Transcription
The first rule in investment is don't lose, and the second rule of investment is don't forget the first rule. And that's all the rules there are. I mean that if you buy things for far below what they're worth and you buy a group of them, you basically don't lose money.
Warren Buffett is reportedly worth over a hundred billion dollars. From a shy boy selling Coca-Cola door-to-door to molding Berkshire Hathaway into a billion-dollar empire, the Oracle of Omaha has remained as one of the richest men in the world. But what makes him so unique among the wealthy is that he didn't inherit his fortune, nor did he acquire it by innovating technology. But rather, he grew his wealth by winning consistently in the stock market. So how did he do it? What did he do differently where so many others have failed?
In this video, we're going to learn how Warren Buffett beat the stock market and became a self-made investment billionaire.
Starting from the very beginning, Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in August of 1930, just one year after the Great Depression hit the country. In his early childhood, he noticed how people struggled to make a living due to the severe economic crisis and quickly learned about the importance of money. Luckily, his father was a smart businessman, and although he had recently lost his job from a local bank, he used what little savings he had to open his own company selling stocks and bonds, and from this was able to provide enough for his family.
Growing up, Warren was a shy and quiet boy who spent most of his childhood alone, often reading books from his father's library. And it was from this library where he developed an early obsession with investing and the game of business. Eager to put his new knowledge to use, he approached his grandfather who owned a local grocery store and asked him if he could provide Warren with drinks so that he could go and sell them around the neighborhood. His grandfather agreed, and so at the young age of six, Warren started his first business selling Coca-Cola door-to-door and making five cents for every six-pack. He soon added a few more items to his small business, and just a year later, Warren was selling chewing gum, magazines, and Coca-Cola while making a decent profit for himself.
By the time he was just 11, the boy used all of his savings to buy his first stock, purchasing three shares for himself in an oil and gas company called Cities Service, with each stock valued at $38.25. But shortly after buying them, their value dropped to around $27 per share. Despite the anxiety he felt, he held on tight and waited until their value rose to $40 before selling them. Although he had successfully turned a profit, he noticed that those same shares later shot up to over $200. The news of his missed opportunities stung, but it taught him an important lesson.
"75 years have gone by and I've never known what the market is going to do the next day. That's not my game. My game is to decide whether I'm in the right economy and by owning good companies for long periods of time."
These experiences and mistakes helped young Warren become much wiser than the average boy his age. A few years later, his father was elected to serve his first term as a U.S. Congressman, and as a result, the whole Buffett family moved from Omaha to Washington D.C. There, Warren Buffett would get his first real job at the age of 14, delivering newspapers for the Washington Post. However, he wasn't satisfied with the money he earned, so he took another job with one of their competitors, the Times Herald, and began delivering the newspapers simultaneously, earning $179 per month, which would be just over $3,000 in today's currency.
Buffett later used his earnings and savings to buy a pinball machine with a friend of his and installed it at a barber shop. Soon after, they bought two more pinball machines, and at the end of each week, they would split the profits between themselves and the owners who ran the shop. They later sold their machines for $1,200, and with the money earned, Warren Buffett bought his first property, a 40-acre plot of land in Nebraska. The craziest thing about all of this was that Warren was just 15 when he bought the farm. Even at his young age, it was clear that this boy from Omaha was on to something big.
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After graduating from high school in 1947, Buffett was eager to begin his life as a full-time stockbroker. However, his father wanted him to go to college, and so Warren enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and was able to pay for his studies with the earnings from his Nebraska farmland, which he rented out. After obtaining his bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Nebraska, he was later rejected by Harvard when he applied for his master's degree. This rejection, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, leading him to enroll at the Columbia Business School, where he met a teacher who would change his life: Benjamin Graham.
Benjamin Graham was an economist and investor whose work and writings Buffett was already familiar with. In fact, the same year that they met, Graham had just published one of the most famous books of his career, "The Intelligent Investor." In simple terms, the book was a step-by-step guide on how to invest successfully and consistently without speculating, by buying stocks that were undervalued. Warren quickly became one of Benjamin Graham's best students, and according to Buffett, Graham would go on to become one of the most influential men in his life, after his father.
