For me, the best part of my Real Vision journey
has been the chance to refine my own investment framework through a series of conversations
with brilliant investors in every corner of the globe. In this series, I want to continue my education
by digging deeper into the lives and careers of my guests to try and learn how they think. I want to understand the experiences that
have shaped them, the failures they bounced back from, and the lessons that those failures
have taught them. And I want to break down their success to
find out what sets them apart. I'm not looking for trade ideas or guesses
about an unknowable future, but rather knowledge, accumulated over the course of careers to
try and make me a better investor. And I want to share those conversations with
you. Several years ago, I was introduced to my
guest today by mutual friends who'd entrusted a significant portion of their savings to. This man, they told me, invest in a way which
is not only unlike the methods employed by 99% of money managers today, but also with
an integrity and a methodology which is a throwback to a time which is sadly almost
vanished. In the intervening period, as I've gotten
to know my guest better, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to persuade him to sit
down with me and share both his experience and his investment philosophy with the Real
Vision audience. Sadly, each of my invitations has been met
with a very polite, but very firm, no thank you. This was no surprise to me. My guest has never before been interviewed,
either in writing or on camera, and for good reason. He's a private man who prefers to spend his
time reading and thinking, who invests far from the spotlight, and with no care for either
mainstream opinion or consensus strategies. A year ago, I finally got to meet my guest,
and I spent an evening I will never forget listening to him talk about how he sees the
world and how he thinks about the discipline of investing. That meeting made me more determined than
ever to try and persuade him to break his silence and give others the chance to learn
from him as I had done. Now, three years after I first approached
him, he's very graciously agreed to talk to me in front of the Real Vision cameras. And so I'm excited to be traveling to the
Swiss Alps to discover how his framework has evolved over the years and see how he looks
at the process of investing that which he considers permanent, irreplaceable capital. So please join me for a conversation with
Tony Deden. There are going to people that watch this
who know you, and they're probably sitting there thinking, why the hell is Tony Deden
doing it? And then they're going to people that don't
know who, after this conversation, are going to go, why the hell do I not know Tony Deden? So I know this is the first time you've done
one of these and I really appreciate the fact that you've agreed to do it, because there's
so many things I want to talk to you about. As I love to do, particularly given the lack
of visibility that you have, is to give people a sense of your background, because it's an
interesting one. It's a varied one, and it's taken you all
over the world. So perhaps we could start just by talking
a little bit about you and your life and your background. How much time do you have? We have all the time in the world. So you left Greece at an early age? Yes, when I was a young boy. And I lived in America for nearly 30 years,
first in California and then for many years in Houston. And I think I became, as American, as one
could possibly ever become, even though for all these years, I never really felt quite
at home there. Not that I feel at home anywhere else. But then I was married there. I had a family, and I had a wonderful time
in the United States. I've met some of the greatest people I've
ever known in America, and I learned a great deal. And many years ago, I moved back here to Europe
and I've lived in Switzerland now for many years. I have traveled a lot, mostly to learn and
to observe, but I have not traveled as much you have, for example. I wouldn't wish that on you, anyway. I think you've got the balance about right. There's nothing extraordinary about my background. I found myself in this work quite by accident. Back in 1985, when I was asked to help a family
with their investment affairs, passing of a husband, or other situations, and one family
became two and then three, et cetera. So I found myself being an investment counselor
without having the preparation or the background, or I've never worked for a financial institution
or bank. I had to learn a great deal by the sheer desire
to do the right thing. So my background is not as extraordinary as
you make it sound. I think you, perhaps, flattered me a bit with
your introduction. But when you are an investment counselor to
a family, and in essence, you are asked to provide guidance for the entire wherewithal
this family has, you come to the inevitable observation, to start with that, this is all
the wealth this family possesses and no one is ever going to give them any more. Yeah. And there's a sense of irreplaceability to
this capital. So you have to start respecting it, respect
the fact that it is really irreplaceable. It represents a lifetime's worth of savings. That is, that you must avoid the kind of error
that would put this family out of business. And you also learn fairly early on, something
that takes men far longer to do-- that is, it's easier to actually make money than to
keep it. Not merely on account of external issues,
such as inflation, taxation. But also internal things, error, imprudence,
and other such factors. It is a kind of different world than the fund
manager has, where a fund manager, in essence, has a undefined, unlimited amount of capital
at his disposal, and if he loses part of that, he can get others by changing his policy and
his investment objectives to something more desirable at the time. I find it fascinating, the fact that the idea
of family offices has grown so much in the last 20 years. When I was younger, yes, truly there were
some very wealthy families that managed their own affairs, but it was very rare. And I often thought about the reasons that
contributed to this, and I cannot help but say that perhaps one of the reasons is that
the investment management industry and the banking industry have failed in their obligation
and ability to protect and preserve the savings of those who have accumulated some. So what was it about you back then that led
this first family to come to you and say, please help us manage this wealth? Well, there was a fellow. He's passed, he's long gone now, who was like
a mentor to me. At the time, I must have been '30s or something
like that, and he was in his '70s. And he liked the way I thought. I was on the board of finance company, and
I was very curious about matters of money. But I was always more interested in what could
go wrong that what could go right. Right. And I always thought that what could go wrong
was not necessarily of a quantitative nature, like the stock market or the bond market,
but the kind of decisions that one makes and the impact of those decisions, both in the
long and short-term, on the whole. So he is the one who originally made introductions
to one of two families, and he's the one who sort of pushed me to pursue this. How did you begin to form the framework that
helped you invest, because I know that's changed and morphed over the years? But how did you begin to think of this? What was your first perspective on it? Well, initially, I did not know much. I erred on the side of inaction. But then I made some friends, particularly
with some large firms that I knew at the time, and I learned about this idea of-- prevalent
among investment management firms-- about seeking to understand the investment objectives
of their clients, and risk parameters, so to speak, and designing some kind of a portfolio
that is suitable to their needs. At the time, it sounded really wonderful to
me, because it was very structured and it made a lot of sense. I've since figured out that it's nonsense. I had one or two friends among a Swiss bank
in New York and I went to them for help. I figured out how securities traded, how they
do this, how banks settle securities, and delivery against payment, and this sort of
thing. And then I came across this idea of value
investing, the Graham-Dodd and Warren Buffett type of things, that every American comes
across from time to time. I really was not aware of anything other than--
and I began reading some of these great investors and others. I was fascinated with the idea of value, as
defined by such value practitioners, only because it made sense, theoretically. But it was a different world, and then came
the crash of 2000, 1987, if you remember, which did not really affect me a great deal
because I had no exposure to the equities market. But then it created opportunities to invest,
to deploy capital in 1988. And then you have these great opportunities. I had the great opportunity to find and to
meet firms at their genesis of what later became the technology issue. But the problem is that I always knew I was
operating in a vacuum of sorts, without really guidance as to the fundamentals of things. I always wondered what was the nature of money. We measured our wealth in terms of money,
but I couldn't figure out what money was in itself. I had questions about really fundamental things
about the nature of interest rates. And then I discovered economics in the Austrian
tradition and the classical liberal tradition, and I began reading. And it changed my perspective a great deal,
not in that economics makes you a different, better investor, but it gives you a light
with which to see the furniture in the middle of a room in the dark. Right. That's more or less. Right. I borrowed this from James Grant. So I became concerned with the nature of risk,
the nature of value for what it was. I became aware that the quantification that
was largely embedded in the financial sector was not really necessary. And I felt that the only way to protect this
capital-- and I had these kind of portfolios that were standard back those days. They used to call them a balanced portfolio,
if you remember. And I had defined their work around this idea
of capital preservation, back in those days when capital preservation meant the austerity
of a bank trust department. You are a fiduciary and you do things from
fear of failure rather than cognizance of this is the right thing to do. But the idea of owning bonds and recapitalizing
the income and having a first class collection of equities, for example, and then taking
part of this what remains and making some meaningful speculations and things that matter,
overall gave you a tremendous advantage. And so the results were wonderful, but I didn't
really understand quite why. I felt, also, that this idea of organizing
an investment portfolio around these so-called unique special needs of each individual family
was intellectually not quite consistent with reality. Because in essence, there's no need to shape
an investment portfolio around a particular person's idea of risk, because people's idea
of risk is not necessarily real. Risk, to most people, is the uncertainty of
the unknown, the prices are going to break down, or something like that. To me, the risk was the idea of losing their
capital permanently with no ability to ever recover. So I went to the 10, 12 families I had at
the time and I said, I've changed my view about investment management. And henceforth, I'm going to have one investment
policy that I think is appropriate to all, and that is protecting and enhancing and deploying
this capital permanently. But the only issue is the time preference. You have to have horizon. You have to have a purpose to this capital
long-term. And they all said, OK. So we scrapped the old investment management
agreements and then set up new ones. I think that was a necessary growth and a
change, because as you learn more things, you become able to acquire understanding of
what it is you have, what it is you face, better than you had before. What did that change in strategy do to your
portfolios? Did you find it completely changed the composition
of them? Or did you kind of tinker around the edges,
but really, it just gradually evolved over time? Was there a sudden, OK, now we've changed
the mandate, the portfolio has to change considerably. Well, starting at about 1996, '97 or so, I
never saw these as a portfolio in the sense that the word is used today. I saw this as a collection of assets in the
form of securities having a purpose, each of the components having a subpurpose of it
own. And when you start seeing it this way, you
become completely uninterested in what others think about matters. The idea of having x percent in industrials
and y percent here, and overweighting these and underweighting that. It's just complete madness. It doesn't make any sense, any more than a
car manufacturer thinks that he has to have x percent of an automobile in glass or y percentage
in steel, and et cetera. It makes no sense. So every company has a purpose. It did change things somewhat because it allowed
me to focus on what I thought was value in the sense of irreplaceability. So you take a replaceable capital and deploy
it to irreplaceability assets. But bonds remains still the hard core of the
thing. The thing with bonds is that I had two kinds
of bonds that I invested in, governments and junk. Right. I never quite bought in the corporate world. Junk in the sense that it was not rated. Yeah.Back in those days, in order to rate
a bond, you had to pay money to the rating agency, and many small issuers would do that. So oftentimes you found issues that had $200
or $300 million in outstanding debt, unrated. And because of that, it sold. Oftentimes, it changed hands. Extremely, incredibly good yields. Real yields, in fact. We had real yields back then. Yes, I remember those days. I think our children will never know what
that is. Yeah, I think so. But then came the period of 1995, '96, '97,
where-- monetary policy has always played a role in financial matters, but all of a
sudden the monetary policy became the driver and industrial activity took a backseat to
financial activity. That was the beginning, I think. Maybe I will disagree on that about the timing,
but prices of securities were going up, independent of economic results or economic activity. And that's mostly in the United States, but
