|
编者按： 许多投资者都跟格隆汇平台反映希望能多看到价值投资的内容，为此我们特意组织力量按照问题由浅至深的顺序汇总并翻译了巴菲特及其挚友查理芒格近几年在各大公开场合回答的关于估值的问题。您即将看到的可能是史上最全股神问答整理，希望对您有所帮助。 We don’t formally have discount rates. Every time we start talking about this, Charlie reminds me that I’ve never prepared a spreadsheet, but I do in my mind.
We just try to buy things that we’ll earn more from than a government bond – the question is, how much higher? If government bonds are at 2%, we’re not going to buy a business that will return 4%.
I don’t call Charlie every day and ask him, “What’s our hurdle rate?” We’ve never used the term.
Munger: The concept of a hurdle rate makes nothing but sense, but a lot of people using this make terrible errors. I don’t think there’s any substitute for thinking about a whole lot of investment options and thinking about the returns from each.
The trouble isn’t that we don’t have one [a hurdle rate] – we sort of do – but it interferes with logical comparison. If I know I have something that yields 8% for sure, and something else came along at 7%, I’d reject it instantly. It’s like the mail-order-bride firm offering a bride who has AIDS – I don’t need to waste a moment considering it. Everything is a function of opportunity cost.
Buffett: I’ve been on 19 boards and seen a zillion presentations projecting a certain IRR [internal rate of return]. If the boards had burned them all, they’d have been better off. The IRR is based on what the CEO wants. The numbers are made up.
Munger: I have a young friend who sells private partnership interests to investors, and it’s hard to get returns in that field. I asked him, “What returns do you tell them you can get?” He said “20%.” I said, “How did you come up with that number?” He said, “If I told them anything lower, they wouldn’t give me the money.”
Buffett: There’s no one in the world who can earn 20% on big money. It’s amazing how gullible pension funds and other investors are. They want it so badly that they’ll believe even total nonsense.
Q: Is the skill of judging risk just as important as calculating intrinsic value? 问：判断风险的能力是否和计算内在价值的能力同样重要？ · Source：BRK Annual Meeting 2000 · 来源：2000年BRK年会 · Time：April 29th 2000 · 时间：2000年4月29日 We perceive risk as items that impair future business. Wants to have mathematical risk on their side over a group of decisions. Not in the business of assuming a lot of risk in business. We look for moats around businesses. We look for castles (businesses) that have a moat surrounding it which is expanding as a primary consideration of a great business.
Q: What valuation metrics do you use? 问：您用的是什么估值指标？ · Source：BRK Annual Meeting 2002 Tilson Notes · 来源：BRK 2002年股东大会 Tilson Notes · Time：2002 · 时间：2002 The appropriate multiple for a business compared to the S&P 500 depends on its return on equity and return on incremental invested capital. I wouldn't look at a single valuation metric like relative P/E ratio. I don't think price-to-earnings, price-to-book or price-to-sales ratios tell you very much. People want a formula, but it's not that easy. To value something, you simply have to take its free cash flows from now until kingdom come and then discount them back to the present using an appropriate discount rate. All cash is equal. You just need to evaluate a business's economic characteristics.
Q: What do you think of the use of book values in making investment decisions? 问：您对投资决策中对账面价值的使用有什么看法？ · Source：BRK Annual Meeting 1995 · 来源：BRK 1995年股东大会 · Time：1995 · 时间：1995 Book value is virtually not a consideration in investment decision-making at Berkshire. Their pursuit of high return businesses usually leads to companies with minimal book values. He added that the book value approach could work well with small sums of money, like Graham had managed, and that the approach had worked well for Graham-type practitioners like Buffett’s friend Walter Schloss. The three most important concepts conveyed by Graham in ““The Intelligent Investor”” were the investor’s attitude toward the market, the ““margin of safety””, and the practice of looking at companies as businesses, not stocks.
Munger proffered that ““projections generally do more harm than good, and are usually prepared by persons who have some sort of an interest in the outcome of actions based on the projections. They often have a precision that’s deceptive.”” Buffett added that they’ve never looked at a projection in connection with an equity or business that they’ve acquired. ““It’s a ritual to justify doing what an executive or a board wanted to do in the first place.”
