01 巴菲特的经验和智慧
- 与自己认可的人和公司为伍，保持长期主义，时间会赠予丰厚的回馈
- 把喜欢和热爱放到决定是否做一件事的第一位，不要牺牲自己来追求所谓的成功
- 认清自己的能力边界，不投资看不懂的公司，关注有核心竞争力的公司
- 不要试图理解所有公司，就算只理解一部分公司，也可以有非常可观的收益
- 对于有投资能力的人，发现少数认可的公司就足够了，不要再盲目多元化投资
- 投资业务能被理解，管理层正直且有能力，能预见未来十年发展状况的公司
- 区分清楚真正重要和不重要的因素，公司层面比宏观层面更加重要，也更可知
- 最佳的投资往往不是计算出来，而是情绪主导，这时你对公司产品有强烈信心
- 一家公司是大盘股还是小盘股不重要，重要的依然是你是否认可这家公司
- 当股市下跌时，更加仔细研究已经可能买入的公司，因为这时可能出现买入价格
- 在浮躁的市场保持冷静，固定留给自己一些时间和空间去做思考
- 不要贪婪，任何事情都有失败的可能性，留出容错空间
- 吸收教训不可避免，但要尽可能地多从别人的错误中吸取教训
02 中英双语演讲文稿
I would like to say a few words primarily and then the highlight for me will be getting your questions. I want to talk about what is on your mind.
我想先讲几句话，之后对我来说最精彩的部分就是回答你们的问题。我想谈谈你们关心的事情。
I would like to talk for just one minute to the students about your future when you leave here. Because you will learn a tremendous amount about investments, you all have the ability to do well; you all have the IQ to do well. You all have the energy and initiative to do well or you wouldn’t be here. Most of you will succeed in meeting your aspirations.
我想花一分钟时间和同学们谈谈你们毕业后的未来。因为你们在这里会学到大量关于投资的知识，你们都有能力做好；你们都有足够的智商做好这件事。你们都有精力和主动性去做好，否则你们也不会坐在这里。你们中的大多数人都会实现自己的抱负。
But in determining whether you succeed there is more to it than intellect and energy. I would like to talk just a second about that. In fact, there was a guy, Pete Kiewit in Omaha, who used to say, he looked for three things in hiring people: integrity, intelligence and energy. And he said if the person did not have the first two, the later two would kill him, because if they don’t have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy.
但在决定你们是否成功的因素中，除了智力和精力，还有其他方面。我想简单说一下这一点。事实上，在奥马哈有个人叫皮特·基威特，他过去常说，他在招人时会看三点：诚信、智慧和精力。他说如果一个人没有前两点，后两点会害了他，因为如果他们没有诚信，你宁愿他们又笨又懒。
We want to talk about the first two because we know you have the last two. You are all second-year MBA students, so you have gotten to know your classmates. Think for a moment that I granted you the right–you can buy 10% of one of your classmate’s earnings for the rest of their lifetime. You can’t pick someone with a rich father; you have to pick someone who is going to do it on his or her own merit. And I gave you an hour to think about it.
我们想谈谈前两点，因为我们知道你们具备后两点。你们都是MBA二年级的学生，所以你们对同学们都有了一定了解。现在设想一下，我赋予你们一项权利——你们可以买下某个同学未来余生10%的收入。但你们不能挑选有富爸爸的人，必须挑选要靠自身实力取得成就的人。我给你们一个小时来思考这个问题。
Will you give them an IQ test and pick the one with the highest IQ? I doubt it. Will you pick the one with the best grades? The most energetic? You will start looking for qualitative factors, in addition to (the quantitative) because everyone has enough brains and energy. You would probably pick the one you responded the best to, the one who has the leadership qualities, the one who is able to get other people to carry out their interests. That would be the person who is generous, honest and who gave credit to other people for their own ideas. All types of qualities. Whomever you admire the most in the class. Then I would throw in a hooker. In addition to this person you had to go short one of your classmates.
你会给他们做智商测试，然后挑选智商最高的人吗？我对此表示怀疑。你会挑选成绩最好的人吗？还是最有活力的人？你会开始寻找除（量化指标）之外的定性因素，因为每个人都有足够的智力和精力。你可能会选择那个与你最合得来、具备领导才能、能让别人为其实现利益的人。这个人会很慷慨、诚实，并且会认可他人的想法。各种各样的品质。也就是你在班上最钦佩的人。然后我再给你出个难题。除了选这个人，你还得做空你的一个同学。 （注：原文中 “Then I would throw in a hooker.” 表述可能有误，结合语境推测可能是 “Then I would throw in a hitch.” ，hitch有“意外障碍、难题”的意思 ，译文按推测含义翻译。如果原词无误，“hooker”常见释义为“妓女”，但在此处语义不通，需根据实际情况进一步确认。 ）
That is more fun. Who do I want to go short? You wouldn’t pick the person with the lowest IQ, you would think about the person who turned you off, the person who is egotistical, who is greedy, who cuts corners, who is slightly dishonest.