the rest of the world followed along with the American policy. At some point, prices became untethered from
the reality of the situation. And I saw this in, possibly, in 1998, and
I became certain that there must be an error, and the
error must be either outside or it could be mine. I couldn't see the fact that the world had
changed. And I went through a period of soul searching
because, I felt, perhaps, I was too old-fashioned. I had too many rigid ideas and the world was
changing. Remember, those were the days of Mr. Greenspan,
who advocated a complete revolution in productivity, and other such factors. And I asked myself, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps what I believe is wrong, and perhaps
everyone else is right. And now, it seems insignificant, but back
then, it was an enormous burden on me, because if I were wrong, that means my actions, or
inactions, would have an effect on other people's savings. So I had to do something about it. What you do in this case is sort of like when
you get lost on the road and you don't know where you are. You might have a map. The map doesn't help you unless you know where
you are. Right. Right? So you have to retrace your steps in some
way and go back to the very basics and try to rethink the basic assumptions of what is
real and what is not. Most of us, when we are younger, we want to
believe the authorities. We want to believe the rating agencies. We want to trust government statistics, or
authorities of all sorts. And it happens as you grow older, particularly
in a setting like this, where you become convinced that they all lie, and everything is phony
and everything is false. And I mean everything. Yeah. Everything. So you go back and retrace your steps. And I did that, and I did that with some friends
and I rediscovered the fact that I was right. The whole economic system-- financial system,
rather, not economic-- as we knew it, it was false. That gave me a great deal of courage to acquire
the kinds of things at the time that no one wanted, and realize a lot of gains that were
gained in the previous 15 years. Yeah. And what people didn't want at the time was
oil. It was copper, coal, gold, silver, and German
government bonds. Right, yes. So by the time the system came to a crashing
halt in 2001, '02, '03, whatever it was, it became obvious that my sentiment about the
relative value of this financial crisis was correct. But then it started a new era, where we re-inflated
the system somehow. And so all I'm saying to you is that we have
gone, in my own brief lifetime so far-- 30 years of practice-- we have gone from booms
to bust to booms and busts. Now, if you are merely in front of a Bloomberg
machine and you think that you can anticipate these matters and you can anticipate interest
rates and foreign exchange rates, you're deluding yourself, because no one really knows when
the next boom or bust will take place or where. But the problem comes in not trying to impress
your customers, but trying to protect what you have spent years accumulating. How do you do that? That has always been difficult throughout
the ages, but it has become phenomenally more difficult, nearly impossible, if you practice
within the framework that you have been used to all these years. Think about that. No, I agree. When you went through the soul searching period,
back in the the late '90s. And you went away, and you sat down for a
weekend, and you really went through every assumption that you made and stress tested
it. First of all, to come out of that sure that
you're right and everybody else is wrong, that takes a lot of character, a lot of selfconfidence,
and a lot of real belief, real belief, that you came out knowing that. And you acted accordingly. You, essentially, sold everything in your
portfolios. I mean, that's taking action after a lot of
soul searching. Few people would have the courage to do that. Your investors, your customers, obviously,
they put their trust in you. And here you are coming back to them saying,
OK, everything I've been doing has to change. How did they react to that? You've built up a very strong bond relationship
with these people by doing the right thing over so many years. Do you find that making such a drastic change
causes some of them to say, Tony's lost the plot? Or do people, having seen your track record
and seen your performance say, wow, this is serious? Well, first of all, it is their capital and
they have a right to find someone else to help them. I have no monopoly on ideas. I think one or two perhaps did. But I think I have always been eager to communicate
this framework, the foundation of the principles, or the framework that motivates actions. In 1999, I worked very hard to produce and
make a speech to our clients at the time. And I wanted to show that the seeming prosperity
that existed-- because if you go back and look at, everything seemed to be so extraordinary
at the time. It was an illusion. And this is very difficult to see, because--
I wrote my speech and I borrowed from James Grant's, the title of his book, The Trouble
With Prosperity, which he makes the same point. You have this apparent prosperity, but unless
you examine its causes, you don't know to what extent it is real or it's a delusion. If you gave me your American Express card
and go out on a buying spree, and I can acquire all kinds of goods, and everyone can see how
wealthy I am because I'm wearing wonderful clothes, I'm driving a great car. In fact, I'm adding to the GDP. Right. But no one quite knows that the money has
been borrowed from your credit card, right? And to the extent that I don't have to pay
it back, then it's real. Words like integrity are thrown around like
confetti these days, but I was captivated by Tony's framework and the clarity and the
simplicity of his thinking. Tony's a deep-thinking, principled man, trying
to assemble a collection of assets which cannot only endure, but also withstand the pressures
exerted upon them by time and turbulence. And it struck me that perhaps this second
definition of integrity, the notion of a soundly constructed, durable, an unimpaired portfolio,
has been lost in a world where monthly performance has become the holy grail, and investor's
time horizons have been compressed, in many cases to the point of becoming a hindrance
to effective money management. Tony's ideas around endurance and permanence,
with both capital and the assets selected to represent it, fascinated me, and I wanted
to dig deeper into how his framework evolved and how he thought about building such a collection
of assets. You have this way of investing in permanence
and endurance, and things that have been there and will be there for a long time. So just, if you can, describe how you think
about that, and how you go about identifying companies and people that you would invest
in. In the beginning of the QE period, the global
QE period, I became convinced that the world, the system, was going to destroy the nature
of money itself. I became convinced that the rules of the game
had changed completely. When the rules change, the basic framework
with which you make a decision needs to change. I remember back those days, post-2008, 2009,
'10, '11. Back in those days, virtually every economic--
financial agent, not economic-- wished that things would go back to normal. They thought that the pre-2008 was normal,
which is not too error the truth. But when the rules of the game change, the
process with which you make decisions, the process with which you act, the value of information,
the value of inputs, must change with it. I think that two things change. Not only the rules of the game change, but
the expectations of people were not commensurate to the reality that existed. So I felt, as perhaps others did, that the
time had come for me to hang my wings, so to speak, and leave the game. I would not want to participate in an environment
in which I had to do things because they were expected rather than I thought was the right
thing to do. But the second most important thing that happened
to me is that, as a result of that, I began thinking about, if the rules of the game have
changed enough, I cannot trust anything. If you don't trust financial accounts, if
you don't trust the ratings reports, if you don't trust the government, if you don't trust
the press, if everyone lies to you, literally-- sort of like going to a restaurant where everything
on the menu was poisoned, but you're hungry. Right. Right? You have to do something. And what you can do is exit the system, just
exit completely. The single thing that matter to me, if I am
involved in a situation where, honestly, I don't know what is real from what is not,
I have to start re-examining what is real, what is really real versus what is not. People talk about outstanding companies. The word is used often by value investors. The question is what is an outstanding company? People talk about good management. What is a good management? No one can really define that. People judge others and make value decisions
with respect to so-called equities on the basis of the success of the stock price. I began thinking about what is it that is
important. And one of the things that I felt really,
even though I lived in Europe at the time and I had left in America, there is something
extraordinary that takes place, and that is we in America, and I say we, are quite keen
to like what is faster and what is bigger and what is better. So often growth for the sake of growth overwhelms
our modulation and our actions. We think of growth stocks. We think of growth industries. We even use the word to grow, to grow earnings,
which is to grow the company, et cetera. But what if these measurements were wrong? What if really what mattered is something
other than bigger and better? The second mental observation I made was that
what really mattered was not that, but the idea of enduring, endurance, the idea of durability. I began looking at investments we owned that
had a history of 100, 150, 200 years. And you ask yourself, how could this have
survived that long? What were the ingredients that have contributed
to their permanence? Permanence is an illusion. There's not really a fixed, where there's
no such thing as permanence in our world, but it's something we perhaps strive to. And I think endurance is a better word to
describe what I'm saying. And all my life up until that point, I've
been examining the idea of failure. Failure on the part of others had been the
principal expert from which I learned what not to do or how not to think or what to examine
or not. I began thinking of those who survived. We have survived the test of time. Again, as a way of a textbook, thinking of
those ingredients that about allowed them to adapt to changes, survive wars, inflations,
et cetera, the people, histories, generations, et cetera. And it's hard to recognize those ingredients
that allows a few to survive and endure. Because if I'm going to protect earnings or
savings that have been earned in prior years for the future, whether it's for future consumption
or a future generation, I have to deploy them in a manner that is consistent with such enduring
characteristics. And so that was a monumental revelation to
me, that some people have survived and have adapted and have grown. But many of these companies are, of course,
privately held and they would never wish to be listed on the stock exchange. But others are listed, but only nominally,
in the sense that they once had an offering some 50, 60, 100 years ago, and they still
have a few shares owned by non-family members. And I discovered that I owned a few of these
things, for reasons that were not purposeful. So I began focusing on what endures and what
is real, independent of the financial world completely. And so what did you find? Because we do live in a financialized world,
and finance for finances sake, and investing has become all about making money, not necessarily
capital preservation, not necessarily income. It's become, which stock is going to go up
the most in the next six months to a year, or whatever my timeframe is? What did you find? When you had this monumental moment and you
started looking into these companies, what was it that you found? The first principle I operate from is the
idea of exclusion. I exclude whole swaths of things from my universe
of things. I think that, in the whole world, there are
probably 150, 200 listed companies that I would even consider owning a piece of. It's a completely different way of looking
at the world. Well, they were all in my universe already. I think that when you start examining what
it is you own-- what happens if you're on a ship that is going down, and you and your
cabin men, you have five minutes to get out, to get up to the deck. You look at your possessions that are sitting
in your cabinet. You say, what's worth taking with me? Right. Not very many things, is it? And this is what I did, in essence. Now, the thing is that if you do this with
respect to your own savings, it's one thing. But if you do this in an institutional setting,
where other people are involved, that's a little bit more difficult. Because not only must you deal with the idea
of what is right with respect to the capital you are being entrusted, but you have to be
concerned also with the expectations of other people, or the expectations of others. And this is quite significant, because I think
that one of the things that is missing, and one of the things that I have discovered,
is that there is a substantial distinction between people who are investors and people
who are owners of businesses. An owner in a business is far more interested
in the survival, the first instance, than its necessary monetary value. No owner of a business wakes up every morning
asking himself what he's worth. He doesn't know what he's worth. He's concerned with his products. He's concerned his employees. He's concerned with his suppliers. She's upset with his customers. To do that, you have to have a time preference
that is different from other people. If you only own things that are quoted, you
look at the quotation machine to give you confidence in the fact that hey, I made a
great decision yesterday, this thing went up. Right. You have a falsity in your understanding. You're an investor. You're in something, hoping that it will go
up. You are making decisions based on expectations
