Friends,
This is going to be my first actual post on investing. What best can I do but to dedicate this post to the one and only Warren H Buffett, the guru of investing. And as rightly said by someone -There can be no another buffett. He has created tremendous long term wealth as no one has.
You can read thousand books on investing, still no book on investing can give you the wisdom, the practical experience of more than 50 years of investing in markets and businesses. I consider the annual letters of Buffett as the golden bible one can have before one mentally can be ready for long term investing.
One surely needs to read his annual letters from 1960 to present before one can actually understand the framework of long term investing. Sure, it is a huge huge compilation, but believe me friends, you can find no other book or journal or article even close to what he has written over a period of 50 years. You will find many techniques to make money in market, but to make money in markets for 50 years is no joke.
I am still reading his letters. Here forth I will present the short glimpses of his annual letters which one needs to understand before one becomes ready for HEAVY long term investing.
Reading his letters is a time consuming affair but even if it was paid, it would have been worth every penny. No wonder it’s free! Time and again I will try to show the glimpses as far as possible from each of his annual letter. This is the first one. These posts will be long, take your time, and try to assimilate whatever is said, for these are pearls of wisdom.
1960:
· The remaining 65% of the portfolio is in the securities which I consider undervalued and work-out operations. To the extent possible, I continue to attempt to invest in situations atleast partially insulated from the behaviour of the general market.
· This policy should lead to superior results in bear markets and average performance in bull markets.
1961:
· I would consider a year in which we declined 15% and the average 30% to be much superior to a year when we and the average advanced 20%. Over a period of time are going to be good and bad years; there is nothing to be gained by getting enthused or depressed about the sequence in which they occur. The imoprtant thing is to be beating par; a four on a par three hole is not as good as a five on a par five hole and it is unrealistic to assume we are not going to have our share of both par three's and par five's.
· Our bread and butter business is buying undervalued securities and selling when the undervaluation is corrected along with investment on corporate rather than market action. To the extent that patnership funds continue to grow, it is possible that more opportunities will be avilable in "control situations".
1962:
· I have continously used the Dow-Jones Industrial Average as our measure of par. It is my feeling that three years is a minimal test of our performance, and the best test consists of a period that long where the terminal level of Dow is reasonably close to the initial level.
· Our avenues of investment break down into three categories. These categories have different behavior characteristics, and the way our money is divided among them will have an important effect on our results, relative to the Dow, in any given year. The actual percentage division among categories is to some degree planned, but to a great extent, accidental, based upon availability factors.
The first section consists of generally undervalued securities (hereinafter called “generals”) where we have nothing to say about corporate policies and no timetable as to when the undervaluation may correct itself. Over the years, this has been our largest category of investment, and more money has been made here than in either of the other categories. We usually have fairly large positions (5% to 10% of our total assets) in each of five or six generals, with smaller positions in another ten or fifteen.
Sometimes these work out very fast; many times they take years. It is difficult at the time of purchase to know any specific reason why they should appreciate in price. However, because of this lack of glamour or anything pending which might create immediate favorable market action, they are available at very cheap prices. A lot of value can be obtained for the price paid. This substantial excess of value creates a comfortable margin of safety in each transaction. This individual margin of safety, coupled with a diversity of commitments creates a most attractive package of safety and appreciation potential. Over the years our timing of purchases has been considerably better than our timing of sales. We do not go into these generals with the idea of getting the last nickel, but are usually quite content selling out at some intermediate level between our purchase price and what we regard as fair value to a private owner.
The generals tend to behave market-wise very much in sympathy with the Dow. Just because something is cheap does not mean it is not going to go down. During abrupt downward movements in the market, this segment may very well go down percentage-wise just as much as the Dow. Over a period of years, I believe the generals will outperform the Dow, and during sharply advancing years like 1961, this is the section of our portfolio that turns in the best results. It is, of course, also the most vulnerable in a declining market.