这就更有意思了。你会选择做空谁呢？你不会挑选智商最低的人，而是会想到那个让你反感的人，那个自负、贪婪、偷工减料、有点不诚实的人。
As you look at those qualities on the left and right hand side, there is one interesting thing about them, it is not the ability to throw a football 60 yards, it is not the ability the run the 100 yard dash in 9.3 seconds, it is not being the best looking person in the class, they are all qualities that if you really want to have the ones on the left hand side, you can have them.
当你审视左右两边的这些品质时，会发现一个有趣的现象：这些品质不是能把橄榄球扔出60码远的能力，不是能在9.3秒内跑完100码的速度，也不是班上颜值最高的长相。如果你真的想要拥有左边的那些品质，你是可以做到的。
They are qualities of behavior, temperament, character that are achievable, they are not forbidden to anybody in this group. And if you look at the qualities on the right hand side the ones that turn you off in other people, there is not a quality there that you have to have. You can get rid of it. You can get rid of it a lot easier at your age than at my age, because most behaviors are habitual. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. There is no question about it. I see people with these self- destructive behavior patterns at my age or even twenty years younger and they really are entrapped by them.
这些都是行为、气质和性格方面的品质，是可以培养出来的，在座的每个人都有机会拥有。再看看右边那些让你讨厌别人的品质，没有一个是你必须具备的。你可以摒弃这些品质。在你们这个年纪摒弃它们，比在我这个年纪要容易得多，因为大多数行为都是习惯养成的。习惯的枷锁很轻，轻到你察觉不到，直到重得无法打破。这一点毫无疑问。我见过和我年纪相仿甚至比我小20岁的人，被这些自我毁灭的行为模式困住。
They go around and do things that turn off other people right and left. They don’t need to be that way but by a certain point they get so they can hardly change it. But at your age you can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It is simply a question of which you decide.
他们四处行事，总是让身边的人反感。他们本不必如此，但到了一定程度，就很难改变了。但在你们这个年纪，你们可以养成任何你们想要的习惯和行为模式，这仅仅取决于你们的选择。
If you did this… Ben Graham looked around at the people he admired and Ben Franklin did this before him. Ben Graham did this in his low teens and he looked around at the people he admired and he said, “I want to be admired, so why don’t I behave like them?” And he found out that there was nothing impossible about behaving like them. Similarly he did the same thing on the reverse side in terms of getting rid of those qualities. I would suggest is that if you write those qualities down and think about them a while and make them habitual, you will be the one you want to buy 10% of when you are all through. And the beauty of it is that you already own 100% of yourself and you are stuck with it. So you might as well be that person, that somebody else.
如果你这么做……本·格雷厄姆会观察身边那些他敬佩的人，在他之前，本·富兰克林也这么做过。本·格雷厄姆在十几岁的时候就这样做了，他观察身边那些他敬佩的人，然后说：“我希望受到别人的敬佩，那我为什么不像他们那样行事呢？”他发现，像他们那样行事并非不可能。同样，在摒弃那些不良品质方面，他也采取了相同的做法。我建议你们把这些品质写下来，思考一会儿，让它们成为习惯，这样等你们完成学业后，就会成为那个你愿意购买其10%未来收入的人。美妙之处在于，你已经完全属于自己，而且无法改变这一点。所以，你不妨成为那个人，成为让别人欣赏的人。
Well that is a short little sermon. So let’s get on with what you are interested in. Let’s start with questions………..
好了，这就是一段简短的教诲。那么，我们来聊聊你们感兴趣的内容吧。现在开始提问……
Question: What about Japan? Your thoughts about Japan?
问题：日本的情况如何？你对日本有什么看法？
Buffett: My thoughts about Japan? I am not a macro guy. Now I say to myself Berkshire Hathaway can borrow money in Japan for 10 years at one percent. One percent! I say gee, I took Graham’s class 45 years ago and I have been working hard at this all my life maybe I can earn more than 1% annually, it doesn’t seem impossible. I wouldn’t want to get involved in currency risk, so it would have to be Yen-denominated. I would have to be in Japanese Real Estate or Japanese companies or something of the sort and all I have to do is beat one percent. That is all the money is going to cost me and I can get it for 10 years. So far I haven’t found anything. It is kind of interesting. The Japanese businesses earn very low returns on equity – 4% to 5% – 6% on equity and it is very hard to earn a lot as an investor when the business you are in doesn’t earn very much money.
巴菲特：我对日本的看法？我不是一个关注宏观经济的人。现在我心里想，伯克希尔·哈撒韦可以在日本以1%的年利率借到10年期的贷款。1%！我心想，我45年前上了格雷厄姆的课，并且一生都在努力钻研投资，或许我每年能赚到超过1%的收益，这似乎并非不可能。但我不想涉足汇率风险，所以借款必须是日元计价的。我得投资日本房地产、日本公司之类的，而我要做的就是收益超过1%。这就是这笔钱的成本，而且我能借10年。到目前为止，我还没找到合适的投资项目。这有点意思。日本企业的股权回报率非常低——只有4% – 5% – 6%，当你投资的企业赚不了多少钱时，作为投资者也很难获得丰厚回报。
Now some people do it. In fact, I have a friend, Walter Schloss, who worked at Graham at the same time I did. And it was the first way I went at stocks to buy stocks selling way below working capital. A very cheap, quantitative approach to stocks. I call it the cigar butt approach to investing. You walk down the street and you look around for a cigar butt someplace. Finally you see one and it is soggy and kind of repulsive, but there is one puff left in it. So you pick it up and the puff is free–it is a cigar butt stock. You get one free puff on it and then you throw it away and try another one. It is not elegant. But it works. Those are low return businesses.