of what you think other people's expectations are likely to be, based on their framework. An investor is really one who generally will
acquire something, hoping he will sell it at a higher price. And so all of the calculations, and all of
the pseudo intellectual activity that goes along with it, is based on this idea of price--
is this price high or low-- relevant to what other people are going to think of it next
year. What is it likely to be next year, and why,
et cetera. Owners don't do this. They're interested in building substance. They're interested in building the productive
base of the company, they're recapitalizing the earnings, or whatever. So the focus on wealth creation is different
from that of an investor as an owner. It is difficult for an investor to be an owner
because you cannot have immediate liquidity. If you and I owned a big farm where we grow
carrots, we can't sell part of it tomorrow because we want to finance a trip around the
world. Right. And also, there's another element that is
of significance here, and that is that there's a very large gap in perception and temperament
between an American, and perhaps, an English speaking view of the world from, say, a continental
European temperament view of the world. I'm not familiar with the Asian world at all. I've stayed out of it. I can't do everything. The idea of leveraging a balance sheet to
buy back your shares so your earnings per share go up is completely foreign where we
are, for example. It just doesn't happen, yet it is a financial
tool in America. The idea of having a fragile balance sheet
for the sake of a higher gold price doesn't lend itself to the idea of ownership. An owner is really, very concerned with his
balance sheet. Yeah. In fact, the balance sheet is perhaps more
important than his income statement. His ability to endure and survive is based
on the strength of his balance sheet. And the nature of the assets on the balance
sheet is not just assets, but the nature of the asset. And so on account of the convenience of the
English language, we speak in general terms about financial matters and equities, et cetera,
but the framework with which different people in different countries make different decisions,
in general, on a generalized basis, is very, very different. For us, it's even more difficult because we
have shareholders from some 30 countries around the world. All have perhaps different cultural and different
business expectations and framework. But the important thing is that they are largely
like-minded to what we aim to achieve. As I said to someone recently, it's akin to
the idea of if you are a captain of a ship, it's nice to know that all of the passengers
on board your ship are going to that same destination. Well, that's where they wish to go and that's
where you started out going, and so they will judge you eventually by having gotten there,
rather than perhaps how long it took, because you avoided certain weather, or other such
things. By the same token, this like-mindedness, I
have come to conclude that it is a necessary ingredient even in the deployment of capital. And that is, if I am interested in acquiring
a 5%, 10% of your enterprise as a participation, I want to be absolutely certain that the motivation
that you have as an owner and manager is similar to that of mine. I have an interest in you making the kind
of decisions that will have an impact on the company 20, 30 years from now, rather than
next quarter or next year. So if your objectives and if your motivation
is different than that of mine and the capital that I deploy, then at some point, I'm going
to be disappointed. So like-mindedness, whether it is in a marriage,
in a business, or in any enterprise, a principle and important factor in doing the right thing
in the right way. Leonardo da Vinci once said that simplicity
is the ultimate sophistication. And as I listen to Tony talk about the carefully
laid foundations of his investment framework and what he looks for, in terms of both assets
in which he may want to take an ownership stake, and the families that he is the captain
allows to board his metaphorical ship, I realize that, at the end of the day, the simplicity
of how Tony invests affords him the luxury of being able to do so in a way that few professional
managers today can. I do what you would do with your own capital
as an owner of that capital. Yes. The only thing I have is that I have purposefully
extracted myself and our team and our organization from the financial world. That's all I've done. So when you extract yourself from it, your
vocabulary changes. Your practice changes. Your philosophy changes. Everything changes. Yeah. You know the fellow Nicholas Taleb? Yup. Who wrote this famous-- he's written this,
in my opinion, one of the most extraordinary books I've ever read called Antifragile. Yes. And in it, to many people, it would be a rambling
thing, but it is the most extraordinary analysis of those factors that lead to this kind of
issues that we talked about, the ability to survive, this robustness, or the ability to
actually gain strength from a difficult environment in which you are, this anti-fragilitism. Anyway, these ideas have always existed in
life, have always existed in the course of events, have always existed in industry. The people who do things where they don't
exist is the financial. So in order to understand them and appreciate
them and embed them in your own thinking, you have to exit the financial world completely. Yeah. That ability to own something, really own
it for the long-term, has been taken away by monthly liquidity and by how many basis
points did you miss the benchmark by what I'm going to redeem. That has really made most people doing what
you do, as stewards of other people's savings, it's taken away the ability you have to own
things. It’s true. You can't own something for a month. This is really true. That is called renting. But earlier, I talked to you about the idea
of like-mindedness, for example. And so I'm serious about this, in a sense
that I want to own a participation. I don't call it a stock or equity. I want to own a business participation in
a business that is run by owners whose motivation is the same as mine, who are responsible to
their family and to their community and to the capital that they employ, as much as I
would have been if I owned the same enterprise. So instead of owning 100%, I own 2%, 3%, 4%,
5%, 10% Sure. But the missing 78%, 89%, 90% is owned by—One
or two families. Yeah. Who have owned it for 50, 100, 150, 200 years. I can sleep very well at night, which I think
is more important than eating well. Right. You can go without food, but you can't go
without sleep. It also adds to the idea of what I said I
consider important, is the enduring value of something. So when you think of value simply in financial
terms of price-- price earnings, ratio, a price to book ratio-- all of these are accounting
terms. They also reflect what happened in the past. So traditional EBITDA and price to earnings
ratios, and all the things that people fixate on, and guidance. You and I have spoken previously about guidance
and what happens when a company misses a guess they made about what might happen at some
point in the future. Right. How do you look on that sort of stuff? Well, EBITDA is not traditional. It existed when I was a young man. Sure. And the only reason EBITDA is around is on
account of the ability to finance acquisition to the credit. We're an all for credit creation or there
wouldn't be EBITDA. Second, the real owners do not think of the
value of business as a multiple of the cost to generate before everything. He says earnings before everything is so BBA. Right. Second, the idea of earnings, if you really
quite think about it, is very important. Earnings are very important. A company must be profitable. And equally as much, it has to generate cash. Profitability cannot be related only to accounting
entries. Yup. But even though this is the case, the idea
of profitability on any one period to another is really a function of the oftentimes temporal
events. And so a price to earnings ratio is actually
quite meaningful, somewhat, but it's not really so essential, in terms of value. So we don't really pay much of any attention
to that. I do want to see a recapitalization of earnings. So I think, to us, perhaps earnings before
interest and tax is a larger-- it's perhaps more important, in the sense that it incorporates
balance sheet components. But also the compounding of that earnings
to book value per share is a far more important indicator of a company's ability to compound
it, because that's really what wealth is. Wealth is the compounding of earnings. And you acquire machinery and equipment to
allow you greater freedom in adding to that pile. So you take from existing earnings and add
to it. This is really the nature of capitalism, the
ability to satisfy the needs of a customer and create an enduring enterprise that adds
value to you. Self-interest is the foundation of all. Yes, right. Also, today, largely in the United States,
but this is increasingly more common here in this continent, the emphasis is placed
on the income statement, often to the complete exclusion of the balance sheet. I said to you earlier, I think the balance
sheet is probably more primary, engaging this idea of endurance. But not on its own alone. The components that are there must be examined,
the nature of the asset, and their economic value in the process. So I think that most owners of businesses
do exactly the same thing we're doing. I don't think there's any difference. No, but to your earlier point, you're aligned
with the businesses in your motivation. That's crucial. Now, you asked me about this nonsense about
earnings estimates and forecasts, and what do they call them? Forward guidance. Forward guidance. Yeah. I mean, I think that every CEO that I know
personally would tell you in person that they have no clue. And first of all, even if they did have a
clue, why would they give you forward guidance? There's nothing in it for them. No, no, there's something for them, if they
have the options involved. Well, you're exactly right. We're talking business owners here, not CEOs. I mean, what is the purpose for having forward
guidance? The only purpose is the price of the stock. And then therefore, the price of the stock
becomes a product, so then it becomes a game. So the focus is not on making something, the
focus is on how to make money. So the idea behind the business is money is
made as a result of doing something well. I mean, that's the principle foundational
aspect of it, is you do well financially as an individual because you contribute something
worth-- someone else is willing to pay what you contribute. So to the extent that the only objective is
to make money, or to acquire something of a purpose, or reselling it, or what have you,
you lose track of those essential components, of this idea of independence and endurance
that I spoke to you about. It becomes a game. Yeah. I have a very different view of what people
have towards the idea of diversification. You screen because you have certain-- now
computers. When I was a young man, we didn't have computers. And you couldn't do any of this stuff. You had value line in America, and other such
things in Europe. In fact, I invested in companies who, in Europe,
did not even want to give you their balance sheet accounts. We own 28 participations. They all have a purpose. Some of them are more core and more permanent
than others. Others are opportunistic or temporal, or whatever. The idea of going out to try to find more,
why would I want to do that, first of all? I once wrote a paper and I called it My Great
Broom Theory. And what I did is I went on the Bloomberg
machine and I said, give me all the companies in the world that are listed, the principal
listing. And the computer says, 78,522, for argument's
sake. I said, OK. Now, I said, I really don't know anything
about Africa, the Middle East, and say, South America, and some places. So I just wanted to reduce it to companies
that are in North America, Western Europe, and perhaps Australia, New Zealand. Computer's says, OK, now you've got 48,226. OK, that's good. And then you say, OK, now give me companies
that are financially solvent. That means they have a right a current ratio--
at least on the current ratio basis-- of at least 1. It says 20,500 something. I said great. Now I said to myself, I would invest in nearly
anything, nearly anything, except for businesses that are finance related-- banks, insurance
companies, mortgage companies. They're not interesting. Yeah. Take out all those companies. OK, now you've got 10,500 and something. All right, now, I said to myself, I really
want to own something in a firm that is manageable, or it's owned by-- so take anything away over
$10 billion of market cap. OK, and anything under, say, $100 million
in market cap. Just give me something. 8,500. OK, now I said, give me companies who are--
this is true, you can do that today, or some variation thereof-- that pay a dividend of
more than one penny per share, at least one penny. I want some dividend, right? Another thing. Give me companies that have, I don't know,
a debt to equity ratio of no more than x, another thing. Ends up that you end up with maybe 250, 300
out of all those. And those are in all industries. Yeah, sure. Now, the possibility of finding anything worthwhile
in there, it's really remote, I mean, at any one point in time, right? Yeah. But what do you do is you learn about business. Not about stocks, but about business. You learn the food business, the fertilizer
business, engineering. You learn about specific endeavors, and you
acquire an understanding-- a businessman who grows, say, carrots. I'm using this example. Yeah. He's completely uninterested in spending time
learning about semiconductors. Because no matter how much he knows, he will
not ever know what could go wrong. He knows carrots. He knows what can go wrong in the carrot business. He knows the components that contribute to
successful carrot business. So you can never tell me that there's a young
man 25 years old, however many degrees he may have from Harvard, who can sit in New
York and know what can go wrong in some biotech business in Japan or some machinery business
in Spain. He sees things superficially on financial
information, on a superficial-- look at what it looks like, or what it has looked like. When you buy for the purpose of selling, you
