Skyrocket Your Wealth: Warren Buffett Investment Strategy Secrets

he's the chairman CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway he's considered to be one of the world's most successful investors if you want to learn about investment strategies you want to learn from Warren Buffett mentor me Warren when you look at the future there's also the argument made that that this is something that goes with your philosophy today get out of cash and get into assets because we don't know what's going to happen to the dollar well cash is always a bad investment but when people said cash is king a year ago I mean that's crazy I mean cash wasn't producing anything and it was sure to go down in value over time I know that you always want to be sure you have enough I mean it's like oxygen you're one of the shirts around you know but you don't even have you don't have excess of a possible around and cash we will always have enough cash around but anytime we have surplus cash around I'm unhappy I mean I would much rather have good businesses than cash and we found a chance in the last year there abouts to deploy we came in with something over 40 billion a campaign we've got about 20 billion now and we've had some earnings so we put a lot of cash to work and I like that no I'd much rather own a good business than have cash and it is a hedge against the dollar well you can say all assets are a hedge against a dollar I mean but that all you know is that the dollar is going to be worth less 10 20 30 years from now I say worth less not worthless but it will be you know and that's true of almost every currency that like a big of huh the question is how much it depreciates in value but cash cash is not a place that no why for that well because always gonna be worth less because we'll we'll print more of them in relation to the amount of goods that are moving you know if we if we dropped if we drop the million dollars of cash into every household in the United States today everybody feel very good except the people that invest in things that were denominated dollars yeah exactly there will be no tendency toward deflation in this country over time or virtually an attendance story inflation absolutely important thing is to decide what is to be able to define which ones you can come to an intelligent decision on and which ones are beyond your capacity to evaluate you don't have to be right about thousands and thousands of thousands of competition you only have to be right about a company couple I met bill gates on July 5th 1991 we arrived Seattle and bill said you've got to have a computer and I said why and he said well he said you can do your income tax on it I said I don't have any income Bircher doesn't pay a dividend he said well you can keep track of your portfolio I said I only have one stock I said I did I mean he says it's going to change everything and I said well will it change whether people chew gum and he said well probably not and I said what will change what kind of gum they'd show and I said well then I'll stick to chewing gum and you stick to computers how bad I don't have to understand all kinds of but there's all kinds of business I don't understand but there's thousands of opportunities there I did understand the Bank of America you know and uh and I'll be able I'm able to do that I'm able to understand some given percentage but Ted Williams wrote a book called the science of hitting and in the science of hitting he's got a diagram shows him at the plate and he's got the strike zone divided in the seventy seven squares each the size of a baseball and he says if I only swing it pitches in my sweet zone which he shows there and he has what his batting average would be which is four hundred if he had to swing at low outside pitches but still in the in the strike zone his average would be 230 he said the most important thing in hitting is waiting for the right pitch now he was at a disadvantage because if the count was oh and two or one and two or so on even if that ball was down where he was only about two thirty he had to swing at it in investing there's no called strikes people can throw Microsoft out and you know you name it any any stock General Motors and I don't have to swing and nobody's going to call me out on call strikes I only get a strike call if I swing at a pitch and mess so I can wait there and look at thousands of companies day after day and only when I see something I understand and when I like the price of which is selling then if I swing if I if I had it fine if I miss it's it's it's a strike but it's an enormous ly advantageous game and it's a terrible mistake to think you have to have an opinion on everything you only have to have an opinion on a few things in fact I've told students if when they got out of school they got a punch card with 20 punches on it and that's all the investment decisions they got to make in their entire life they would get very rich because they would think very hard about each one and you don't need 20 right decisions to get very rich you know four or five will probably do it over time so I don't worry too much about the things I don't understand if you understand some of these businesses that are coming along and can spot things on if you can spot on Amazon for example I mean it's a tremendous accomplishment what Jeff Bezos has done and I tip my hat to me is a wonderful businessman he's a good guy too but could I have anticipated that he would be the success and ten others wouldn't be I'm not good enough to do that but I done fortunately I don't have to you know I don't have to form an opinion on on Amazon and I did I did form an opinion on the Bank of America and I form of opinion on coca-cola I mean coca-cola has been around since 1886 there's 1.8 billion 1.8 billion 8 ounce servings of coca-cola products sold every day now if you take one penny and get one penny extra that's 18 million dollars a day and 18 million times 365 is 7 billion 3 less 730 billion or 6 billion 570 million dollars so annually 6 billion 570 million dollars from one penny do you think coca-cola is worth a penny more than you know Jo's Cola I think so so I you know and I've got about 127 years of history would indicate it so those are the kind of decisions I like to make and you may have an entirely different field of expertise than I would have and probably much more up to date in terms of the kind of businesses that we're seeing about and you can get very rich if you just understand a few of them and understand their future the real test of whether you would like it as an investment is whether you would be happy if it never got quoted again and just in terms of what the asset did for you but that doesn't I would say this about gold if you took all the gold in the world it would it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side so if you took all the gold in the world we could have a cube we went down there 67 feet 67 feet high and that would be the whole thing now for that same cube of gold it would be worth at today's