现在有些人就是这么做的。事实上，我有个朋友叫沃尔特·施洛斯，我在格雷厄姆公司工作时，他也在那里。我最初投资股票的方法就是购买股价远低于营运资本的股票。这是一种非常廉价的、基于量化的股票投资方法。我把它称为“捡烟蒂式”投资法。你走在街上，四处寻找烟蒂。最后你看到一个，它又湿又脏，有点让人厌恶，但里面还有一口可抽。于是你把它捡起来，这一口是免费的——这就是一支“烟蒂股”。你免费抽了一口，然后把它扔掉，再去找下一个。这种方法并不高雅，但很有效。这些都是低回报的企业。
But time is the friend of the wonderful business; it is the enemy of the lousy business. If you are in a lousy business for a long time, you will get a lousy result even if you buy it cheap. If you are in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little bit too much going in you will get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.
但时间是优质企业的朋友，是糟糕企业的敌人。如果你长期投身于一家糟糕的企业，即便买入成本很低，最终结果也会很糟糕。而如果你长期投资一家优质企业，即便初始买入价格略高，只要长期持有，也会收获出色的回报。
I find very few wonderful businesses in Japan at present. They may change the culture in some way so that management gets more share holder responsive over there and stock returns are higher. At the present time you will find a lot of low return businesses and that was true even when the Japanese economy was booming. It is amazing; they had an incredible market without incredible companies. They were incredible in terms of doing a lot of business, but they were not incredible in terms of the return on equity that they achieved and that has finally caught up with them. So we have so far done nothing there. But as long as money is 1% there, we will keep looking.
目前，我在日本几乎找不到什么优质企业。他们或许会在某些方面改变企业文化，让管理层对股东的回应更积极，进而提高股票回报率。当下，日本有许多低回报的企业，即便在日本经济繁荣时期也是如此。这很不可思议，他们曾经拥有一个令人难以置信的市场，却没有与之匹配的卓越公司。他们在开展大量业务方面表现出色，但在股权回报率方面却不尽人意，而这最终还是对他们产生了影响。所以到目前为止，我们在日本没有任何投资。但只要日本的资金成本维持在1%，我们就会继续寻找机会。
Question: You were rumored to be one of the rescue buyers of Long Term Capital, what was the play there, what did you see?
问题：有传言称你是长期资本管理公司（Long Term Capital）的拯救性买家之一，当时是怎么回事，你看到了什么情况呢？
Buffett: The Fortune Magazine that has Rupert Murdoch on the cover. It tells the whole story of our involvement; it is kind of an interesting story. I got the really serious call about LTCM on a Friday afternoon that things were getting serious. I know those people most of them pretty well–most of them at Salomon when I was there. And the place was imploding and the FED was sending people up that weekend. Between that Friday and the following Wed. when the NY Fed, in effect, orchestrated a rescue effort but without any Federal money involved. I was quite active but I was having a terrible time reaching anybody.
巴菲特：就是那期封面人物是鲁珀特·默多克的《财富》杂志。它讲述了我们参与（长期资本管理公司事件）的整个过程，这是个挺有意思的故事。在一个周五的下午，我接到了关于长期资本管理公司（LTCM）的非常严肃的电话，说情况变得很严重了。我和那里的大多数人都很熟——我在所罗门公司（Salomon）的时候，他们中的大多数人也在那里。当时那家公司（长期资本管理公司）正面临崩溃，那个周末美联储还派人过去了。从那个周五到接下来的周三，纽约联邦储备银行实际上精心策划了一场救援行动，但没有动用任何联邦资金。我当时非常积极地参与其中，但联系上任何人都让我费了好大劲。
We put in a bid on Wednesday morning. I talked to Bill McDonough at the NY Fed. We made a bid for 250 million for the net assets but we would have put in 3 and 3/4 billion on top of that. $3 billion from Berkshire, $700 mil. from AIG and $300 million. from Goldman Sachs. And we submitted that but we put a very short time limit on that because when you are bidding on 100 billion worth of securities that are moving around, you don’t want to leave a fixed price bid out there for very long.