don't really need to understand what can go wrong. You see everything in terms of price. That’s very true. So we have a relatively important stake in
the business of salmon farming, for argument's sake. Well, not just myself, perhaps, but we have
a team that knows, more or less, everything there is to know about salmon farming literally
everywhere in the world. We know what can go wrong. We know where the strengths are. We know where the abilities, where skill is. And not just merely from what will happen
in the price of say, salmon, today or tomorrow, the demand or supply of it, but in terms of
those ingredients that contribute to the long-term viability of a business. But we also pay to understand what could go
wrong. What could go wrong is really more important
than what can go right, because over time, even a marginally good business will profit,
will do well. So you really need to understand, you don't
know what anything is worth until you know what can go wrong. Because we value things differently because
we weigh components differently. There's no such thing as valuation metrics
based on some standardized formula, unless you see it in connection with other issues. So when you extract yourself from the financial
world and you say, what is this salmon company worth? What if you were private? Well, you don't have metrics there, or you
can use elicit company metrics. But what do I pay for this? And what do I pay in that genuine economy,
not in a distorted economy that we have today, where the cost of money is zero. So today, valuations of businesses have been
distorted on account, again, of these distortions in money. And so this is a very difficult time to have,
and this is why it's so important to have your own subjective way of measuring and assessing
value. And part of this method includes the value
that is imputed by elements of risk that are unique to a particular business, a particular
geographic location, and competitive advantage or not. So it's simple, but it isn't easy. As Tony so beautifully put it, when you buy
for the purpose of selling, you don't really need to understand what can go wrong. You see everything in terms of price. Having a clear understanding of the kind of
business you want to have an ownership in is fast becoming a lost art. Today, the focus is almost exclusively on
price and the ability to make a profit on a specific position, rather than finding an
enterprise that offers a robust, sustainable revenue stream to an investor. Finding such businesses requires the diligence
and discipline to look in places that most mainstream investors shy away from, but it's
the very fact that the times of business which meet Tony's criteria are so rare, that creates
the value opportunity. So let's talk about scarcity. Let's get back to that, the point of scarcity
and why it's so important. Well, I should tell you that in 2002, we formed
an investment fund, which largely, over the course of the next four or five years, I abandoned
the private-- being an investment counselor-- and just focused on this one fund. And in 2010, we changed the character of this
to being more akin to a holding company. But the issue is it became very quite important
when you are dealing with-- you're no longer dealing with families, where every decision
you made had an impact of them directly, because we knew who they were. But you were dealing with a pool of capital
belonging to the very same people you had. Whether it was an error or not, I had made
this sentiment. I was giving the sentiment out that we would
look after your savings, whatever you put into this investment company, as if it was
the only money in the world you had. This was a wonderful thing because it not
only focused our views on doing the right thing for the whole, but it allowed a number
of people to really keep into this investment company the vast bulk, and some cases, all
of their financial savings or wealth. But this kind of policy does not lend itself
to popularity, because people want to put you in a box, and they want to put a label
on you. And an honest investment practice does not
lend itself to labels. And they want to label you according to some
predefined idea of what you are. You are a value investor, or this, or the
other. And so it became really important in 2010,
'11 or so-- I don't remember the year-- to create not a slogan, but a defining characteristic
of the practice that would allow someone to focus on the essentials of it. And we defined it by the word scarcity, and
that scarcity is the most important law in economics, in that no one can have all that
they want. Scarcity is a natural law. It's just part of life. There's scarcity in material goods, in resources-
- everywhere you look at the scarcity, in real savings, in terms of money, other than,
perhaps, credit is being created. But there's not just scarcity only in visible,
tangible resources, there's also scarcity and skill sets. There's also scarcity among the kind of characteristics
and character in men that you and I would consider to be attractive. So scarcity, in all of its permutations, is
an important ingredient in any action that deploys capital for the future. What makes a Van Gogh painting valuable is
not the canvas or the paint, but the fact there is only one. By the same token, there's a second component,
which we call permanence. I sometimes think we should have called it
endurance, but nonetheless. It's the idea of creating a framework not
only within your collection of investments, but by extension within each investment, the
nature of the investment itself, and the people, the participation that it represents, in the
kind of policies and the kind of practice and the kind of purposeful behavior that is
designed to endure, rather than merely grow. You can grow but become fragile and then die. That's not interesting to me. So if my mandate is to protect capital from
both inflation, taxation, and bad decisions, then the idea of seeking to find endurance
is very important. It's really important. And the third part was the idea of independence. So it was scarcity permanency. And independence is even of significant value
as well in the sense that much of what we see today in our world is interdependent today. We depend on so many external factors. We depend on suppliers. We depend on the light coming on when we turn
on the switch. We take it for granted that the light will
come on. We depend on the water company. But more so, in a business sense, we depend
on, perhaps, key suppliers, that often, perhaps, their situation is not as strong as we think
it is. We have competitive pressures that come as
a result of competition that would not have been there had there not been credit. So credit creation. The debasement of money has created an environment
in which there is falsity within the competitive arena in which companies operate. And in order to survive, they have to, more
or less, adapt to the conditions. So there's dependence on government for subsidies,
or for tax abatements, or other such things. Sometimes there's dependence on one customer. So dependence makes a system fragile. So the more independent an organism is from
external weaknesses, the more likely is to add to its endurance, or its strength. So independence is very valuable, and is actually
costly. There's an element of freedom. Freedom doesn't come free. You have to work at it. The threats to your freedom and to your liberty
and to your independence are many, and they change from time to time and from apple to
apple. But a successful practice in which seeks to
protect, preserve, and enhance the patrimony over many years is one that must be concerned
with these three components. We think with words. The ancient Greeks said that the revisiting
of definitions is the beginning of wisdom. So today, we use words oftentimes without
really thinking about their significance. And oftentimes, words we use today have a
different modern meaning than the word had been used in an earlier era. So we have to be careful about words. I actually don't use the word wealth much
at all. I use the word savings. And by that, I have a very precise meaningful
for savings, that which is left over for production after consumption, and the accumulated results
of that savings over time. I think that people make the error of considering
anything with a bid to have value. Well frankly, many of the things that have
a bid on, they may have financial value but have no economic value. So distinguishing that which has economic
value from that which is just a claim or a loan or promise, is just merely a beginning. Because even that which has real economic
value, oftentimes, its value is fleeting or is temporal. This is why I think that, more than any other
aspect of life, in investment practice, you and I have to be incredibly discriminating,
to a point of absurdity, actually, because there are very few things that would fit in
this very narrow and very constrained view of the sanctity of savings that I think is
important. You appear to be an outlier in the modern
way that people think of managing money. But the truth is, you go back to an age before
the noise, before this cacophonous din that surrounded money management. You're a throwback. You're a throwback to real money management
as it used to be, when people didn't have 70,000 stocks to choose from. They had to invest their capital, they had
to invest their savings, in a way that was restricted by the universe they were presented
with. All you've done is go back to those first
principles you talked about earlier on. But to people watching this, you'll seem like
some strange beast doing things in a strange way.Well, I think there are a bit others. But there are very few. And in fact, I think there we're few is because
this kind of practice is not really what is wanted. There's no demand on the part of man-- a man
with money in his pocket-- for this sort of practice, largely on account of the fact,
but not only, that man's time preferences changed over the years. It's hardly anyone who works to provide for
another generation. People want to consume what they have. They see their investments as an extension
of their current account. It isn't always true, but this debasement
of money has changed. It has had a moral impact on man's view of
his savings or his world. So there's really no demand for this at all,
very, very nominal and minimal. And I say this from experience. Sure. But what that does is it enables you to create
a practice, create an investor base of, to your point, like-minded people. Because they are so few, and guys like you
nowadays are so few, that eventually you find each other. And that creates itself a very robust practice
that gives you that time preference, that permanence of capital that enables you to
do what you do. The only way we would ever get permanence
of capital as other holding companies have is by listing our shares on a stock exchange
and making shareholder liquidity subject to exchange trading. That allows us to fix our capital base and
not our capital issue. Now, of course, we-- shareholders-- can trade
their shares with other shareholders or the company buys back a few from time to time. But capital changes. I mean, they are insignificant. I mean, we have maybe 1% a year change in
our capital. Right. It's just, by modern standards it's tiny. I think you are looking at the wrong thing
by saying I'm strange, in that there have been many families and others in the past,
particularly in Europe-- Americans, if you ask them about investment greats, investors,
for example, they can name Warren Buffett, for example, which is-- here on this continent,
there are many. And most of them are completely unknown, have
no interest in promoting themselves, and they have extraordinary records over generations
in creating wealth in the form of a family or a listed holding company. When you start thinking about enriching yourself
from the assets of those who are participants in your scheme, then you are no longer an
owner. You become-- really that becomes a business
in itself. For example, our capital base is about 330
million. If it was double, I would not make any money. I would not see myself or any one of our team. This is completely different from the world
in which funds and others operate, where the size of their capital pool is directly proportional
to their income. And very little of it has to do with long-term
results. Because people do come and go. No one sees annualized rates of return over
20, 25 years, because no one hangs around for 25 years. Right, sure.But for each family alone on a
personal basis, the results over 20, 25 years matter a lot. Finance gives you the tools with which to
deceive oneself, to make it seemingly complicated so you can razzle dazzle people and make them
think somehow you know more than they do, where on the average, the average man who
worked very hard for what he earns probably knows more than most investment advisers. Yes. No, it’s true. Yes. Well, this idea of industry first, finance
second, has been turned on its head. we don't think of-- we think of industries
in financial terms now rather than think of the industries themselves. What is the business? Who are the customers? That's been turned completely on his head. We now look at what are the earnings per share? What are the forecasts for the next 12 months? But this is really, truly an American observation. I mean this-- you cannot generalize this around
the world. In America, it is generally true. You won't find it among privately held firms. There are some extraordinary companies, American
privately held. But in the United States generally, a listed
company, their-- and I'm being unfair perhaps by generalizing too much-- but even with just
disclaimer, a listed company's principal business is their stock. Yes. Nothing else. What they do is an unnecessary complication
to the idea of the stock going up. And so because that's what the customers want. If there were owners in these firms, there
would not be any disputes about compensation. Right. Because an owner of a business knows very
much well how to compensate. An owner in a business doesn't take options
on its common stock. He owns it. This idea of sustainability, think about the
increasing use of the word sustainability. The more unsustainable the system becomes,
the more we talk about it. The idea of corporate responsibility has become
