I.H.86.Warren Buffett.Pattern Recognition

投资决策中90%的定性分析（约等于模式识别：pattern recognition），没有模式的思考和学习都是自我毁灭。

1、《1997-05-05 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

32. Just takes 5 minutes to know if we’re interested in a company

只需 5 分钟即可知道我们是否对一家公司感兴趣

WARREN BUFFETT: The five minute test is a — you know — Charlie and I have — we’re familiar with virtually every company of a size that would interest us in the country. I mean, if you’ve been around for 40 or more years looking at businesses, it’s just like if you were looking at — you know, studying baseball players every day. You get to know all the players after a while. And that’s the way it works.

沃伦·巴菲特：五分钟测试是——你知道——查理和我——我们熟悉这个国家几乎每一家我们感兴趣的规模的公司。我的意思是，如果你花了 40 年或更长时间来观察企业，这就好比你——你知道，每天研究棒球运动员。过一段时间，你就会了解所有球员。事情就是这样运作的。

Then we have a bunch of filters we’ve developed in our minds over time. We don’t say they’re perfect filters. We don’t say that those filters don’t occasionally leave things out that should get through. But they’re very — they’re efficient.

然后，我们随着时间的推移，在我们脑海中开发了一系列过滤器。我们并不是说它们是完美的过滤器。我们并不是说这些过滤器偶尔不会遗漏一些应该通过的东西。但它们非常——它们非常高效。

And they work just as well as if we spent months and hired experts and did all kinds of things. So we really can tell you in five minutes whether we’re interesting in something, and —

而且它们的效果和我们花几个月时间聘请专家并做各种事情一样好。所以我们真的可以在五分钟内告诉你我们是否对某事感兴趣，而且——

We’d never owned shares in FlightSafety but we’d been familiar with the company for at least 20 years, wouldn’t you say, Charlie?

我们从未拥有过 FlightSafety 的股份，但我们熟悉这家公司至少有 20 年了，你说是吗，查理？

CHARLIE MUNGER: Sure, I had a partner who bought a lot of it 20 years ago. Yeah.

查理·芒格：当然，我有一个合伙人在 20 年前买了很多。是的。

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. But that’s true of almost any business. And we know — we’ve got a fix on what we don’t understand, and then we don’t care to know any more about them, particularly, although we’ll pick up a little as we go along, maybe.

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。但几乎所有企业都是如此。我们知道——我们已经确定了我们不了解的东西，然后我们不想特别了解更多关于它们的信息，尽管我们可能会在此过程中学到一些东西。

And then the ones that are — we’re capable of understanding, we’ve probably gotten about as far as we’ll get already. So we do know in five minutes.

然后那些——我们有能力理解的，我们可能已经达到了我们已经达到的程度。所以我们确实在五分钟内就知道了。

Now, when we do something with FlightSafety, before the purchase and even for somewhat — a little after the purchase — I’d never been — I’d never set foot on a piece — they have 40 or so training centers around the world — I’d never set foot on one of them.

现在，当我们对 FlightSafety 采取行动时，在收购之前，甚至在收购之后的一段时间里——我从未——我从未踏足过一块——他们在世界各地拥有 40 个左右的培训中心——我从未踏足过其中任何一个。

I’d never been to their headquarters. We never looked at a lease. We never look at title of the properties. I mean, we don’t do all of those things.

我从未去过他们的总部。我们从未看过租约。我们从未查看过这些房产的所有权。我的意思是，我们不做所有这些事情。

And I will say this: to date, that’s never cost us a penny. What costs us money is when we misassess the fundamental economic characteristics of the business.

我要说的是：到目前为止，这从未让我们损失一分钱。让我们赔钱的是当我们错误评估了企业的基本经济特征时。

But that is something we would not learn by what people generally consider due diligence. We could have lawyers look over all kinds of things, but that isn’t what makes a deal a good deal or a bad deal. And we don’t kid ourselves by having lots of studies made and lots of reports made. They’re going to support whatever they think the guy that pays them, you know, wants anyway. So they don’t mean anything. They’re nonsense.

但这不是我们通过人们通常认为的尽职调查所能学到的东西。我们可以让律师查看各种各样的东西，但这并不是决定一笔交易是好是坏的因素。我们不会通过做大量的研究和大量的报告来欺骗自己。他们会支持他们认为付钱给他们的人想要的任何东西。所以它们没有任何意义。它们是无稽之谈。

But we do care about being right about the economic characteristics of the business, and that’s one thing we think we’ve got certain filters that tell us in certain cases that we know enough to assess. And then we make some mistakes.

但我们确实关心对企业的经济特征做出正确的判断，这是我们认为我们拥有某些过滤器的一件事，这些过滤器在某些情况下告诉我们，我们有足够的知识进行评估。然后我们会犯一些错误。

Charlie?