我们在周三上午提交了一份报价。我和纽约联邦储备银行的比尔·麦克多诺谈过。我们出价2.5亿美元收购其净资产，但除此之外我们还会额外投入37.5亿美元。其中伯克希尔哈撒韦公司出资30亿美元，美国国际集团（AIG）出资7亿美元，高盛集团出资3亿美元。我们提交了报价，但设定了非常短的时限，因为当你对价值1000亿美元且价格不断波动的证券进行出价时，你不会希望让一个固定价格的报价长时间有效。
In the end the bankers made the deal, but it was an interesting period. The whole LTCM is really fascinating because if you take Larry Hillenbrand, Eric Rosenfeld, John Meriwether and the two Nobel prize winners. If you take the 16 of them, they have about as high an IQ as any 16 people working together in one business in the country, including Microsoft. An incredible amount of intellect in one room. Now you combine that with the fact that those people had extensive experience in the field they were operating in. These were not a bunch of guys who had made their money selling men’s clothing and all of a sudden went into the securities business. They had in aggregate, the 16, had 300 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing and then you throw in the third factor that most of them had most of their very substantial net worth’s in the businesses. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of their own money up (at risk), super high intellect and working in a field that they knew. Essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating.
最终，银行家们达成了交易，但那真是一段有趣的时期。整个长期资本管理公司（LTCM）的事件确实很引人深思，因为如果你想想拉里·希伦布兰德、埃里克·罗森菲尔德、约翰·梅里韦瑟以及那两位诺贝尔奖得主。把他们这16个人放在一起，他们的智商总和大概比美国任何一个行业里一同共事的16个人都要高，包括微软公司的员工。同一间办公室里汇聚了极其强大的智力资源。 现在，再结合这样一个事实，即这些人在他们所从事的领域有着丰富的经验。他们可不是一群靠卖男装赚了钱，然后突然转行进入证券行业的人。总的来说，这16个人在他们所从事的业务上，有着三四百年的经验积累。然后还有第三个因素，他们中的大多数人把自己相当可观的净资产都投入到了公司业务中。他们投入了数亿美元的自有资金（面临风险），拥有超高的智商，并且在自己熟悉的领域工作。但基本上，他们最后还是破产了。这一点对我来说，绝对是非常值得探究的。
If I ever write a book it will be called, Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. My partner says it should be autobiographical. But this might be an interesting illustration. They are perfectly decent guys. I respect them and they helped me out when I had problems at Salomon. They are not bad people at all.
如果我要写一本书，书名就叫《为什么聪明人会做蠢事》。我的搭档说这本书应该写成自传。但长期资本管理公司这件事或许就是个很有意思的例证。他们都是非常不错的人。我尊重他们，而且我在所罗门公司遇到麻烦的时候，他们还帮过我。他们压根儿就不是坏人。
But to make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and what they did need. That is just plain foolish; it doesn’t matter what your IQ is. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t care if the odds you succeed are 99 to 1 or 1000 to 1 that you succeed. If you hand me a gun with a million chambers with one bullet in a chamber and put it up to your temple and I am paid to pull the trigger, it doesn’t matter how much I would be paid. I would not pull the trigger. You can name any sum you want, but it doesn’t do anything for me on the upside and I think the downside is fairly clear. Yet people do it financially very much without thinking.
但是，为了赚取他们本没有且也不需要的钱，他们拿自己所拥有且确实需要的东西去冒险。这简直太愚蠢了，不管你的智商有多高都是如此。如果你为了一些对你来说不重要的东西，而去拿对你来说重要的东西冒险，那真的毫无道理。不管你成功的几率是99比1，还是1000比1，我都不在乎。如果你递给我一把有一百万个弹膛的枪，其中一个弹膛里有一颗子弹，然后把枪抵在你的太阳穴上，还说只要我扣动扳机就给我钱，不管给我多少钱，我都不会扣动扳机。你可以说出任何你想要的金额，但这对我来说没有任何好处，而且我觉得后果是相当明显的。然而，人们在金融领域常常不假思索地就做出这样的冒险行为。
There was a lousy book with a great title written by Walter Gutman—You Only Have to Get Rich Once. Now that seems pretty fundamental. If you have $100 million at the beginning of the year and you will make 10% if you are unleveraged and 20% if you are leveraged 99 times out of a 100, what difference if at the end of the year, you have $110 million or $120 million? It makes no difference. If you die at the end of the year, the guy who makes up the story may make a typo, he may have said 110 even though you had a 120. You have gained nothing at all. It makes absolutely no difference. It makes no difference to your family or anybody else.
沃尔特·古特曼写过一本糟糕的书，却有着很棒的书名——《你只需富一次》。这道理似乎相当基本。如果你年初有1亿美元，在不使用杠杆的情况下能获得10%的收益，而在100次里有99次使用99倍杠杆的情况下能获得20%的收益，那么到了年底，你拥有1.1亿美元还是1.2亿美元又有什么区别呢？根本没什么区别。如果你在年底去世了，撰写关于你的事迹的人可能会打错字，也许你有1.2亿美元，可他却写成了1.1亿美元。你根本没有多得到什么。这绝对没有任何差别。这对你的家人或者其他任何人来说都没有差别。
The downside, especially if you are managing other people’s money, is not only losing all your money, but it is disgrace, humiliation and facing friends whose money you have lost. Yet 16 guys with very high IQs entered into that game. I think it is madness. It is produced by an over reliance to some extent on things. Those guys would tell me back at Salomon; a six Sigma event wouldn’t touch us. But they were wrong. History does not tell you of future things happening. They had a great reliance on mathematics. They thought that the Beta of the stock told you something about the risk of the stock. It doesn’t tell you a damn thing about the risk of the stock in my view.