· Source：BRK Annual Meeting 2007 Tilson Notes · 来源：BRK 2007年度股东大会 Tilson Notes · Time：2007 · 时间：2007 We have a bias toward investing in the U.S., but I bought my first stock outside the United States at least 50 years ago and we’ve looked at plenty of marketable securities overseas. It would make no difference to us if Coke was headquartered in Amsterdam.
But nobody outside the U.S. has heard of us. Eitan Wertheimer found us. The Iscar acquisition has contributed to our becoming better known. Eitan is going through a procedure to get us better known abroad. [Buffett did not give any details about this “procedure”.]
I haven’t done a good selling job abroad. We could be fairly criticized for not doing enough to become better known [overseas].
We own stocks in Germany and 4% of POSCO, which is based in South Korea – it’s now worth over $1 billion. I can think of a half dozen investments [we currently have] outside the U.S. We don’t have to report them in our [SEC Form] 13F, so they don’t get picked up like our domestic investments.
We have to report our holdings in Germany once we reach 3% ownership. So if we buy a $10 billion [market-cap] company, that means once we buy $300 million worth we have to tell the world, and Charlie and I don’t like doing that. It screws up our future buying, so the 3% rule is a real minus.I can assure you that the entire world is on our radar screen and we hope to be on its radar screen.
Munger: John Templeton made a fortune being in Japan very early and stocks there went to 30-40x earnings. It was an admirable piece of investment, but you know, we did alright during the same period.
Q: If you can’t talk with management, and can’t read the annual report, and didn’t know the price, but could only look at the financial statements, what metric would you look at? 问：如果你不能与管理层交流，不能看年报，也不知道股价，只能看到财务报表，你会关注哪一项指标？ · Source： BRK Annual Meeting 2008 Boodell Notes · 来源：BRK 2008年度股东大会 Boodell Notes · Time：2008 · 时间：2008 WB: Investing is laying out money now to get more money later on. Let’s leave the market price out. If you were buying a farm, you would think about bushels per acre — you are looking to the asset itself. Ask yourself: do I understand enough about the business so that the financials will be able to tell me meaningful things that will help me to foresee the statements in the future? I have bought stocks the way you describe. They were in businesses I understood, and if I could buy at 40% of X, I’d be okay with the margin of safety. If you don’t tell me the nature of the business, financial statements won’t tell me much. We’ve bought many securities, and with most, we’ve never met management. We use our general understanding of business and look to specifics from financial statements.
CM: One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
WB: We could value an apartment if we knew where the apartment is, and we know the monthly checks. I have bought a lot of things off the financials. There is a lot I wouldn’t buy even if it had the best management in the world, as it doesn’t make much difference in a bad business.
Q: How do you think about growth rates when you value businesses? 问：当你在给一项业务做估值的时候你怎么看待它的增长率？ · Source：BRK Annual Meeting 2004 Tilson Notes · 来源：BRK 2004年度股东大会 Tilson Notes · Time：2004 · 时间：2004 When the [long-term] growth rate is higher than the discount rate, then [mathematically] the value is infinity. This is the St. Petersburg Paradox, written about by Durand 30 years ago. [Click here for a copy of the original 1957 article. For more on this topic, I recommend Integrating the Outliers: Two Lessons from the St. Petersburg Paradox, by CSFB’s (now Legg Mason’s) Michael Mauboussin.].Some managements think this [that the value of their company is infinite]. It gets very dangerous to assume high growth rates to infinity – that’s where people get into a lot of trouble. The idea of projecting extremely high growth rates for a long period of time has cost investors an awful lot of money. Go look at top companies 50 years ago: how many have grown at 10% for a long time? And [those that have grown] 15% is very rarified. Charlie and I are rarely willing to project high growth rates. Maybe we’re wrong sometimes and that costs us, but we like to be conservative.
[CM: If your growth rate is so high that you conclude the business has an infinite valuation, you have to use more realistic numbers. What else could anyone do?]
利益声明：本文内容和意见仅代表作者个人观点，作者未持有该公司股票，作者提供的信息和分析仅供投资者参考，据此入市，风险自担！ 【作者简介】 |
|
|
