Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.
In the 1930s, there as a stretch here you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that’s hat’s going on in today’s private-equity world.
Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
Berkshireis in the business of making easy predictions If a deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it.
Trying to prioritize among things we’re unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.
The investment game always involves considering both quality and price, and the trick is to get more quality than you pay for in price. It’s just that simple.
I feel that by getting rich in the way I did, I think my own example has hurt my own country.
See’s candy company was the first high-quality business we ever bought.
It takes almost no capital to open a new See’s candy store. We’re drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality control.
You don’t have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich – just a bit better than average over a long period of time.
We’ve had the most massive creation of wealth for people a lot younger than those who formerly got wealth in the history of the world. The world is full of young people who really want to get rich, and when I left school nobody thought it was a reasonable possibility.
Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system.
We don’t have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.
The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.
To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on what they’ve sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one thinks a bond’s value will soar to the moon.
It’s very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.
If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.
Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn’t solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.
In the LBO field there is a buried “covariance” with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.
The name of the game is continuing to learn. Even if you’re very well trained and have some natural aptitude, you still need to keep learning.