不利的一面在于，尤其是当你在管理别人的钱时，不仅会赔光所有的钱，还会身败名裂、颜面扫地，而且还要面对那些被你赔了钱的朋友们。然而，16个高智商的人却参与了那样的游戏。我认为这简直是疯狂之举。在某种程度上，这是由于过度依赖某些东西导致的。那些人在我还在所罗门公司的时候就曾对我说：六西格玛事件不会降临到我们头上。但他们错了。历史并不能告诉你未来会发生什么事情。他们过于依赖数学了。他们认为股票的贝塔系数能说明这只股票的风险情况。但在我看来，它对于股票的风险根本说明不了任何问题。
Sigma’s do not tell you about the risk of going broke in my view and maybe now in their view too. But I don’t like to use them as an example. The same thing in a different way could happen to any of us, where we really have a blind spot about something that is crucial, because we know a whole lot of something else. It is like Henry Kauffman said, “The ones who are going broke in this situation are of two types, the ones who know nothing and the ones who know everything.” It is sad in a way.
在我看来，西格玛值并不能告诉你破产的风险，或许现在他们也这么认为了。但我并不想以他们为例。类似的事情换种方式也可能发生在我们任何人身上，我们在某些关键问题上确实存在盲点，因为我们对其他很多方面了解得太多了。就像亨利·考夫曼说的那样：“在这种情况下破产的人有两种，一种是什么都不懂的人，另一种是自以为什么都懂的人。”从某种程度上来说，这挺可悲的。
I urge you. We basically never borrow money. I never borrowed money even when I had $10,000 basically, what difference did it make. I was having fun as I went along it didn’t matter whether I had $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000 unless I had a medical emergency come along.
我要告诫你们。我们基本上从不借钱。甚至在我只有大概一万美元的时候，我也从不借钱，这又有什么关系呢。在人生的道路上我过得很开心，不管我拥有一万美元、十万美元还是一百万美元都无所谓，除非遇到了突发的重大医疗状况。
I was going to do the same things when I had a little bit of money as when I had a lot of money. If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically (SunTrust gives me mine), we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or better yet, Dairy Queen, and we live in a house that is warm in winter and cool in summer. We watch the Nebraska (football) game on big screen TV. You see it the same way I see it. We do everything the same—our lives are not that different. The only thing we do is we travel differently. What can I do that you can’t do?
当我钱不多的时候和当我有很多钱的时候，我打算做的事情是一样的。如果你想想我和你们之间的差别，基本上我们穿的衣服是一样的（太阳信托银行会给我提供衣服），我们吃的食物也差不多——我们都会去麦当劳，或者更好一点，去冰雪皇后（Dairy Queen），而且我们都住在冬暖夏凉的房子里。我们会在大屏幕电视上看内布拉斯加州（橄榄球）比赛。你看到的和我看到的是一样的。我们做的所有事情都一样——我们的生活并没有那么大的不同。唯一的区别就是我们出行的方式不同。有什么我能做而你们不能做的事情呢？
I get to work in a job that I love, but I have always worked at a job that I loved. I loved it just as much when I thought it was a big deal to make $1,000. I urge you to work in jobs that you love. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. I was with a fellow at Harvard the other day who was taking me over to talk. He was 28 and he was telling me all that he had done in life, which was terrific. And then I said, “What will you do next?” “Well,” he said, “Maybe after I get my MBA I will go to work for a consulting firm because it will look good on my resume.” I said, “Look, you are 28 and you have been doing all these things, you have a resume 10 times than anybody I have ever seen. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?
我得以从事一份自己热爱的工作，但其实我一直都在做自己喜欢的工作。当我觉得能挣到1000美元是件了不起的大事时，我就非常热爱自己的工作了。我劝你们去从事自己热爱的工作。要是你一直做着自己不喜欢的工作，仅仅是因为你觉得这在简历上会好看些，那我觉得你真是疯了。前几天我在哈佛和一个年轻人在一起，他当时带我去聊天。他28岁，跟我讲了他人生中做过的所有事情，都非常了不起。然后我问他：“那你接下来打算做什么呢？”他说：“嗯，也许等我拿到工商管理硕士学位后，我会去一家咨询公司工作，因为这在我的简历上会很好看。”我说：“听着，你才28岁，已经做了这么多事情，你的简历比我见过的任何人的都要丰富10倍。这难道不有点像把性生活都留到年老时才去享受吗？ ”
There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. When I first got out of Columbia Business School, I wanted to go to work for Graham immediately for nothing. He thought I was over-priced. But I kept pestering him. I sold securities for three years and I kept writing him and finally I went to work for him for a couple of years. It was a great experience. But I always worked in a job that I loved doing. You really should take a job that if you were independently wealthy that would be the job you would take. You will learn something, you will be excited about, and you will jump out of bed. You can’t miss. You may try something else later on, but you will get way more out of it and I don’t care what the starting salary is.