a very big business. Owners don't need to be reminded to be responsible. It is not uncommon for someone to be given
somewhat of a tip of some kind, perhaps watching CNBC or something and say, well, this must
be a great idea. I will put a $5,000, $10,000 in this and hope
it works. And they're likely to part with the $5,000,
or $10,000, or $15,000 on the basis of a very, very flimsy suggestion by someone, or just
a hunch, or a hint. The story is a real story about this man who
often did this sort of thing. But one day, he came to me, and he says, I
need your help. He says, there's going to be a dry-cleaning
store in our neighborhood and I have a chance to invest money. And I said, well, that's wonderful. He says, well, but I've got to do some research. So he says, I went around, found out that
the nearest dry cleaners is only 2 and 1/2 miles and they're very busy. So there's likely to be demand for this cleaning
shop. I also went to industry to find out what the
operating margins are for cleaning stores and what is the nominal labor component versus
the amortization, and equipment, and on and on. And so this man was a dentist, actually, he
was a educated man by nominal standard. The moment he had an opportunity to invest
in something that was not quoted, and he didn't really know what he would like to do, he became
fascinated with the idea of being an owner in a dry cleaners. But he saw the necessity of understanding
those ingredients that would otherwise contribute to the success or failure of this investment. Whereas on the other hand, because throwing
money on a tip is the kind of thing that allows you, well, the next day to sell it, or buy
more, et cetera. That liquidity gives you an excuse not to
want to know anything, not to understand anything. I think this-- for me, it was an incredibly
interesting example of a microcosm of a larger world. Again, I think when you look through history,
and people bought into their South Sea China, South Sea Company in London, they brought
in the Mississippi Bubble company in Paris some years ago, man has always sought to become
rich without work. I'm not interested in that. See, I'm not interested in the man who's already
rich, who's already earned something and he wants to keep it. Those are different people. Their needs are different. Their world is different. So if you have some money in your pocket,
or some ability, and somebody wants to become rich, there are a million places where you
can go gamble from Las Vegas, to everywhere, to Wall Street, to ETFs. There's just an umpteen number of ways. There are Bitcoins, Zipcoins. There's just everything. But for someone who has already acquired,
that has the fruit of past labors at hand, the tools with which you protect wealth are
different from the tools that are needed to create it to start with. And so the tools are different, the framework
is different, the objectives are different, the methods are different, the language is
different. I have a habit of revisiting decisions-- good
or bad-- over the years. And I go back and I ask myself, what is it
that I should have seen that I didn't? What was possible to see that one overlooks? I also ask myself, what could I have seen
that I didn't? What did I see and how did I focus on this
that others perhaps didn't? The idea behind this is to be able to separate
an element of luck and happenstance from skill. Now, of course, since then, now I'm making
a lot fewer decisions than I ever did in the past. You know, if I think back in those days, I
would make 20 or 30 decisions-- investment decisions, a year. Today I'll make one, maybe two on a very busy
year. Right. The ability, or the necessity to go back and
examine decisions is necessary because it adds, it hones your skills in understanding. Because what you see is-- I've come to the
conclusion that-- and perhaps we can talk about this at some point-- that the unseen
and the unmeasurable are more important than the other kind. And that has come from such observations over
the years. Things that kill you are often times things
that you cannot measure or you cannot see, generally with respect to people, perhaps. Understanding not just the notion of risk
itself, but the nature of, and the possible places from which the kinds of risks that
threaten a given investment may emerge, is crucial, and frankly, something which is given
far too little thought by the average investor today. In modern times, we distill risk down to a
number. And we call it volatility, because that's
easier for most people to quantify. But in doing so, we're ignoring the very nature
of risk itself. But as Tony and I walked in the snow, our
conversation turned toward something he feels is a vital component of any investment-- time
preference. This date farmer I met is Arab. And he had inherited an orchard, right? It's called an orchard? Yes. --of roughly about 1,000 trees. He showed me around. And he showed me something like 100 trees
that were recently planted. And I said to him out of curiosity, I have
this curiosity about, I said, how long will it take for this to bear fruit? And he says, well, this particular variety,
it will bear fruit in about 20 years. But that's not good enough for the market. It may be about 40 years before we can actually
sell it. I've never heard of this. I did not know this. Now, there are other date trees that could
produce faster. But anyway, so I said-- so all of a sudden,
it became odd. Because I looked at all these trees that were
being harvested. And you realize that he couldn't have possibly
planted them. Yes. He said, oh, yes, yes, yes, that was my grandfather,
and my father, great grandfather. It was fascinating. Why would a man do something today for which
he will receive no reward in his lifetime? The only reason he would do this if his time
preference is so low that he's concerned about his family's wealth a generation or two from
now. Because he receives no reward by planting
a tree that will have no— You know, in your world, they would call it an economic loss,
a loss of opportunity, or god knows what they would call it. But he saw the world differently. I'm in a supermarket and I see dates, I think
about this story now. And I'm sure there are other, similar kind
of situations. Everyone has heard me tell the story about
Antoine Fievet, the chairman of Bel-- Fromagerie Bel. And the first time I met him, something had
happened in the company that was notable. Anyway, so I said, I want to congratulate
you for something. I don't remember what it was. And he says, oh, Tony, you don't need to congratulate
me. I found myself in this family that several
generations built this wall. And I'm adding one or two bricks. And I'm going to pass it on to someone else. Think about what this man said. I mean, I was instantly in love with this
man. It made no difference if he made cheese or
made furniture. He had a perspective of what his role was,
a perspective of what his task was, that his mission was to protect, to preserve, and to
enhance what he was handed. It was not the business of quickly selling
it, and making money, and doing things. They do make a great deal of money. But they do make money as a result of making
great products. So how many people in the world can I find
that I can buy 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% of their business that think like that? Because that way I can sleep very well at
night. And I can assure you the capital that I command
and is deployed is going to be around 50 years from now. Correct. And we touched on it earlier, but this comes
back to people. This is-- you can find a company that looks
good, might come out of that screening you did when you got 78,000 companies down to
150. It then comes down to the people. It comes down, because let's face it, every
intergenerational company, I guess the biggest, potential pitfall is you get that one generation
where the kid comes in and he decides he wants a Ferrari instead of the family business. Sure. Absolutely. That's an unquantifiable risk. This is, in fact, the norm more than an exception. You probably-- you were a fund manager as
well, for a while. Yes, sure. Did you go visit and talk to people? I mean, this is not. Not as many as you. And not the same kind of people as you, because
these were big companies. Ah. Oh, yes, you're right. You ask them for their forward estimates. Yes. There you go. There you go. Something along those lines. A lot of that stuff was private. No, this has happened to me twice. Once happened in the United States. And the case I told you, it happened, you
know, here in Europe, where I'm visiting briefly with the man who runs the business who is
a member of a family who owns a large stake. And many times they are really involved in
the production of things. They are really not-- they don't drive a Rolls
Royce or a series 6 BMW. And so he says, how many shares you own of
our firm? I said, x. So I don't remember what it was. He said, by the way, what's our stock price
nowadays? Nowadays. Yes. Nowadays, yes. And he was genuinely curious. Because I mean, he could have found out. But it didn't occur to him that it was necessary
for him to know what the current price was. And so oftentimes you see, for example, let
me just give you-- I sometimes think about this. Yesterday, we have one holding in which someone
sold 14 shares. Right. The prior closing price was 505 euro. Yes? Yes. The new bid was 480, asking 540. Ask 540, bid 480. Somebody sold 14 shares at 540. The last price came down 2 and 1/2%. And I calculated that for the family that
owns the company that translates to something like 400 million euro worth of change. Right. Now imagine they were watching it. It is immaterial. For us, it was something like 600,000 of dollars
or euros, or I don't know what. But the fact is that the more often, the more
frequently you look at something, the more frequently you'll second guess why you own
it and what else you could own instead. Completely. It's important to know that you work for people
that are like minded with you. You know? I'm not doing this to become famous and rich. And so if there are-- if we have 100 and say
we have 117 shareholders in the firm, I want to make sure-- I want to know-- that at least
the majority of them understand what we do, appreciate what we do, and then I feel confident
in working for them. I mean, I really feel a sense of pleasure
in doing whatever we do for people who— If they were strangers, or if they were people
who were going somewhere else, or wanted something else, or wanted excitement in life, I mean,
we've been told many times, why don't you leverage the portfolio? Borrow money. I've never done this. Why don't you sell something short? I've never done this before. I don't even know how to do it. Why don't you buy this, or why don't you take
your reserves and buy treasury bills in, I don't know, Zimbabwe? The interest rate is higher. We don't do any of these things. If you're not happy, listen, there's so many
people that would be happy to play with your money. I mean, this is not a competition. But it comes down, once again, to people. You have to make a judgment on the investors
when they come in. They have to make an adjustment. Thsi is so rare. No. But they have to make an assessment of you. And then you have to make an assessment of
every management that you-- OK, you've got 28 investments. That's 28 investments you have to evaluate. Our shareholder turnover is much lower than
our portfolio turnover. Well, which itself is— I'm sure extremely
low. But there's a reason for that. And it comes down to people. It's because the people you invest in and
the people who invest in you make judgments that turn out to be, in the most part, correct
about those people. Right. So how do you-- as that judgment of people
is such an important component in both directions of what you do. It's also the hardest quantification to make
successfully, because they're people. Who really knows? Yes. It's also important that, for example, in
my case, I have a wonderful team. And I want to be able to pass on to another
generation the ideas that are most valuable. I mean, they all have their own personality,
and they have their own temperament and all that. So you want to pass on ideas that matter. And one of those ideas is the ability to judge
other men. And you can only do this with practice. And you can only do this by observing things. We have been known to make a completely reverse--
reversal-- on an investment we hold on the basis of a single sentence that was uttered
by a CEO or CFO that betrayed something that I would not want to have. So imagine you own the whole company, and
your president of your company or the financial officer comes in, gives you a report. And in that report, he says something that
you'd want to fire him on the spot. Right? Right. And you would. And you should. In my case, I only own 1%. You don't sit there and rationalize and say,
well, that's not what he meant. And the P ratio is good, and the IBITA is
good, and the prospects are great, so we'll hold it. No. You get out. I can tell you an incredible story. I don't mind telling you the name, or actually,
maybe I should. It's a company that at one time in Brazil,
it was the largest processor of chickens in the world. The company was called Sadia. And I went to visit them in Sao Paolo. Because this company not only produced chicken
for the local market, but they also sold the vast majority of breasts and other good components
of the chicken to markets in the Middle East, in Russia, and elsewhere. They generated a great deal of foreign income,
foreign exchange. They grew their own wheat to feed. They made their own chicken feed. They were exceptional. And there was a second generation. And one day I went to visit. And we owned a stake in it. And I visited with the CFO. The patriarch in the family was absent. He was not there. And it was sad because I wanted to meet him. The CFO said, ah, he says, if we had the ability
to have access to the banking system so that we can hedge our receivables from various
countries, then we can-- this was 2000 something-- we can make more money by being able to foresee. Because we can foresee foreign exchange rates. Only if we could work with an institution
that would work with us in the forward market. And the CFO insisted on telling me, spending
15 minutes telling me about this thing that had nothing to do with chickens. So I noted it. Two years later, it was in the news, Sadia
