决定你是出生在这里还是阿富汗，拥有130还是70的智商，会决定许多事。那么，你会设计怎样的世界？”
I think it is a good way to look at social questions, because not knowing which ball you are going to get, you are going to want to design a system that is going to provide lots of goods and services because you want people on balance to live well. And you want it to produce more and more so your kids live better than you do and your grandchildren live better than their parents. But you also want a system that does produce lots of goods and services that does not leave behind a person who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well wired for this particular system. I am ideally wired for the system I fell into here. I came out and got into something that enables me to allocate capital. Nothing so wonderful about that. If all of us were stranded on a desert island somewhere and we were never going to get off of it, the most valuable person there would be the one who could raise the most rice over time. I can say, "I can allocate capital!" You wouldn't be very excited about that. So I have been born in the right place.
我认为用这种方式来看社会问题很有意义：因为不知道会抽到哪个球，你就会想设计一个能够提供大量商品和服务的制度，好让人们整体上过得不错，并且让它不断增产，使你的孩子比你过得更好，你的孙辈比他们的父母更好。但你也需要一个在创造大量商品与服务的同时，不会抛下那些抽到“坏球”、与这个体系不匹配的人的制度。我与自己所处的体系天生契合。我出生后进入了一个能让我配置资本的领域，这其实没什么了不起。如果我们全都被困在一座孤岛，永远无法离开，那么最有价值的人将是那个能长期种出最多大米的人。我若说“我会配置资本！”，你们大概不会很兴奋。所以，我确实生在了正确的地方。
Gates says that if I had been born three million years ago, I would have been some animal's lunch. He says, "You can't run very fast, you can't climb trees, you can't do anything." You would just be chewed up the first day. You are lucky; you were born today. And I am. The question getting back, here is this barrel with 6.5 billion balls, everybody in the world, if you could put your ball back, and they took out at random a 100 balls and you had to pick one of those, would you put your ball back in?
盖茨说，如果我出生在三百万年前，我早就成了某只动物的午餐。他说：“你跑不快，也不会爬树，什么都做不了。”第一天你就会被咬得连渣都不剩。你很幸运——你生在今天，而我确实如此。回到那个问题：这里有一个装着 65 亿个小球的桶，代表世界上每一个人；如果你可以把自己的一球放回去，他们随机抽出 100 个小球，你必须从中再选一个，你会把自己的一球放回去吗？
Now those 100 balls you are going to get out, roughly 5 of them will be American, 95/5. So if you want to be in this country, you will only have 5 balls, half of them will be women and half men--I will let you decide how you will vote on that one. Half of them will below average in intelligence and half above average in intelligence. Do you want to put your ball in there? Most of you will not want to put your ball back to get 100. So what you are saying is: I am in the luckiest one percent of the world right now sitting in this room--the top one percent of the world. Well, that is the way I feel. I am lucky to be born where I was because it was 50 to 1 in the United States when I was born. I have been lucky with parents, lucky with all kinds of things and lucky to be wired in a way that in a market economy, pays off like crazy for me. It doesn't pay off as well for someone who is absolutely as good a citizen as I am (by) leading Boy Scout troops, teaching Sunday School or whatever, raising fine families, but just doesn't happen to be wired in the same way that I am. So I have been extremely lucky so I would like to be lucky again.
在那 100 个小球里，大约只有 5 个代表美国人，比例是 95/5。如果你想生活在这个国家，你只有 5 个机会；其中一半是女性，一半是男性——至于偏好哪种性别，就由你决定。它们还有一半智力低于平均水平，另一半高于平均水平。你愿意把自己的一球放进去吗？大多数人都不会愿意把球放回去再抽 100 个。也就是说，我现在坐在这里，属于全世界最幸运的 1%——顶尖的 1%。我也是这么感觉的。我很幸运出生在美国，当时的概率是五十分之一。我在父母、环境等各方面都很幸运，也幸运地拥有一种在市场经济中能带来巨大回报的“线路”。而对于那些同样是好公民——带童子军、教主日学、养育优秀家庭——却没有这种特质的人来说，回报并不相同。所以我非常幸运，也希望继续幸运。
Then the way to do it is to play out the game and do something you enjoy all your life and be associated with people you like. I only work with people I like. If I could make \$100 million dollars with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I would say no because in way that is very much like marrying for money which is probably not a very good idea in any circumstances, but if you are already rich, it is crazy. I am not going to marry for money. I would really do almost exactly what I have done except I wouldn't have bought the US Air.
因此，实现这一点的方法就是继续这场游戏，一辈子做自己喜欢的事，与自己欣赏的人相伴。我只和喜欢的人共事。如果跟一个让我胃里翻腾的人合作能赚 1 亿美元，我也会拒绝，因为那就像为了钱结婚——在任何情况下都不是好主意，而如果你已经很富有，那就更荒唐。我不会为了钱去“结婚”。除了不会买下美国航空之外，我几乎还会做我已经做过的所有事情。
Thank you.
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