总有那么一个时刻，你应该开始去做自己想做的事情。找一份你热爱的工作。这样你每天早上都会迫不及待地从床上跳起来。我刚从哥伦比亚商学院毕业的时候，就想立刻无偿为格雷厄姆工作。他觉得我“要价”太高（能力与期望不匹配）。但我一直缠着他。我卖了三年证券，还一直给他写信，最后终于去为他工作了几年。那是一段很棒的经历。但我一直都在做自己喜欢的工作。你真的应该找一份工作，一份即使你已经财富自由也依然会选择去做的工作。你会学到东西，会对这份工作充满热情，而且每天都会迫不及待地起床。这样做你不会有任何损失。你以后或许还会尝试其他的事情，但你会从这份工作中收获更多，而且我不在乎这份工作的起薪是多少。
When you get out of here take a job you love, not a job you think will look good on your resume. You ought to find something you like.
当你离开这里后，找一份你热爱的工作，而不是一份你认为在简历上看起来会很不错的工作。你应该找到自己喜欢的事情去做。
If you think you will be happier getting 2x instead of 1x, you are probably making a mistake. You will get in trouble if you think making 10x or 20x will make you happier because then you will borrow money when you shouldn’t or cut corners on things. It just doesn’t make sense and you won’t like it when you look back.
如果你认为得到两倍（的财富等）会比得到一倍更幸福，那你很可能犯了一个错误。如果你觉得赚到十倍或二十倍的钱会让你更幸福，那你就会陷入麻烦，因为那样的话，你可能会在不该借钱的时候去借钱，或者在一些事情上走捷径。这根本毫无道理，而且当你回首往事时，你不会喜欢自己当时的所作所为。
Question: What makes a company something that you like?
问题：是什么让一家公司成为你喜欢的公司？
Buffett: I like businesses that I can understand. Let’s start with that. That narrows it down by 90%. There are all types of things I don’t understand, but fortunately, there is enough I do understand. You have this big wide world out there and almost every company is publicly owned. So you have all American business practically available to you. So it makes sense to go with things you can understand.
巴菲特：我喜欢那些我能够理解的企业。咱们就从这一点说起。这就把范围缩小了90%。有各种各样我不理解的东西，但幸运的是，也有足够多我能理解的东西。外面有广阔的世界，而且几乎每家公司都是公开上市的。所以实际上所有美国企业都在你的选择范围之内。因此，选择那些你能够理解的企业是有道理的。
I can understand this, anyone can understand this (Buffett holds up a bottle of CocaCola). Since 1886, it is a simple business, but it is not an easy business—I don’t want an easy business for competitors. I want a business with a moat around it. I want a very valuable castle in the middle and then I want the Duke who is in charge of that castle to be very honest and hard working and able. Then I want a moat around that castle. The moat can be various things: The moat around our auto insurance business, Geico, is low cost.
我能理解这个，任何人都能理解这个（巴菲特举起一瓶可口可乐）。自1886年以来，这是一门简单的生意，但它不是一门容易的生意——我可不希望对竞争对手来说这是一门容易的生意。我想要一家周围有护城河的企业。我想要在中间有一座非常有价值的城堡，然后我希望掌管那座城堡的公爵非常诚实、勤奋且有能力。接着我还想要那座城堡周围有一条护城河。这条护城河可以是各种各样的东西：我们的汽车保险公司政府雇员保险公司（Geico）的护城河就是低成本。
People have to buy auto insurance so everyone is going to have one auto insurance policy per car basically. I can’t sell them 20, but they have to buy one. I can sell them 1. What are they going to buy it on? (based on what criteria?) They (customers) will buy based on service and cost. Most people will assume the service is identical among companies or close enough. So they will do it on cost. So I have to be a low cost producer–that is my moat. To the extent that my costs are further below the other guy, I have thrown a couple of sharks into the moat. All the time you have this wonderful castle, there are people out there who are going to attack it and try to take it away from you. I want a castle I can understand, but I want a castle with a moat around it.
人们必须购买汽车保险，所以基本上每个人每辆车都得买一份汽车保险保单。我没法卖给他们20份，但他们必须买一份。我只能卖给他们一份。那他们会基于什么来购买呢？（依据什么标准呢？）他们（客户）会基于服务和价格来购买。大多数人会认为各公司之间的服务是相同的，或者相差不大。所以他们会依据价格来做决定。因此，我必须成为低成本的供应商——这就是我的护城河。我的成本比其他公司低得越多，就相当于我往护城河里多扔了几条鲨鱼。你一直拥有这座很棒的城堡，而外面总有人会来攻打它，试图把它从你手中夺走。我想要一座我能理解的城堡，但我更想要一座周围有护城河环绕的城堡。
Kodak 柯达
30 years ago, Eastman Kodak’s moat was just as wide as Coca-Cola’s moat. I mean if you were going to take a picture of your six-month old baby and you want to look at that picture 20 years from now or 50 years from now. And you are never going to get a chance—you are not a professional photographer—so you can evaluate what is going to look good 20 or 50 years ago. What is in your mind about that photography company (Share of Mind) is what counts. Because they are promising you that the picture you take today is going to be terrific 20 to 50 years from now about something that is very important to you. Well, Kodak had that in spades 30 years ago, they owned that. They had what I call share of mind. Forget about share of market, share of mind. They had something—that little yellow box—that said Kodak is the best. That is priceless. They have lost some of that. They haven’t lost it all.