After receiving his master's degree in economics, Buffett was eager to kick-start his career and yearned to work near the headquarters of the biggest investment firms in the country and home of the historic New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street. However, one major problem stood in his way. Despite his wealth of knowledge in business management and investing, Warren Buffett was still an introverted 21-year-old who couldn't present himself as the charismatic business tycoon he's become today. He was terrified of talking to new people and at times would even throw up out of pure nervousness. Nevertheless, he summoned the courage and signed up for a public speaking course, and that move turned out to be one of the best investments he ever made.
"Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. The more you learn, the more you earn."
Not too long after, Benjamin Graham contacted Buffett and offered him a job at his investing firm in New York, to which the young man gladly agreed. There, he mastered the art of security analysis, learning how to see the real value of a company based on their balance sheets. But while Graham and Buffett shared a mutual respect for each other, the differences in their philosophies soon became obvious. Buffett was more interested in understanding how companies worked and believed that the company's management should be part of the investment decision process, but Graham disagreed. Graham was more concerned with the company's numbers and balance sheets, and it didn't help matters that he was also a difficult man to work with, expecting strict compliance to the conventional rules of investing, which Buffett's young mind was constantly questioning.
But ultimately, their disagreements wouldn't matter because by 1956, Warren Buffett was on his own after Graham decided to retire and shut down the partnership. Nevertheless, the young man had built up his savings from $9,800 to $175,000 and, more importantly, gained first-hand experience running a New York investment firm. He was now ready to establish his own partnership, making those who invested in him into millionaires while also transforming himself into one of the wealthiest people in the world.
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In 1956, at the age of 25, Buffett returned to Omaha and started his own partnership called Buffett Associates, Limited. Despite having more than enough money to rent an office space and hire some staff, Warren instead chose to use one of the bedrooms of his house and manage the business himself. He got some of his friends and family to invest a total of $105,000, and immediately after, he kick-started his partnership. Influenced by his master, Graham, Warren Buffett began investing in undervalued stocks, but took its philosophy to the extreme by dealing with terrible performing companies that were ready to go bankrupt, buying them so cheap that even their liquidation value was worth more. This strategy is what he calls the "cigar butt."
"Anyone who picks up discarded cigars on the street can enjoy a few puffs, which would cost him nothing. Cigar butt investing runs along that same line. You find a terribly undervalued stock that sells for so cheap, you know for a fact it is worth more, and after selling it at its appropriate price, the initial bargain purchase makes the puff all free."
This method proved to be a masterstroke for Buffett, and over the next six years of his business, his partnership's net worth increased from a $105,000 venture to a $7.2 million foundation. As his portfolio began to grow, so did the number of people who wanted to join. However, most of them never ended up partnering with him because they couldn't trust an 18-year-old looking kid to manage all their money by himself, and they were right. Warren Buffett still had the looks of a teenager despite being in his late twenties, and for more than five years, he conducted his business all alone, writing all the checks, filing the tax returns, and taking delivery on stocks, causing many potential clients to doubt him.
But for those who were bold enough to invest in him, they would see their portfolios rise, averaging a 29.5 compound annual return from 1956 to 1969, outperforming the stock market by a factor of four. Ten years into his partnership, Warren Buffett was managing over $44 million in assets, and just three years later, these numbers shot up to an astonishing $104 million. However, while the market was booming and his partners were very happy with the return on their investments, there was one thing that Buffett worried about: the rising stock prices.
There's a motto that Warren Buffett lives by that has always served him well: "Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." You see, it became difficult for him to keep making his cigar butt investments in an overvalued stock market, and he was well aware that the bull market they were experiencing would soon be coming to an end. He found it too risky to continue investing with other people's money, and so by the end of 1969, he made the big decision to dissolve the business altogether and let his partners go. Still, he had built his own fortune all the way to $25 million by the age of 39, and he was ready to make his next move, turning Berkshire Hathaway into a billion-dollar empire.