Our second category consists of “work-outs.” These are securities whose financial results depend on corporate action rather than supply and demand factors created by buyers and sellers of securities. In other words, they are securities with a timetable where we can predict, within reasonable error limits, when we will get how much and what might upset the applecart. Corporate events such as mergers, liquidations, reorganizations, spin-offs, etc. lead to work-outs. An important source in recent years has been sell-outs by oil producers to major integrated oil companies.
This category will produce reasonably stable earnings from year to year, to a large extent irrespective of the course of the Dow. Obviously, if we operate throughout a year with a large portion of our portfolio in work-outs, we will look extremely good if it turns out to be a declining year for the Dow or quite bad if it is a strongly advancing year. Over the years, work-outs have provided our second largest category. At any given time, we may be in ten to fifteen of these; some just beginning and others in the late stage of their development. I believe in using borrowed money to offset a portion of our work-out portfolio since there is a high degree of safety in this category in terms of both eventual results and intermediate market behavior. Results, excluding the benefits derived from the use of borrowed money, usually fall in the 10% to 20% range. My self-imposed limit regarding borrowing is 25% of partnership net worth. Oftentimes we owe no money and when we do borrow, it is only as an offset against work-outs.
The final category is “control” situations where we either control the company or take a very large position and attempt to influence policies of the company. Such operations should definitely be measured on the basis of several years. In a given year, they may produce nothing as it is usually to our advantage to have the stock be stagnant market-wise for a long period while we are acquiring it. These situations, too, have relatively little in common with the behavior of the Dow. Sometimes, of course, we buy into a general with the thought in mind that it might develop into a control situation. If the price remains low enough for a long period, this might very well happen. If it moves up before we have a substantial percentage of the company’s stock, we sell at higher levels and complete a successful general operation. We are presently acquiring stock in what may turn out to be control situations several years hence.
1963:
· While I much prefer a five-year test, I feel three years is an absolute minimum for judging performance. It is a certainty that we will have years when the partnership performance is poorer, perhaps substantially so, than the Dow. If any three-year or longer period produces poor results, we all should start looking around for other places to have our money. An exception to the latter statement would be three years covering a speculative explosion in a bull market.
· Our investments will be chosen on the basis of value, not popularity;
That we will attempt to bring risk of permanent capital loss (not short-term quotational loss) to an absolute minimum by obtaining a wide margin of safety in each commitment and a diversity of commitments
· My (unscientific) opinion is that a margin of ten percentage points per annum over the Dow is the very maximum that can be achieved with invested funds over any long period of years,
· I promised to inform partners if my conclusions on this should change. At the beginning of 1957, combined limited partnership assets totaled $303,726 and grew to $7,178,500 at the beginning of 1961.
· The first section consists of generally undervalued securities (hereinafter called “generals”) where we have nothing to say about corporate policies and no timetable as to when the undervaluation may correct itself. Over the years, this has been our largest category of investment, and more money has been made here than in either of the other categories. We usually have fairly large positions (5% to 10% of our total assets) in each of five or six generals, with smaller positions in another ten or fifteen.
Sometimes these work out very fast; many times they take years. It is difficult at the time of purchase to know any compelling reason why they should appreciate in price. However, because of this lack of glamour or anything pending which might create immediate favorable market action, they are available at very cheap prices. A lot of value can be obtained for the price paid. This substantial excess of value creates a comfortable margin of safety in each transaction. Combining this individual margin of safety with a diversity of commitments creates a most attractive package of safety and appreciation potential. We do not go into these generals with the idea of getting the last nickel, but are usually quite content selling out at some intermediate level between our purchase price and what we regard as fair value to a private owner.
The generals tend to behave market-wise very much in sympathy with the Dow. Just because something is cheap does not mean it is not going to go down. During abrupt downward movements in the market, this segment may very well go down percentage-wise just as much as the Dow. Over a period of years, I believe the generals will outperform the Dow, and during sharply advancing years like 1961, this is the section of our portfolio that turns in the best results.