查理？

CHARLIE MUNGER: I’ve got nothing to add to that, except that people underrate the importance of a few simple big ideas. And I think that to the extent Berkshire Hathaway is a didactic enterprise teaching the right systems of thought, I think that the chief lessons are that a few big ideas really work, as I think these filters of ours have worked pretty well. Because they’re so simple.

查理·芒格：我没有什么要补充的，只是人们低估了一些简单的大想法的重要性。我认为，就伯克希尔哈撒韦公司是一个教导正确思维体系的说教企业而言，我认为主要的教训是，一些大的想法真的有效，因为我认为我们的这些过滤器运作得相当好。因为它们如此简单。

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I think most of the people in this room, if they just focused on what made a good business or didn’t make a good business and thought about it a little while, they could develop a set of filters that would let them, in five minutes, figure out pretty well what made sense or didn’t make sense.

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我认为这个房间里的大多数人，如果他们只是专注于什么造就了一个好的企业或什么没有造就一个好的企业，并思考一会儿，他们就可以开发出一套过滤器，让他们在五分钟内，很好地弄清楚什么有意义或什么没有意义。

I mean, there may be some reason after five minutes we don’t get together on a deal of some sort, but —

我的意思是，五分钟后，我们可能有一些原因无法达成某种协议，但是——

Another thing you can usually tell — at least you can tell it in the extreme cases — you can tell whether you’ve got the kind of manager, very quickly, that you want to have. I mean, if you’ve got somebody that’s been batting .400 all their life, and fortunately age doesn’t change that picture, in terms of business performance, and they love what they do, it’s going to work.

你通常可以分辨的另一件事——至少你可以在极端情况下分辨出来——你可以很快分辨出你是否拥有你想要的那种经理。我的意思是，如果你有一个一生都在以 0.400的命中率击球的人，幸运的是，就业务绩效而言，年龄不会改变这种情况，并且他们热爱自己的工作，那么这将会奏效。

If the seller cares a lot about the money, you’re probably not going to make a very good deal. If their real interest is going in the — is what they’re going to do with the money, they may fall out of love or have less interest in their business subsequently.

如果卖家非常关心钱，你可能不会做成一笔非常好的交易。如果他们真正的兴趣在于——在于他们将如何处理这笔钱，他们可能会失去对他们业务的热爱或兴趣。

We love working with people who are just plain nuts about their businesses. And it works very well. And you can usually spot that.

我们喜欢与那些对自己的业务非常着迷的人一起工作。而且效果非常好。你通常可以发现这一点。

Now, having said that, we’ll have a few people figuring out how to fake that attitude, you know, when they try and sell us some piece of junk here, but — (Laughter)

现在，话虽如此，我们会让一些人想办法假装那种态度，你知道，当他们试图在这里卖给我们一些垃圾时，但是——（笑声）

Charlie says we can get conned by some guy with a green eyeshade, you know, and a low-rent office and all that. But we won’t get taken in by the guy with the suede shoes. (Laughter)

查理说我们可能会被一些戴着绿色遮阳板、你知道的，还有低租金办公室之类的人所欺骗。但我们不会被穿着绒面鞋的人所欺骗。（笑声）

2、《2010-11-07 The Forging of a Skeptic - From Accountant to Buffett’s Voice on Wall St.》

Alice: History was one of Warren’s best subjects even when he was very young (in school). He has a liking for it. But at the same time pattern recognition is one of his primary skills and perhaps his greatest skill. So in terms of data points, unlike many people who learn by seeking information on an as-needed basis, Warren is always looking for fuel for pattern recognition before he needs it.

爱丽丝：历史一直是沃伦从小就擅长的科目之一。他对历史有很大的兴趣。但与此同时，模式识别是他最主要的能力之一，甚至可能是他最强的能力。因此，谈到数据点，不像许多人在需要时才寻求信息，沃伦总是在提前为模式识别寻找“燃料”，在他还没有需要它的时候就开始准备。

He’s always looking for context. Having an interest in a broad sweep of history provides vast context for making many decisions because it enables analogies. And that I think has been very helpful for him in avoiding fallacies such as “This time it’s different.”

他总是寻找背景信息，对历史的广泛兴趣为做出许多决策提供了丰富的背景，因为它能够启发类比。我认为这对他避免“这次不同”的谬论非常有帮助。

It allows him to make analogies between industries, for example between the internet/dotcom stocks and early auto stocks, as in the speech he gave at Sun Valley that is described in The Snowball.