market prices about seven trillion dollars that's probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States so you can have a choice of owning a third of all the stocks in the United States or you can have a choice of owning a little block of gold which can't do anything but kind of shine there and make you feel like my desert Croesus or something of the sort now for seven trillion dollars there are roughly a billion farm acres of farmland in the United States they're valued at about two and a half trillion dollars it's about half the continental United States this farmland you could have all the farm line in the United States you could have about seven Exxon Mobil's and you can have a trillion dollars of walking-around money and if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot a cube of gold and looking at it all day you know I'm an attachment font fondling it occasionally you know and then saying you know do something for me and it says I don't do anything I just stand here look pretty and and the alternative to that was to have all the farmland of the country everything cotton corn soybeans seven ExxonMobil's just think of that and a trillion dollars of walking-around money I you know they maybe call me crazy but haha I'll take the farmland of the Exxon Mobil's what's your advice about that you can't constantly sit there and wait and say oh it's going to go higher so I go high we don't even think about that what we think about is how much is it selling for how much do we think it's worth when we bought it at 35 billion effectively I felt the company was probably worth at least a hundred billion how did it come to your attention how do you find a stuff like PetroChina I sit there in my office and I read an annual report which fortunately was in English and it described a very good company and told about the oil reserves followed by three findings all about the chemicals everything else and I sat there and read it and I thought to myself this company is worth about a hundred billion now I didn't look at the price first I look at the business first and try and figure out what it's worth because if I look at the price first I'll get influenced by that so I look at that look at the company first I try to value it and I look at the price and if the price is way less than what I've just valued that I'm going to buy it how do you value it well I that's that's the trick but it's it's essentially what I would pay for the whole business if I could buy it how do you know when to throw in the towel on an investment or business when you throw in the towel on an investment or business business yeah well you'd what you know you do it too late I've done I I went the textile business by accident in 1965 and I threw it at all about twenty years later and that was about twenty years too late the there's a great tendency to want to hold on justify old decisions I mean it's a human human trait and what when you really know you've got a bad business is when you have a good manager and you're getting bad results I mean it when you when you're getting bad results with a bad manager you still have to examine the question of whether you know you can get better results if you got a better manager usually you can't you know I've said in the past you know that when a when a management with a reputation for excellence Encounters of business with a reputation for bad economics it's the reputation of the business that remains intact and and I've proved that many times there are businesses that are just plain tough you know and there's the copy there there may be too many competitors but there's reasons why they don't drop out there's reasons well we we started out in textiles and we made over half of the the linings for men's suits in the country and we we went through World War two and got awards and and sears roebuck named us their supplier of the year and all of that sort of thing and then we'd say what we'd like to increase the price of of these linings a quarter of a cent a yard and services we got of your miners ten other guys that'll sell it to us of the old price that and nobody ever went into a Sears store and said I'd like a a blue Serge Serge a blue shirt Serge suit with a half away lining it didn't exist we had no connection to the consumer and there are lots of lousy businesses you know and there's lots of wonderful businesses and or my job over the years has been to try and figure out which is which and I've made plenty of mistakes I bought a company called extra shoes in the early 90s I paid four hundred plus million dollars for it and it made money before I bought it but you know as soon as I bought it they pulled some switch or something I immediately started losing money and and it was because of foreign competition so under it was because I owned I don't know ah and it went to zero and the worst thing was that I paid for it in stock so that 400 million in stock I gave at the time is now worth about five billion so it so every time Berkshire stock goes down I feel a little bit better because of my opportunity lost on this business but you know when I looked at Dexter shoe they had a good position in retailers they turned out good shoes they had a great workforce all kinds of things but I just forgot one thing that that they weren't going to make shoes in the United States anymore so you make you make mistakes and it does okay to recognize quickly when you made them if you've got a good person running a business in it isn't making any money you know you're in the wrong business and and you've got to face up to that generally speaking investing in yourself is the best thing you can do anything that improves your own talent so nobody can take it away from me they can run up huge deficits and the dollar can become worth far less you can have all kinds of things happen but if you've got talents yourself and you've maximized your talent you've got a terrific asset and that does mean everybody should go to college but it it doesn't mean that any way you find to improve communication skills are enormous ly important I mean I took a Dale Carnegie course that I paid $100 for and it was worth a college degree at least I thought it was maybe this interview will cook a lot of ice laughs thank you guys so much for watching I made the mentor me series because I wanted to spend a little bit more time with super successful people and I hope some of their magic pixie dust rubs off on us so I'd love to know what you thought of this video and what lessons you learned that you're going to apply to your life and how I'm really curious to find out leaving the comments below I'll join the discussion thank you so much for watching you can you to believe and I'll see you soon

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 2,542,879

Keywords: business, success, advice, help, entrepreneur, how to, better, life, money, work, job, career, company, motivation, education, inspiration, Evan, Carmichael

Id: d0XKtUXgpOw

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2016