30年前，伊士曼柯达公司的护城河和可口可乐公司的护城河一样宽广。我的意思是，如果你要给六个月大的宝宝拍张照片，并且希望在20年后或者50年后还能看看这张照片。而你又绝不是专业摄影师，没有机会去评判这张照片在20年或50年后看起来效果如何。在这种情况下，你对这家摄影公司的印象（心智占有率）才是关键所在。因为他们向你承诺，你今天拍摄的照片，在20年到50年后依然会很棒，而照片里记录的是对你来说非常重要的东西。嗯，30年前的柯达在这方面优势极为明显，他们占据着这一领域。他们拥有我所说的心智占有率。先别提市场占有率，我说的是心智占有率。他们有那样一个东西——那个黄色的小盒子——上面写着“柯达是最棒的”。这是无价之宝。他们已经失去了一部分这样的优势，但还没有完全丧失。
It is not due to George Fisher. George is doing a great job, but they let that moat narrow. They let Fuji come and start narrowing the moat in various ways. They let them get into the Olympics and take away that special aspect that only Kodak was fit to photograph the Olympics. So Fuji gets there and immediately in people’s minds, Fuji becomes more into parity with Kodak.
这并非乔治·费舍尔的过错。乔治干得很出色，但他们让柯达的护城河变窄了。他们任由富士公司进入市场，并开始以各种方式侵蚀这条护城河。他们让富士获得了奥运会的相关权益，失去了那种只有柯达才适合拍摄奥运会的特殊地位。于是富士进入了这个领域，而且很快在人们的认知里，富士在一定程度上与柯达平起平坐了。
You haven’t seen that with Coke; Coke’s moat is wider now than it was 30 years ago. You can’t see the moat day by day but every time the infrastructure that gets built in some country that isn’t yet profitable for Coke that will be 20 years from now. The moat is widening a little bit. Things are, all the time, changing a little in one direction or the other. Ten years from now, you will see the difference. Our managers of the businesses we run, I have one message to them, and we want to widen the moat. We want to throw crocs, sharks and gators—I guess—into the moat to keep away competitors. That comes about through service, through quality of product, it comes about through cost, some times through patents, and/or real estate location. So that is the business I am looking for.
这种情况在可口可乐身上可没有出现；如今可口可乐的护城河比30年前更宽了。你不可能每天都察觉到这条护城河的变化，但每当在某个国家建设起那些目前对可口可乐来说还无法盈利、但20年后可能盈利的基础设施时，可口可乐的护城河就在一点点变宽。事情总是在这样或那样地发生着细微的变化。十年之后，你就能看到其中的差异。对于我们所经营业务的管理者们，我只有一个要求，那就是我们要拓宽护城河。我们要往护城河里投放鳄鱼、鲨鱼，还有短吻鳄——我想是这些——来抵御竞争对手。这可以通过优质的服务、高质量的产品来实现，也可以通过控制成本来达成，有时候还可以依靠专利，或者是绝佳的地理位置。这就是我所追求的企业模式。
Now what kind of businesses am I going to find like that? Well, I am going to find them in simple products because I am not going to be able to figure what the moat is going to look like for Oracle, Lotus or Microsoft, ten years from now. Gates is the best businessman I have ever run into and they have a hell of a position, but I really don’t know what that business is going to look like ten years from now. I certainly don’t know what his competitors will look like ten years from now. I know what the chewing business will look like ten years from now. The Internet is not going to change how we chew gum and nothing much else is going to change how we chew gum. There will lots of new products. Is Spearmint or Juicy Fruit going to evaporate? It isn’t going to happen. You give me a billion dollars and tell me to go into the chewing gum business and try to make a real dent in Wrigley’s. I can’t do it. That is how I think about businesses. I say to myself, give me a billion dollars and how much can I hurt the guy? Give me $10 billion dollars and how much can I hurt Coca-Cola around the world? I can’t do it. Those are good businesses.
那么，我要到哪里去找到这样的企业呢？嗯，我会在简单产品领域去寻找，因为我无法想象十年之后，甲骨文、莲花软件公司或者微软的护城河会是什么样子。盖茨是我见过的最出色的商人，他们的企业也占据着极其有利的地位，但我真的不知道十年后这些企业会发展成什么样子。我当然无从知晓十年之后，他的竞争对手会是什么样子，我也不知道。但我知道十年之后口香糖行业会是什么样子。互联网改变不了我们嚼口香糖的方式，其他东西也很难改变我们嚼口香糖的习惯。未来会有很多新产品出现。绿箭口香糖或者果味口香糖会消失吗？那是不可能的。你给我十亿美元，让我进入口香糖行业，试着对箭牌公司造成实质性的冲击，我做不到。我就是这样思考企业的。我会对自己说，给我十亿美元，我能对那个企业造成多大的伤害呢？给我一百亿美元，我又能在全球范围内对可口可乐造成多大的伤害呢？我做不到。这些都是优秀的企业。
Now give me some money and tell me to hurt somebody in some other fields, and I can figure out how to do it.