Our second category consists of “work-outs.” These are securities whose financial results depend on corporate action rather than supply and demand factors created by buyers and sellers of securities. In other words, they are securities with a timetable where we can predict, within reasonable error limits, when we will get how much and what might upset the applecart. Corporate events such as mergers, liquidations, reorganizations, spin-offs, etc. lead to work-outs.
The final category is “control” situations, where we either control the company or take a very large position and attempt to influence policies of the company. Such operations should definitely be measured on the basis of several years. In a given year, they may produce nothing as it is usually to our advantage to have the stock be stagnant market-wise for a long period while we are acquiring it. These situations, too, have relatively little in common with the behavior of the Dow. Sometimes, of course, we buy into a general with the thought in mind that it might develop into a control situation. If the price remains low enough for a long period, this might very well happen. Usually, it moves up before we have a substantial percentage of the company's stock, and we sell at higher levels and complete a successful general operation.
· To some extent, we have converted the assets from the manufacturing business which has been a poor business, to a business which we think is a good business—securities. (3) By buying assets at a bargain price, we don’t need to pull any rabbits out of a hat to get extremely good percentage gains. This is the cornerstone of our investment philosophy: “Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results. The better sales will be the frosting on the cake.”
· “I feel the most objective test as to just how conservative our manner of investing is arises through evaluation of performance in down markets. Preferably these should involve a substantial decline in the Dow. Our performance in the rather mild declines of 1957 and 1960 would confirm my hypothesis that we invest in an extremely conservative manner. I would welcome any partner’s suggesting objective tests as to conservatism to see how we stack up. We have never suffered a realized loss of more than ½ of 1% of total net assets, and our ratio of total dollars of realized gains to total realized losses is something like 100 to 1.
· I think you can be quite sure that over the next ten years, there are going to be a few years when the general market is plus 20% or 25%, a few when it is minus on the same order, and a majority when it is in between. I haven’t any notion as to the sequence in which these will occur, nor do I think it is of any great importance for the long-term investor. If you will take the first table on page 3 and shuffle the years around, the compounded result will stay the same. If the next four years are going to involve, say, a +40%, -30%, +10% and -6%, the order in which they fall is completely unimportant for our purposes as long as we all are around at the end of the four years. Over a long period of years, I think it likely that the Dow will probably produce something like 5% per year compounded from a combination of dividends and market value gain. Despite the experience of the last decade, anyone expecting substantially better than that from the general market probably faces disappointment.
· I would consider a year in which we were down 15% and the Dow declined 25% to be much superior to a year when both the partnership and the Dow advanced 20%.For the reasons outlined in our method of operation, our best years relative to the Dow are likely to be in declining or static markets.
· Specifically, if the market should be down 35% or 40% in a year (and I feel this has a high probability of occurring one year in the next ten—no one knows which one), we should be down only 15% or 20%. If it is more or less unchanged during the year, we would hope to be up about ten percentage points. If it is up 20% or more, we would struggle to be up as much. It is certainly doubtful we could match a 20% or 25% advance from the December 31, 1962 level. The consequence of performance such as this over a period of years would mean that if the Dow produces a 5% per year over-all gain compounded, I would hope our results might be 15% per year.
· The results continue to show that the most highly paid and respected investment advice has difficulty matching the performance of an unmanaged index of blue-chip stocks. This in no sense condemns these institutions or the investment advisers and trust departments whose methods, reasoning, and results largely parallel such investment companies. These media perform a substantial service to millions of investors in achieving adequate diversification, providing convenience and peace of mind, avoiding issues of inferior quality, etc. However, their services do not include (and in the great majority of cases, are not represented to include) the compounding of money at a rate greater than that achieved by the general market.
· Investment decisions should be made on the basis of the most probable compounding of after-tax net worth with minimum risk. Any isolation of low-basis securities merely freezes a portion of net worth at a compounding factor identical with the assets isolated. While this may workout either well or badly in individual cases, it is a nullification of investment management. The group experience holding various low basis securities will undoubtedly approximate group experience on securities as a whole, namely compounding at the compounding rate of the Dow. We do not consider this the optimum in after-tax compounding rates.
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