buys a 60% stake in a bank in Brazil. Within 30 minutes, our entire stake was sold
just on that announcement alone. Within two years, the company was insolvent,
out of business. Look it up. Why is it, I wonder, that stories such as
that of Sadia's demise seems so unsurprising today and yet Tony's response to that one
announcement about the company buying a stake in a bank catches one completely by surprise? Tony's logic is simple, his action in selling
his whole stake in the company completely justifiable. And yet it seems like a bold move instead
of a prudent, fiduciary action. This intense focus on the people responsible
for the stewardship of a company in which he has an investment is central to the way
in which Tony identifies potential places in which to deploy his irreplaceable capital. But sometimes, even with this level of attention
to detail, drastic and painful action can be required. How would you act if you owned the entire
thing? You walk into a business, and you meet the
head of the business, or the head of development, or the head of anything. Ask yourself, if I own this entire thing,
would I hire this guy to run it? Right. Yes. That's a great question. Now where is the formula to tell you that? You're absolutely right. But you have to-- it's your knowledge. You have to look them in the eye. And if the answer is no, why would you want
to own 1,000 shares? I don't disagree. But how do you make that judgment without
going to meet the man and talking to them. And him, maybe on another day, you may have
had a completely different conversation with him. Sometimes you don't have to meet them. Sometimes what you can do is you can look
at actions over 20, 30, 40 years, 50 years and be absolutely certain that in the right
time, they made the right decision for the right reason in the right way. And they've done this all their lives. You don't need to meet them. We have a fairly large investment in France,
and I have never met-- actually, two-- I've never met the people involved. But I am extremely assured-- as much as I've
done everything else-- that they are the right people doing the right thing in the right
way. I'm sure. On the other hand, I must tell you about an
unbelievable error in judgment we made because we bought a large stake in a company that,
by all standards, had enormous value in it. And the people who run it said all the right
word. Blah, blah. And it was not until a year or two later that,
through sleuthing, really, we came to conclude that what they said, and what they did, and
how they acted were completely different. And so no matter how valuable the company
was, we exited. And it was actually quite painful, mostly
do my own ego. Of course. Yes. Of course. Because I had invested a lot into understanding
this. Today, you're suffering from a culture of
unaccountability. Look how many times you've heard recently
the word transparency. Everybody says this, huh? When I was a young man, no one really knew
the word transparency. When a company is owned by an owner, there
is no need for transparency. Right? Yes. When a company is owned by someone who is
responsible to the owner, that's all we need is a responsibility. We used to have this word. No? Now we have manufactured all this bureaucracy
to satisfy our nominal need that things are being reported, et cetera, et cetera. Every fraud in the world had an audited, financial
account. Yes. Everyone. So that doesn't mean anything either, does
it? Nope. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. This is an old business in making barrels
for wines and spirits. And the Francois family in France had controlled
it for years. But the son was a bit more ambitious. And he saw opportunities in an industry that
was being consolidated, principally, on account of incompetence, particularly cooperages in
Scotland. Because it may sound a simple thing making
a barrel, but it actually isn't. It takes a lot of work, and you need to know
what to do with the wood, the components. You need to teach people how to do it. It's really difficult. But they're very traditional. For example, this company relied mostly for
most of its life on demand for barrels in the Bordeaux and Burgundy regions in France. And in fact, they have, I think, all the market
there for that. But they've grown. Now, they have operations in Australia, in
California, in Scotland, in South Africa. Chile, I think. I'm not on top of all those details. But the point is that they have grown to be,
really, the largest company of its kind in the world, even though there are only, I don't
know, $250 million in size. And this is in a business that people will
consider boring. I mean, there's nothing sexy or exciting about
making barrels. But I tell you, they will be making the same
barrels 50 years from now, and they will be the very best at it. And there will be 3, 4, or 5 times the size
they are today. But that's durability. That's endurance that you talk about. Finding these businesses that people think
are boring because they don't leverage up the balance sheet, they don't chase growth,
they don't do all these things. Talking about durability and permanence, so
I have to bring up the subject of gold. Why do you have to? Well, because I feel like it's a permanent
asset. It's a durable asset. Why? Well, I'm going on 6,000 years of history. Maybe in one day it doesn't become permanent. Maybe one day it doesn't come durable. All the evidence so far point to it being
that way. Why are you asking me? You know far more about it than I do. I'm curious to see you views on it. Because I know you have owned gold. I suspect you probably still own some gold. But I'm curious as to how you think about
it within the framework that we've been discussing today. Because it's not a company. It's not-- there isn't a man whose eye you
can look into— It has no PE. It has no PE. It has no PE. It has a P, but not an E. Right, right. And the fact is that the P is in money, which,
itself, we don't know what it's worth. Well, I have had a fairly long history with
gold, starting in 1998. I've owned gold bullion for many years. I think at one time I saw it as being incredibly
mispriced. And I saw it as an anomaly, thinking that
somehow the market has-- occasionally, the market misprices certain assets. So what was it that made you think it was
mispriced? I had a curiosity about gold for the right
reasons for a long time. And I used to be an owner in Franco-Nevada
since 1996 or thereabouts. But I've never owned the bullion. And Franco was in the business of royalties. And it was an extraordinary business managed
by incredibly good people. But in 2001, I had a fortune to be a guest
of Gold Fields in Johannesburg. And as part of this thing, they gave us a
tour of several facilities. And I don't really know what mine we went
to. But I know at some point the man looked at
us. And he says, do you see this field over there? There are 10,000 people that work 2 and 1/2
miles down. And I stopped for a moment to consider the
logistics of providing air, food, water, or whatever living conditions for so many people
down there. And immediately I think of the capital that
it takes to do that. Well, I mean, this is not a small matter. And then they took us in this shaft-- this
elevator shaft-- that moves actually quite fast. And they took us all the way to the bottom
of this pit. And they gave us a tour of rock faces and
all that. And I remember we have this unbelievable feeling
as I was coming up the elevator some hour later that either the price of gold was mispriced--
it was selling at the time at $250, somewhere, give or take $10-- or all of this capital
that had been sunk here had to be written off completely and forgotten. And I thought of the idea that it was either
one or the other. There could not have been any rational solution
in the middle. Right. It's either with nothing or a lot more than
$250. That's correct. And I what I did is that I felt compelled
that this was the time to buy it. And I did not buy gold. I bought shares in goldfields. At the time, they were selling for $2 or something
or less. But a year or two later after the initial
rebound had taken place and goldfields were selling at $18 or $19, I decided that I would
own gold-- the physical metal-- for different reasons. I would own it. So I sold the equities. And I bought shares in GLD, which I subsequently
sold, because our shares in GLD for me did not represent ownership in gold. They represented the security that perhaps
reflected its price. I wanted to own the real thing, the same way
a farmer down here doesn't own cattle futures. He wants the real cattle. He owns cows, yes. So over the years, the component in gold in
portfolio, of course, the price went up from $250 to whatever, $1,600, et cetera, back
down to $1,200. Today it represents-- gold-- about 35% of
our capital. Physical metal. But I should tell you, I mean, I don't own
it with the idea that the price will go up. So don't ask me where the price is going or
when—No. I would never do that. Because you're right. It's unimportant. I own it because had I not owned gold today,
I would own treasury bills. I would own short-term, commercial paper. I would own cash deposits and other such things
to provide me liquidity. Because I think that, roughly, about 60-some
percent of our capital is permanently invested. Roughly, about 40%, of which 35% is gold,
is in liquid. I wanted liquid so I can exchange it for participations,
likely what we have, in the future at some point. And I think any good investment operation,
particularly it involves irreplaceable capital, must have embedded in it a source of continuity,
and substance, and reserves. So in years ago, I would not hesitate to buy
treasury bills, commercial paper, short-term bonds, time deposits. But I have come to believe that virtually
all of those things I've just mentioned, they're actually debt. When you deposit money in the bank, the bank
doesn't actually hold it in their vault there. It's a liability of the bank. When you buy a treasury bill, you're buying
somebody's debt. And you call it an asset. When you're buying a bond, it's actually a
debt. You call it an asset because it's got a CUSIP
number or an ISIN number on it. So I decided that I want my liquidity not
to be somebody else's liability. I want it to be an asset. No. OK. That's interesting—So gold gives me what? Scarcity. It gives me permanence. And it gives me independence from the financial
system. It gives me all those things—--all the things
you're looking for— --in these three things. Or look at it. Let's do a present day hypothetical. It is hypothetical, but still, let's give
it a try. But if you decided today, what would make
you exchange your gold for something today? I mean, I hate to say this to you today because
I don't want anyone to sort of quote me on it. But today the nominal price of gold is, in
fact, cheaper than it was when I first bought it in 2001. Now, if you buy it for the sake of profiting
from a price rise, there's really nothing wrong with this. And I'm sure there are, in fact, there are
many people in your organization who you've talked to who know far more about it than
I do. My sentiment about gold is very simple. It's something that I understand, something
that I hold in a vault that I can see, something that can be sold to anybody anywhere in the
world at a moment's notice, something no one actually owes me. It's not a claim on anything. It's not a promise for anything. And there's a sense of peace that I possess
by having financial strength that even central banks don't do. We own three tons of gold. And at one time it was more gold than virtually
every-- most-- central banks in the world own. Canada owns nothing, I think, or something. : I'm willing to bet a substantial size of
my assets that you don't own any Bitcoin, nor will you ever own any Bitcoin. Point is, I don't know what it is. I don't know where it is. I don't know what it looks like. I mean, they have these little pictures of
gold coins with a B on it. And they talk about mining it. So they've used all the elements-- superficial
elements-- of having some sort of tangible— I don't know what Bitcoin is. Where do we find one? Can I misplace it? Do I lose it? Where is it held? So I don't want to own things I don't understand. I don't care if it's going up. It makes no difference. From everything we talked about, I knew gold
must have had a place in Tony's portfolio. But even I was a little taken aback at just
how large a part it played. Upon reflection, however, and given the exceedingly
small universe of companies which meet these stringent investment criteria, it made more
and more sense to me that gold would be the perfect place to keep his liquid assets. A world away from gold, Tony's search for
long-term, investable opportunities requires an understanding not just of an overall industry,
or even individual business, but also of the various, component parts that come together
to create that which the world sees at face value. So I want to talk to you about something that
is a common thread in similar conversations we've had. And that's the idea of the structure of production. Because this is something that occurs time
and time again. And I'm interested in it because today people
think one step down the line. If an idea happens, they think, who's the
beneficiary? And once you get a sense of this structure
production, and some of the examples that you have of companies that you've found that
are 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 steps down the production line, just talk a little bit about that concept
and how you use that to identify companies. I don't think that we purposefully look for
such a standing. It's just a natural outcome of perhaps valuing
the idea of scarcity a bit more than others. For example, a lot of people could-- perhaps
I like to enjoy having a whiskey. But a lot of people do make whiskey. A lot of people make the glass and the bottle. But how many people make the machine that
makes the bottle? Only one. And you end up having a view that there is
scarcity and oligopoly in certain areas that have come as a result of some events or some
reasons that are economic positions that are impossible to compete with for a number of
reasons. So to the extent that these economic agents
are wise and they can use their position to do well, that idea of scarcity and technical
expertise or position adds to the enduring value of a company. I would not want to participate in the securities