这使他能够在行业之间进行类比，例如在他在《雪球》一书中描述的太阳谷演讲中，将互联网/点com股票与早期的汽车股票进行比较。

Miguel: Tell me more about his pattern recognition skills? How is this one of his greatest skills?

米格尔：告诉我更多关于他的模式识别技能？为什么这是他最重要的技能之一？

Alice: Take this example. If you look at the dotcom stocks, the meta-message of that era was world-changing innovation. He went back and more patterns of history when there was a similar meta-message, great bursts of technological innovation in canals, airplanes, steamboats, automobiles, television, and radio. Then he looked for sub-patterns and asked what the outcome was in terms of financial results.

爱丽丝：以这个例子为例。如果你看看点com股票，当时那个时代的元信息是改变世界的创新。他回顾了更多历史上的模式，当时也有类似的元信息，即在运河、飞机、蒸汽船、汽车、电视和广播等领域的伟大技术创新浪潮。然后他寻找子模式，问这些技术创新在财务结果方面的结局是什么。

With the dotcoms, people were looking to see what was different and unique about them. Warren is always thinking what’s the same between this specific situation and every other situation.

随着互联网公司的兴起，人们在寻找它们与众不同和独特之处。沃伦总是在思考这个特定情况与其他所有情况之间有什么相同之处。

That is the nature of pattern recognition, asking “What can I infer about this situation based on similarities to what I already know and trust that I understand?” There is less emphasis on trying to reason out things on the basis that they are special because they are unique, which in a financial context is perhaps the definition of a speculation. (Warren is not averse to speculation, by the way, as long as it’s what he calls “intelligent speculation,” meaning he’s got long odds in his favor.) But pattern recognition is his default way of thinking. It creates an impulse always to connect new knowledge to old and to primarily be interested in new knowledge that genuinely builds on the old.

这就是模式识别的本质，问自己“根据我已经了解并信任的情况，我能从这个情况中推断出什么？” 他更少强调试图基于它们的独特性来推理，这在金融背景下或许可以定义为投机行为。（顺便说一下，沃伦并不反对投机，只要它是他所称的“明智的投机”，意思是他在这场赌局中有极大的胜算。）但模式识别是他默认的思维方式。这种思维方式促使他总是将新知识与旧知识联系起来，并主要对能够真正建立在旧知识基础上的新知识感兴趣。

Other interesting situations: I have seen him make his famous 5-minute decisions on the phone. Five minutes is the outside amount of time it takes him to make a decision. If the person can be succinct and convey the salient points in 60 seconds he’ll say, “Yes” or “No” in 60 seconds.

其他有趣的情况：我见过他在电话上做出他著名的五分钟决策。五分钟是他做出决策所需的最长时间。如果对方能够简明扼要地在 60 秒内传达要点，他会在 60 秒内说“是”或“否”。

The time is determined by how long it takes the person to convey the salient points, not how long it takes him to think about it. It’s virtually instant once he has grasped the 2 or 3 variables or points that are important to him.

时间是由一个人传达要点所需的时间来决定的，而不是他思考所需的时间。一旦他掌握了对他重要的 2 或 3 个变量或要点，这几乎是瞬间的。

Typically, and this is not well understood, his way of thinking is that there are disqualifying features to an investment. So he rifles through and as soon as you hit one of those it’s done. Doesn’t like the CEO, forget it. Too much tail risk, forget it. Low-margin business, forget it. Many people would try to see whether a balance of other factors made up for these things. He doesn’t analyze from A to Z; it’s a time-waster.

通常，这一点并不被很好地理解，他的思维方式是，投资有一些不合格的特征。因此，他会快速浏览，一旦遇到其中一个，就结束了。不喜欢首席执行官，算了。尾部风险太大，算了。低利润业务，算了。许多人会尝试看看其他因素是否能弥补这些问题。他不从头到尾分析；这浪费时间。

3、《2016-04-30 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

And you do — I mentioned pattern recognition earlier — you know, there’s — you — and I would say it’s important to recognize what you can’t do. So we have — we may have tried the department store business and a few things, but we’ve — we’ve generally tried to only swing at things in the strike zone, and our particular strike zone. And it really hasn’t been much more complicated than that.

你确实如此——我之前提到过模式识别——你知道，有——你——我会说，认识到你不能做的事情是很重要的。所以我们——我们可能尝试过百货商店业务和一些其他事情，但我们——我们通常只尝试在我们的击球区内的事情，而我们的特定击球区。实际上，这并没有比这更复杂。

I.H.86.Warren Buffett.Pattern Recognition

I.H.86.Warren Buffett.Pattern Recognition

1、《1997-05-05 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

2、《2010-11-07 The Forging of a Skeptic - From Accountant to Buffett’s Voice on Wall St.》

3、《2016-04-30 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting》

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