Now, to amass such a fortune, smart investors like Warren Buffett know how to utilize uncertain times to their advantage, and it's no secret that we are definitely in uncertain times with inflation hitting a 40-year high and nearly 70% of economists surveyed by the Financial Times predicting a recession next year. But institutions like Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway may already be prepared. Because earlier this year, Bank of America's chief strategist recommended investors look at real assets like art as inflation heats up. Even Bloomberg has reported that art can serve as an inflation hedge in almost any environment. Because the last time inflation was this high, in the late '70s through the early '80s, art had an average yearly appreciation of 33% according to Masterworks All Art Index, which is higher than gold and real estate, the traditional inflation hedges during that same period. Which is why Masterworks has seen increased demand this year.
Masterworks allows anyone to invest in multi-million dollar contemporary artworks to hedge against inflation and potentially recoup some returns. Because since their inception, Masterworks has sold five paintings with an average net return of 26.8% to their investors. Legally, I have to add that past performance is not indicative of future results. But that's during a bear market, rising inflation, and continued uncertainty with no end to inflation in sight. The demand for Masterworks remains high, and there is a waitlist, but you can skip it just by clicking on the link in the description.
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Berkshire Hathaway was a struggling textile company destined to fail. Its stocks were trading at around $7 in 1965, but its assets were worth at least $11. Naturally, Warren purchased a lot of shares in the company as a "cigar butt," $7.50 each, and three years later, he arranged a deal with the owner to sell his shares at $11.50. But when the final offer came, the owner tried to cheat Warren by buying his shares at $11.37. This infuriated Buffett, so in return, he bought out the whole company and fired him. Although he got his revenge, Buffett now found himself stuck owning a company on the decline. But instead of letting his investment go to waste, he decided to phase Berkshire Hathaway out of the textile industry and use it instead as a holding firm to make his investments.
However, his recent bad experience buying undervalued stocks had given Buffett pause to rethink his investment strategy. Luckily, one of his good business partners, Charlie Munger, influenced him to change his philosophy from buying fair companies at great prices to great companies at fair prices, and that decision turned out to be another turning point in Warren Buffett's career. He began searching for companies that he believed had an "economic moat." The word "moat" in this sense refers to a company's ability to maintain a competitive advantage over the rest of the industry and still maintain its market share. One example of this is Coca-Cola. Whenever you think about soft drinks, Coca-Cola will most likely come to mind. It's a brand that has been around for more than a century and connected with billions of people around the world. It's an advantage Coca-Cola has that makes it harder for other brands to compete against.
Using this new philosophy, Warren Buffett began buying large shares in grade A companies such as American Express and The Washington Post through Berkshire Hathaway, whose stock had increased from $11 per share in 1965 to over $290 by the late 1970s. By then, Buffett's personal net worth had increased to around $240 million. And yet, this new game-changing investment strategy was only a part of the reason for his growing success. What really allowed him to make his true wealth was getting into the insurance business.
You see, insurance companies operate much more like banks. As people regularly pay their insurance premiums, company owners generally tend to have a great amount of cash on hand. Buffett realized he could use that cash to carefully buy and invest in a series of businesses, essentially generating even more profit from those investments. Thus, since 1967, Warren started buying up insurance businesses, starting with National Indemnity, then followed by others such as Central States Indemnity and GEICO. After tapping into billions of dollars from those insurance companies, he began purchasing shares in businesses that he believed had a moat, most notably acquiring 7% of Coca-Cola's total stock. From then on, his Berkshire's portfolio skyrocketed so much so that by 1990, its stock was trading at around $7,000, and by the age of 60, Warren Buffett himself had a net worth over a billion dollars.
Over the years, Berkshire Hathaway has gone on to buy and hold shares in many grade A companies, most recently large banks such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, making Berkshire Hathaway one of the most powerful and profitable companies in the world, and Buffett himself the richest man on Earth in 2008. But even with all of his riches and achievements, Buffett still remains an astonishingly frugal man who can be seen driving his 2014 Cadillac XTS and often eating McDonald's for breakfast. It is clear that the Oracle of Omaha is a man who has lived by his principles and integrity, but above everything, he will be remembered as the man who understood the game of business and investment better than anyone else.
Thank you all for watching. Make sure to subscribe and like the video. Until then, I'll see you in the next one.