of a company that does some commodity item, even if it might have a large label on it,
or some kind of a brand. Because the barriers to entry are fairly low
in most cases, or the general acceptance of such a product is subject to the seasonal
whims of the public, of the bias. By the same token, I'm not interested in acquiring
a stake in a company that provides aircraft transport, or train transport, or truck. Because they have no operating leverage. They're subject to inputs and costs that are
above and beyond their control. They are subject to government regulation. And they don't represent the substance that
I want to have. Now, they may be fine for other people, but
just not for me. On the other hand, I mean, we spoke earlier
about an investment we have EMS, in Switzerland. Here is a company that produces polymers. I mean, a lot of people can probably do the
same things they do. Nonetheless, here's a chemical company that
has operating margins that are unheard of in the chemical industry. But only in the sense that they take this
polymers-- polyamides, in this particular case-- to create products that solve problems
that no one has ever thought of, among the many products, in fact, they make the little
exciter that goes into every air bag in the world. We're not looking for the place they are in
the structure of production as much as we're looking for his uniqueness, this ability to
have natural barriers to entry that are based on a number of factors that are difficult
to compete with. That's just an advantage. It is not always permanent. You have to cultivate it, and you have to
adapt to it. Nothing is permanent. Right. But the further up the structure you go, the
more chance you have of identifying an input that is, for now, unique.Yes. But you don't want to manufacture a product,
or to be part of-- I don't want an investment in a participation of a company that makes
something the nature of which is so large as a component of something so as to be subject
to the seasonal demand or subject to external risks, either through government intervention,
or regulation, or competition. I want an element of independence. And often times, for example this exciter
I was telling you about only as an example, is an infinitesimal part of an automobile. Yet an automobile cannot do without that as
a matter of-- and we can talk about many other such examples. So you need to gauge and understand the strength
of what you own within a competitive economy in which we operate.But I mean, this exciter
idea is an interesting one. Because it's a component-- a tiny component--
that cost a handful of Swiss francs, but it's in every single car that's made today. And as the number of airbags increases, and
safety standards increase, the number of these units required also increases. So you know, something like finding a company
like that which is up there hiding in plain sight, but people tend not to think. They think about, oh, car sales. Ford, GM, Volvo, Saab, wherever. They don't think about component parts, certainly
not down to that one tiny, tiny component. That's the extra work required if you really
want to understand a process and find a point in that process that is defensible and profitable
and will help a company make money for the long period. Right. So when you find a company like that, just
kind of, if you can, walk us through the process from finding the idea, OK, how do you then
go from, here's an idea, here's a potential investment? How do you turn that into an investment? I'm not sure that there is a check list that
one would normally think it's there. You need-- first of all, you need to ask yourself,
do I like this business? You can't just merely say, I'm making an investment
because I'm going to make money with it. First of all, do I like this business? Do I understand it? Do I want to be in this business? Why? What is the history of this firm? What are the competitive advantages? What is the larger environment in which we
operate, both from the issue of demand, what does the demand for the products come from? Does it come as a result of government policy,
or subsidies, or regulation? Or does it come as a result of choice on the
part of the consumers, or the customers, or et cetera? What are the components that go into this
business? And how are they regulated? And what risks are they subject to in and
of themselves? What is a market for this company's products? Not this, but the supply of components, the
market for these components. How honest are the revenues? How permanent are they? What are the factors that influence their
operating margins or unit growth? How have they deployed their earnings in the
past two years? How have they grown? I have never met a company that has grown
from acquisitions, subject to just acquisitions. Acquisitions are, when you look at something
that depends on acquisitions or financial engineering, you're looking at an accident
waiting to happen. What is the ownership structure of this company? Who owns it? How long have they owned it? What have they done with it? Who are the people involved? How long have they been here? So the fact is that as you begin looking at
it, at any one moment, you come across something that says, no, I'm not interested. Something significant. It's only at the very end when you say, here's
something that is substantively valuable, something enduring, something scarce, something
extraordinary, something beautiful that you ask yourself, well, what is it worth? We all know what something sells for, right,
particularly in listed securities. You know you can look it up and immediately
see what it sells for. But what is it worth? How do you approach the idea of value in this
particular case? What are the components that add to value? What risks are inherent in the business that
you would want to take care against? How do other people think it's worth, under
what circumstances or over the period of time? Is it something that's neglected? Is it something that's followed by every few
mutual fund and ETF in the world? If it is, I'm not interested. Look, it's not a science. No. Absolutely not. And I think it would be a mistake to suggest
that you have a checklist, and you go through, and you-- Oh, no. And I'm not suggesting that. I'm just interested in some of the inputs.It's
a subjective process that sometimes you come to a very quick conclusion as to the attractiveness
of something. Sometimes it's sort of like you meet a girl,
you, some people just know immediately. I've met someone says, immediately, when I
saw this girl, I fell in love with it. I knew she was going to be my wife. That does happen. Other times, you get to know someone. You get to grow with them, talk to them, take
them to dinner, et cetera. And then you begin to appreciate the value
that is in this person. The same thing with this. The last thing I do, really, as a person,
is look at the price and say, well. Oftentimes, of course-- in the last 10 years,
more often than not-- things that I would like to own are priced at such a level where
I think it's just not suitable for me to acquire it, to invest at that price. Price is an important vein. But what others think about what the potential
earnings are is not of consequence to me. Because I know they all-- I've never met anyone
who can predict these sort of things accurately, consistently. So I don't rely on any of them. We have a wonderful team that does a lot of
work answering some of the basic questions. But I ask myself two or three questions, oftentimes. One is that, if I own this whole company,
would I want the same people to run it? This is, I guess, very subjective. Another question I ask myself, would I want
to own the entire thing? Is this something I would want in my collection
of assets? If I wouldn't want the entire thing, why would
I want to buy just a little bit so that I can-- I ask myself, is this business likely
to be around 20 years from now? And I know this is a difficult question. And I know that you probably say to yourself,
well, how would you know? Well, if it has been around for 200 years
or 150 years, chances are it will be around for 20 years. But you generally know when you look at the
decisions that are being made over a period of years, looking at decisions, you understand
the motivation of those who own this firm. And you understand whether or not they're
sowing seeds for the next year or the next 10 years. I used to own a stake-- many years ago-- at
Safra's bank in Luxembourg. Safra National Bank, you remember this bank? Yes. Bank of Safra, yes. And we owned it for seven or eight years and
the price never changed. It was 50, 51, 52, 49 for seven years. The business was doing very well. No one was following it, unbelievably, so
the dividend yield at the time was 12%. Current yield. Anyway, I remember distinctly someone saying
to me, why do you own this? The price is not going anywhere. I said, it's a great business. You know, Edmund Safra was a banker's banker. I mean, he's one of my heroes. And then one day, HSBC paid me $195 a share
when he sold the bank after 7, 8, 9 years. I'm not sure how long-- Yes. And you'd been paid 12% a year to hold that
for seven year. And I was paid 12% a year. The point I'm trying to make is, we make a
lot of judgments by looking at the price of something on a daily or weekly basis without
having a clue as to the seeds that are being sown today-- good and bad-- that are likely
to bear fruit a year, 2, or 3, or 4 years down the road. Do you start trying to find reasons not to
do something? Or do you start, once you have an idea, do
you start? Sometimes, yes, sometimes something looks
very nice. Yes. And you say, there has got to be something
wrong here. So you seek out to find the reason not to
buy something? Or not to add something to an existing holding,
or you know. Yes. I'm a doubting Tom. Thomas, right? Yes. Doubting Thomas, yes. Now, there comes a point in time, though. There are people that I know, people who run
some investment companies in which we have a participation, but I would trust completely--
I mean, completely- - because they have a demonstrated faithfulness to their families,
to their companies, to their shareholders over many, many years. And I would never second guess them. Never. There are others that I would second guess,
but I will write a little letter, maybe, a very nice, little letter. But if there's a series of error or actions
that I'm not sure are in the best interest of the company long-term, I will quietly leave. That's the only thing I can do, being a minority
shareholder.Sure. But these relationships, I mean, you know,
this comes back to time preference, again. Because you don't get to develop that kind
of a relationship with management, that kind of trust in management, unless you are a stakeholder,
unless you to-- you keep mentioning this--: I love this word, stakeholder. Yes, but you mention this word, you know,
you have a participation in things. You have ownership in things. And these are different terms to the way most
investors think of things. And it's funny. It's just words, but they convey a different
sense of what these investments mean, both to you, to your holding company, and to your
shareholders. And you don't get to develop that without
holding these shares for a period of time. And people don't. People buy a share, and you know, I guess
some families pass on shares in Exxon or IBM to the kids. But it's such a big company, everything you
know it out there. You normally know who's the CEO of IBM. But these companies you find, these small—You
remember years ago when we were younger, they're called the gambling business. Now, they call it the gaming business. This is not by accident. They want to infer to you that there is an
element of fun in giving money to the house when all the odds are against you. This is quite similar to, I guess, the typical
investment process that most people do. But you don't have to participate. No you don't. You don't have to go to the casino. So how do you go about generating ideas? Do they fall into lap because of happenstance,
something you say that will trigger a thought, and you'll just go off and investigate that? Or when you're sitting down with this time
thinking, whether you're up in the woods, or whether you're out on a boat, you how do
you find an idea? How do you find a company? All kinds of ways. I know it's a very broad question, but people
do it different ways. Some people say, I read the news, and a story
will happen and I'll follow it through to its logical conclusion, cui bono. No, I never have any investment ideas come
through the reading of the news. No, right. It's not that. Just forget that. Generally, it will come from knowing other
firms were in the same business in the same industry or curiosity. You find a nice-- I don't know. It comes from all kinds of sources. It's not important to be looking for opportunities. We don't do that. What is important is to acquire an understanding
so you can recognize the opportunities when you see them. You understand? Because if there is an opportunity, it comes
across for everyone to see, but very few people, perhaps, recognize it. Right? Yes. So the people that recognize it are prepared
to recognize it. So what are the tools you need to recognize
something that appears? Well, you need understanding of the business,
understanding of a sector, understanding of a market need. You need to, perhaps, have a third, fourth
sense of something. I have conversations with a lot of people,
particularly email correspondence, with people who say some industries that we have, some
companies we have. We have a team in the office of younger than
me who are eager, enthusiastic, and perhaps even more curious than I am. And so altogether, generally speaking, you
will come across in the course of a year 50 or 60 situations that require that you take
another look. And out of these 50 or 60, if you're very
lucky, you'll find one that fits. But you have to invest a lot of time and effort. In the meantime, you learn something about
the process. So there's no formula. Is that time ever wasted? No. No, no, it's not wasted at all. What happens is that you, if you spend 3,
4, to 5 days understanding how oil is extracted in, say, Canada, and how it's refined, and
how it goes here and there, and the cost components and the capital structures of companies, you
