Warren Buffett’s Meeting with University of Maryland MBA Students – 11/15/20
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PostPosted: Mon, Dec 9 2013, 9:30 pm EST    Post subject: Warren Buffett’s Meeting with University of Maryland MBA Students – 11/15/20 Reply with quote

Warren Buffett’s Meeting with University of Maryland MBA Students – November 15, 2013

(Notes taken by Professor David Kass, Department of Finance, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland and Rahul Shah, MBA student)

Warren Buffett (WB) met with 20 MBA students from each of eight universities, including the University of Maryland, on November 15, 2013. The MBA students asked 16 questions in the following order:

(1) Has Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) lowered its hurdle rate as it grew larger?

WB: BRK does not have a hurdle rate. The added capital makes it harder to achieve superior returns. If I manage $1 million I will get better returns than managing $210 billion (BRK’s net worth). Size is the enemy of performance. I would still rather manage $210 billion than $1 million.

(2) In the past you said you attribute 85% of your investing to Benjamin Graham and 15% to Philip Fisher. Has that percentage changed?

WB: I developed my investment strategy under Graham. I went to Columbia and learned from Graham. With Graham’s approach, you cannot lose money over time. It’s very quantitative in nature, and you have to do reasonably well. On the other hand, it has less and less application as you get into bigger and bigger companies with larger sums of money. It’s better to buy wonderful businesses at fair prices than so-so businesses at low prices.

With the “cigar approach”, you can find a nasty cigar on the ground, with one puff left, can pick it up, light it and you get a free puff. You can keep doing this and get many free puffs. That’s one approach, that’s what I did. I looked for very cheap stocks quantitatively. After exposure to Fisher and Charlie, I started looking for better companies. Previously I was doing both. Now we are looking for good companies, not just cheap companies. Railroads are huge, and they will be good in 10 years, and 100 years from now. Burlington Northern is now earning $6 billion pre-tax, as compared to $3 billion a few years ago before we bought it. Moving much towards Fisher now and less Ben Graham because we are working with larger sums. With smaller sums, we would be looking at better margins/cheaper stocks.

When I got out of school, I went through Moody’s manual page by page. Got to page 1433 and learned the good ones were in the back. Western insurance company in 1951 was earning $29.09 a share, the year before $21.66. The price of the stock had traded between 3 and 13 the previous 12 months. The price was at 16 when I saw it, less than 1 x earnings. A few years ago, in 2004, someone told me I should look at Korea. I got a book from Citigroup which had 1 stock to a page. Describes all the publicly traded companies in Korea. Went through it and found about 20 companies (ex. Day-Han flower mills) it had book value, eps, and securities. Didn’t tell you anything about the share until you look at the price. Found about 20 like that in an afternoon and bought some of all of them, but didn’t know enough about all of them to load up on them. If you buy 20 stocks selling at 2 times earnings, you’re going to make money. That’s Ben Graham and you can make money doing this. If you’re working with bigger money, you have to do Fisher/Charlie style and buy big businesses. Berkshire now looks for large, very strong companies. Like Nebraska Furniture Mart – bought in 1983 and it’s probably earning 20 times as much now. Charlie told me – “You’re never going to disagree with me because you’re smart and I’m always right”.

(3) What is the process you follow in writing the annual shareholders letter? How do you decide what you’re going to write about?

WB: I finished the 2013 letter already, but I will send it out on Feb 28. I already know what I’m going to say, just have to fill in some numbers and send it off.
I try to think of my shareholders as my partners. I try to think of the information I would want them to send me if they were running the place, and I was the shareholder. What would I want to know? This is what I tell them. In my first draft, I address it to my sisters who don’t know a lot about finance. “Dear sisters”- I explain to them what they would want to know in their position. I also like to write one section that is a general teaching lesson that doesn’t directly apply to Berkshire. This year 2600 words (out of 11,500) are thoughts about investing. I’m talking to all people thinking about investing and how they should go about it. I take one subject and just write a chapter on this, annually. Some people are interested, some are not. If they’re going to have most of their money with me, I like to talk to them as if they are in the room with me — economic principles of BRK – so people know what we are all about.
In 1956 I bought a ledger for $0.49, two pieces of paper for a partnership document but didn’t worry about the partnership agreement. I just explained the ground rules in about half a page: This is what I can do, this is what I can’t do, this is how I intend to go about it, and this is how I measure my success. If this looks good to you, then buy in. If you don’t want to buy in, then don’t – we can still be friends. These ground rules are in the back of the Berkshire Hathaway report tailored to investors. In our ground rules, though our management is corporate our attitude is partnership. We consider you as partners. You need to have common ground, just like a marriage. It would be crazy to get married when you differ on important points. The annual shareholders report is ready now. BRK has unusual shareholders, many of whom have 80% of their net worth in BRK. I have almost 100% of my net worth in BRK. But if the market goes down 50% we might rewrite it (laughter).

(4) Why did you convert Goldman Sachs warrants into a smaller stake in the company?

