Buffett interview with NBR on Wall Street
On Jan.22, Nightly business reports' Susie Gharib interviewed with Warren Buffett on a lot of investing topics to celebrate NBR's 30th anniversary. The abstract of the interview is attached. Of course, you will expect to hear many familiar quotes from Mr. Buffett. You can also enjoy the video interview from NBR's website.
Key points I learned from Buffett's interview on NBR
- Should the Americas be buying stocks? "There are a lot more things selling at sensible prices now than they were two years ago. So clearly it's a better time to buying stocks than a couple of years ago. Is it better than tomorrow? I have no idea".
- About investors' confidence? "If people were dependent on the stock market going up to be confident, they're in the wrong business. They ought to be confident because they look at a business and think I got my money's worth. They ought to look to the business as to whether to be confident compared to the price that they paid and they ought to forget about what anybody is saying, including me on television, or what they're reading in the paper".
- Buffet's greed quotient has risen as stocks have gone down.
- Buffett mentioned how he learned from Graham, which is to set a framework and think for different ways to apply it: "I got a framework for investing tha
t I put in place back in 1950 roughly and that framework is the framework I use now. I see different ways to apply it from time to time but that is the framework". - What's Buffett's next buy? "We spent $5 billion on Goldman Sachs, $3 billion on G.E., $6.6 billion on Wrigley, we’ve got $3 billion committed on Dow. We’ve spent a lot of money. We’ve got money left, but I love spending money. Cash makes me very unhappy. I like to always have enough and never way more than enough, but I always want to have enough. So we would never go below $10 billion of cash at Berkshire. We’re in the insurance business — we got a lot of things. We’re never going to depend on the kindness of strangers. But anything excess in that, I love the idea of buying things and the cheaper they get, the better I like it.
Buffett says in the interview that the most important investment lesson is to look at a stock as a piece of business not just some thing that jiggles up and down or that people recommend or people talk about earnings being up next quarter, something like that, but to look at it as a business and evaluate it as a business. If you don't know enough to evaluate it as a business you don't know enough to buy it. And if you do know enough to evaluate it as a business and its selling cheap, you buy it and don't worry about what it is doing next week, next month or next year.
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