acquire something. You may do nothing about it. But it's filed here. So next time the situation comes, you have
tools with which to think. And I think that what's missing in our world
is this ability to have tools with which to think about the economic value of a business
endeavor rather than its financial value. It's easy to say, this company sells for x
number of dollars, or euros, or francs. What is difficult to say, what is this company
worth and why? Right? Yes absolutely. Now part of the reason is there are also a
lot of distortions. This private equity business has come in with
private equities nothing other than regular equity that's leveraged. And because of their ability to borrow unlimited
sums to buy unlimited things, and their ability to turn them over, they are able to pay prices
in the marketplace for businesses that are perhaps higher than the owners think they're
worth. But their business is to extract substance
out of such companies and, you know, get rid of them. Their business is to make money from the security. Sure. But this has distorted the market's ability
to find, to discover, true value in terms of price. Pricing, price discovery is really distorted
immensely on account of both monetary experimentation, as well as the moral consequences of such
policies among economic actors. So it is difficult. But you don't have to do a lot. You don't have to do many things. You don't have to have expertise in every
possible area. You have to do-- whatever you do, you have
to do it very well, though. Think about it. If you do it well, if you can say, if it were
my own money, my own savings, would I do anything differently? And I can tell you I wouldn't do anything
differently at all. So why is it that to me that seems like an
extraordinary statement today? Why do I feel as though that's not--? I don't know. Ask yourself. No, no. No, it seems as though- To me, it's elementary. I completely agree. I think it's the way it should be, but I don't
hear that very often. I don't hear that as an ethos very often. I manage money as if it was my own savings. And what would I? I just don't hear that. Because I think, it's focused on returns. And returns are, essentially, a price. Look, this is what people want, Grant. Right. The market provides what the market demands. People who want to have-- people-- I heard
somebody the other day, they don't make great movies anymore. Remember the great movies of the '50s, the
'60s, the '70s? Why? That's what the people want. So in a capitalist system which we have, you
have the freedom to produce the kind of product that people want to buy. So there's always a limited demand for something
that is a bit more rare, different. There's nothing wrong with it. I find it completely acceptable. You will never-- it is very unlikely that
you will find a very large demand for something that is not very popular. Right. It's self-evident, I guess. But it makes sense. I just find, you know, this business was built
on your kind of philosophy, this careful stewardship of savings. That was the foundation of the investment
business. And yet today, I find you to be the outlier. I find your style-- your investment style--
to be the outlier. But to me, it hearkens back to a different
time, a time when everybody thought the way you did. And I just-- it feels as though the industry
has lost its way. It's lost, if not its soul, then perhaps its
center. And-- : Look, Grant. You may be right, but I see from a different--
I think. I know a number of people who do what I do
more or less the same way and perhaps a few variants. But their philosophy is the same. What I can tell you about all of them, you
will not find him on Twitter or on Facebook. They will not-- no one will- - promote their
shares or themselves. They're not on television. And they will all make fun of me of the fact
that I'm talking to you. I will get some phone calls about that. I'm sure. Yes. But he who shall search will find, they say. It's in the Bible, I think. Yes. : If you want to find very good tasting tomatoes,
it is unlikely you will find them in your local grocery store. If you want good quality fish, meat, cheese,
it is unlikely you will find it at some large supermarket. But if you are seeking it, you will find it. It's there. Somehow, it feels appropriate that those seeking
a manager like Tony should have to work just a little harder to find him. What he does and how he does it, despite his
protestations to the contrary, is unusual today. Not only is it unusual, but to Tony's point
about why something might be rare, it's not necessarily something that most people are
looking for. However, for those whose time preference matches
Tony's and who are looking for a true steward of irreplaceable savings, hearing this kind
of wisdom will seem like water in the desert. How do people find people like you? Because to your point, you're not on Twitter. You don't do interviews. You don't do media. People have found you, and you know other
people that think similarly to you and invest in a similar way to you, but I don't. And I talk to a lot of people in this business. And I spend time with great professionals
that do a fantastic job. But you are different. You think differently. You act differently. You invest differently. And that requires you to have a different
type of investor. We've talked about this alignment, this time
preference. Yet there are people, I guarantee, watching
this who have been trying to find someone that thinks the way you do and invests the
way you do. You're very difficult to find. How do people do that? How do they seek you out? I don't know. Because they wouldn't have the first clue
where to start. I don't know. But eventually, when we list our shares on
the stock exchange, they can go buy a few shares. Well, I want to actually talk about that [? percent,
?] because that seems at odds. The reasons for doing that, I understand. But it's worth talking about, because that
seems at odds for you to list on the stock exchange. It would seem an odd thing to do. Well, the listing on the stock exchange is
a way of finding freedom in an unfree world, believe it or not. It allows anyone, anywhere in the world who
is a shareholder to buy five shares or sell them without having to produce a serum sample
or a copy of this and a copy of the other. Today we are more or less a rich men's club. But we can acquire more permanence to our
capital by listing. And a listed company has certain freedoms
that privately held companies don't have. One of the best ways to hide it from the world
is not in a desert, but in the middle of New York City, perhaps sometimes. And listing may give us that longer-term substance
that is difficult to find. And we haven't concluded yet that we are going
to do that, but it's in the works. It's an option that we are considering. So when you look at the industry from where
you sit-- and you are detached from it. You've created your own niche in that business,
and your own way of doing things-- do you pay attention to what goes on in other parts
of the industry, or you complete-- In other? --in other parts of the investment industry. Or are you just laser-focused on your little
part in it, and the rest of it really doesn't--? Oh, I'm interested in the fertilizer business,
the salmon-farming business, and lots of other little areas. I have no interest in the financial world
None. I mean none. Zero. But so this is the last thing I want to talk
about because people, I'm sure, think, well, how can you be an investor and pay no attention
to the finance world? 'm thinking of a friend I have in England who manages a very large
public fund with a fairly large, visible standing, that he will often do things because it's
necessary because of the position he is in rather than because that's what he wants. And he would readily admit among others that
there's no value in reading with the financial press. I mean, there really isn't. First of all, the news is not news. It is true it's all fake. But it's always been fake. It's nothing new. A lot of what pose for news are poorly disguised
promotions all written by people who have no clue. I was once called by a reporter. I don't know how they found me. And they asked me if they could use a quote
from me that the reasons for the increase in something was because of this and that,
if they could quote me. And I said, you can quote me, yes, the price
of this increased. But not because of the reasons you've suggested. But I am happy to give you my view. He said, no, no, no, I just want to quote
you that they went up because of these reasons. I said, you cannot quote me for that. He said, OK, thanks and hang up the phone. I recently met a farmer in Greece who has--
I don't know-- 25,000 orange trees. It's a wonderful business. And I was discussing with him the economic
viability of adding value to his production instead of selling the apples directly into
the market, because he has thousands of tons. And he says, I haven't thought about it, because
I'm so busy with the trees and their care that I have had no time to think about some
of these matters. And I said, well, how does government policy
on subsidies and other things impact you? He says, I don't know. I said, don't you have a local press that
industry that follows it? He said, I don't read that stuff. They don't know what they're saying. Right. People who are involved in a real economic
endeavor don't have the time. I mean, of people who have friends who are
fund managers, none of them tweets. No one has the time to do that. Besides that, what can you say in, what, if
40 characters, whatever it is they sell you. I'm not suggesting that Twitter it is not
a good thing, by no means. But there's just no time to do these things. There's no-- you just don't have the time. I think part of looking at the press constantly
and seeking what the other people do are because people's decisions are largely based on other
people's opinions, other people's temperament, other people's worldview. And they seek to create a framework, an investment
framework of their own, based on ideas that come from others. And the way to find them is reading the press,
or watching CNBC, or whatever people do in the English-speaking world. If you stand back and say, I'm really not
interested anyone else does, I have inherited this small fortune, and I want to deploy it
in a manner that makes a great deal of sense, I'm going to sit down and figure out for myself
what is the right thing to do, then you are uninterested in what other people do. Because you don't know their motivation. Right? Yes. A year and half ago, they asked me to speak
in New York-- I told you-- in this forum. And they told me, he said, look, you have
to say whatever you say, but then you give us two good investment ideas. People are used to this sort of thing and
they want them. So I said to the organizer, I said, imagine
you ask a doctor, can you give me the names of two good drugs? It's the same question. Yes. First of all, an investment idea is worthless
unless you understand whether it's suitable to someone, appropriate. So the fact that you take particular medicine
and it's useful for you, you don't say, Tony, you need to take that too. Try this stuff. --really good for me. Yes, right. Well, maybe I don't need it. Yes. But that comes back to this point about a
good investment idea has become a synonym for something that's price is going to go
up. And the two are completely different. Yes. I don't have an investment ideas. Right. You're right. But that's the problem. That's the quick fix. Give me something that's going to-- you know,
it's the instant gratification, this delayed gratification of investing in a business,
taking a participation in a business, in a family, in an intergenerational means of preserving
capital and growing capital over time has been substituted for tell me the name of something
that's going to go up tomorrow. And to me that's a shame. And talking to you this last couple of days
makes me realize what a real shame that is, because it does take us back to this casino
mentality. Give me an idea that's going to go up tomorrow. If it doesn't go up tomorrow, you're an idiot,
or you were wrong, whereas he may have quite out of the blue plucked out one of your companies
that you've spent all these months researching and none of the family know that. And to you, it's a great, long-term investment. Another guy gives the same stock as a tip. It goes down tomorrow, and I sell it because
it didn't go up. I'm completely uninterested in what anybody
else does with this-- in fact, I'm happy if they sell it because I can buy more—Tony,
look, we've spent two days talking, you and I. It's been a wonderful opportunity to get inside
that brain of yours. People watching this will never have had that
opportunity. And they may never have it again if I've scared
you off of doing anything like this. But I can't thank you enough for doing this,
because I know it's the last thing you want to do, for being so generous with your insight. I can't thank you enough. So thank you for doing this with me. I really appreciate it. I'm glad to talk to you. Enjoyed it. The hours I spent talking with Tony seemed
to be gone before they'd begun. And when the cameras finally stopped rolling,
I found myself with almost four hours of footage which I knew would be nothing short of heartbreaking
to try and distill into what you've just watched. Despite his protestations that what he does
is unexceptional, I find Tony to be one of the wisest investors it's ever been my pleasure
to talk to, and a man who is both true to his principles and rigorous in their application. Tony looks at the world through a simple lens
that hearkens back to a different time, and he invests with a thoroughness and a discipline
which speaks to me in what I found to be a truly profound way. To listen to Tony talk about how he invests
in the people who run the companies in his portfolio, and how he seeks scarcity and endurance
in a transitory, profit-obsessed world was a revelation, a strategy light years removed
from that which many of today's managers pursue. As I left the fresh mountain air of Switzerland,
I knew that the lessons I'd learned from my time with Tony would have the same kind of
permanence in my mind as his various participations did in his portfolio and that I'd been exposed
to skills that I would try to incorporate into my own investment process for many years
to come. I'd been to the mountaintop, and I certainly
didn't mind.