WB: Goldman Sachs and GE, we helped finance them in 2008 which I never dreamt would happen (Imagine GE calling you, telling you they need your financing assistance). BRK received warrants with preferred stocks, expiring in 5 years (Sept 2013). Warrants to buy $5 billion Goldman Sachs common stock and $3 billion GE common stock. If we exercised, we would have had to invest an additional $8 billion. These two companies didn’t want to issue all of those new shares. Earlier this year we decided, they didn’t want to issue all of those shares, we didn’t want to spend $8 billion. Let’s do a settlement, both wanted to. We didn’t have to lay out cash and they didn’t need to issue all of those shares. BRK ended up with Goldman Sachs shares valued close to $2 billion without any outlay of BRK’s cash. GE was only $200 million. BRK has only one big warrant issue remaining, with Bank of America. We have warrants that entitle us to buy 700 million shares at $7.14 a share ($5 billion) through August 2021. We’ll hold the warrants until the dividend becomes high or we’ll hold until right before the expiration. Goldman Sachs and GE deals are interesting – who would have guessed those 5 years ago. The money market failed because of Lehman. Money market funds held a lot of Lehman paper. It happened overnight, 30+ million Americans who believed money markets were safe, and then Lehman fails. This caused a major money market fund to “break the buck” and lose value. It became a great silent electronic run on money markets. There was $3 1/2 trillion in money market funds and $175 billion of funds flowed out in the first three days after Lehman failed. All money market funds held commercial paper. Companies like GE had a lot of commercial paper. After this, American industry literally stopped. George Bush said, “If money doesn’t loosen up, this sucker will go down” – I believe this was the greatest economic statement of all time. This is why he backed up Paulson and Bernanke. Companies were counting on the commercial paper market. In September 2008, we came right to the abyss. If Paulson and Bernanke had not intervened, in two more days it would have been all over. BRK always has $20 billion or more in cash. It sounds crazy, never need anything like it, but some day in the next 100 years when the world stops again, we will be ready. There will be some incident, it could be tomorrow. At that time, you need cash. Cash at that time is like oxygen. When you don’t need it, you don’t notice it. When you do need it, it’s the only thing you need. We operate from a level of liquidity that no one else does. We don’t want to operate on bank lines. There is no authority for the US Treasury to guarantee money market funds. Their power comes from Congress. Paulson set up an exchange stabilization fund in September 2008 to guarantee money market funds. This stopped the run of money market funds and it was all over. Something like that will happen maybe a couple of times in your lifetime. Two things when it happens again – don’t let it ruin you, and if you have money/guts, you’ll have an opportunity to buy things at prices that don’t make sense. Fear spreads fast, it is contagious. Doesn’t have anything to do with IQ. Confidence only comes back one at a time, not en masse. There are periods when fear paralyzes the investment world. You don’t want to owe money at that time, and if you have money then you want to buy at those times. “Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy”.

(5) How has your understanding of markets contributed towards your political views?
WB: I wouldn’t say knowledge of markets has. My political views were formed by this process. Just imagine that it is 24 hours before you are born. A genie comes and says to you in the womb, “You look like an extraordinarily responsible, intelligent, potential human being. Going to emerge in 24 hours and it is an enormous responsibility I am going to assign to you – determination of the political, economic and social system into which you are going to emerge. You set the rules, any political system, democracy, parliamentary, anything you wish, can set the economic structure, communistic, capitalistic, set anything in motion and I guarantee you that when you emerge this world will exist for you, your children and grandchildren. What’s the catch? One catch – just before you emerge you have to go through a huge bucket with 7 billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get – you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the US or in Bangladesh, etc. You have no idea which slip you will get. Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world? Do you want men to push around females? It’s a 50/50 chance you get female. If you think about the political world, you want a system that gets what people want. You want more and more output because you’ll have more wealth to share around. The US is a great system, turns out $50,000 GDP per capita, 6 times the amount when I was born in just one lifetime. But not knowing what slip you get, you want a system that once it produces output, you don’t want anyone to be left behind. You want to incentivize the top performers, don’t want equality in results, but do want something that those who get the bad tickets still have a decent life. You also don’t want fear in people’s minds – fear of lack of money in old age, fear of cost of health care. I call this the “Ovarian Lottery”. My sisters didn’t get the same ticket. Expectations for them were that they would marry well, or if they work, would work as a nurse, teacher, etc. If you are designing the world knowing 50/50 male or female, you don’t want this type of world for women – you could get female. Design your world this way; this should be your philosophy. I look at Forbes 400, look at their figures and see how it’s gone up in the last 30 years. Americans at the bottom are also improving, and that is great, but we don’t want that degree of inequality. Only governments can correct that. Right way to look at it is the standpoint of how you would view the world if you didn’t know who you would be. If you’re not willing to gamble with your slip out of 100 random slips, you are lucky! The top 1% of 7 billion people. Everyone is wired differently. You can’t say you do everything yourself. We all have teachers, and people before us who led us to where we are. We can’t let people fall too far behind. You all definitely got good slips.
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http://blogs.rhsmith.umd.edu/davidkass/uncategorized/warren-buffetts-meeting-with-university-of-maryland-mbams-students-november-15-2013/
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