现在给我一些钱，然后让我去在其他某些领域中打击某个企业，那我就能想出该怎么做。
So I want a simple business, easy to understand, great economics now, honest and able management, and then I can see about in a general way where they will be ten (10) years from now. If I can’t see where they will be ten years from now, I don’t want to buy it. Basically, I don’t want to buy any stock where if they close the NYSE tomorrow for five years, I won’t be happy owning it. I buy a farm and I don’t get a quote on it for five years and I am happy if the farm does OK. I buy an apartment house and don’t get a quote on it for five years, I am happy if the apartment house produces the returns that I expect. People buy a stock and they look at the price next morning and they decide to see if they are doing well or not doing well. It is crazy. They are buying a piece of the business. That is what Graham—the most fundamental part of what he taught me.
所以我想要的是一家简单的企业，易于理解，目前有着良好的经济效益，拥有诚实且有能力的管理团队，而且大体上我能预见它十年后的发展状况。如果我无法预见它十年后的样子，我就不会买入它。基本上来说，如果纽约证券交易所明天关闭五年，而我持有某只股票却会因此不开心的话，我就不会去买这只股票。我买了一个农场，五年内都没有它的报价，但如果这个农场经营状况良好，我就会很高兴。我买了一栋公寓楼，五年内没有它的报价，但如果这栋公寓楼能带来我预期的收益，我也会很开心。人们买了一只股票，第二天早上就盯着股价，然后据此判断自己做得好不好。这太疯狂了。他们买的可是企业的一部分啊。这就是格雷厄姆所教给我的最核心的内容。
You are not buying a stock, you are buying part ownership in a business. You will do well if the business does well, if you didn’t pay a totally silly price. That is what it is all about. You ought to buy businesses you understand. Just like if you buy farms, you ought to buy farms you understand. It is not complicated.
你买的不是股票，而是一家企业的部分所有权。如果这家企业经营得好，而且你当初买入的价格也并非愚蠢至极，那么你就会获得不错的收益。事情的本质就是如此。你应该买入那些你了解的企业。这就如同你购买农场一样，你应该购买那些你了解的农场。这并不复杂。
Incidentally, by the way, in calling this Graham-Buffett, this is pure Graham. I was very fortunate. I picked up his book (The Intelligent Investor) when I was nineteen; I got interested in stocks when I was 6 or 7. I bought my first stock when I was eleven. But I was playing around with all this stuff—I had charts and volume and I was making all types of technical calculations and everything. Then I picked up a little book that said you are not just buying some little ticker symbol, that bounces around every day, you are buying part of a business. Soon as I started thinking about it that way, everything else followed. It is very simple. So we buy businesses we think we can understand. There is no one here who can’t understand Coke…………..
顺便说一下，之所以把这称为格雷厄姆-巴菲特投资理念，其实这完全源自格雷厄姆。我非常幸运。我19岁的时候读到了他的书（《聪明的投资者》）；我六七岁的时候就对股票产生了兴趣。我11岁时买了自己的第一支股票。但在那之前我一直是瞎折腾——我有股价走势图、成交量数据，还做着各种技术分析之类的事情。然后我读到了一本小册子，上面说你不只是在买一个每天上下波动的股票代码，你买的是一家企业的一部分。一旦我开始从这个角度去思考，其他的一切也就顺理成章了。这非常简单。所以我们买入那些我们认为自己能够理解的企业。在座的各位没有人理解不了可口可乐公司……
If I was teaching a class at business school, on the final exam I would pass out the information on an Internet company and ask each student to value it. Anybody that gave me an answer, I’d flunk (Laughter).
如果我在商学院授课，在期末考试时，我会给学生们发放关于一家互联网公司的资料，然后让每个学生对它进行估值。要是有人给我一个（关于该公司估值的）答案，我就会让他不及格。（笑声）
I don’t know how to do it. But people do it all the time; it is more exciting. If you look at it like you are going to the races–that is a different thing–but if you are investing…. Investing is putting out money to be sure of getting more back later at an appropriate rate. And to do that you have to understand what you are doing at any time. You have to understand the business. You can understand some businesses but not all businesses.
我可不知道该如何去给互联网公司估值。但人们却总是在这么做，而且他们觉得这更刺激。如果你把这当成是去赛马场赌马——那就是另一回事了——但如果你是在做投资……投资是投入资金，目的是确保日后能以合适的回报率获得更多的回报。要做到这一点，你在任何时候都必须清楚自己在做什么。你必须了解相关的企业。你能够了解某些企业，但不可能了解所有的企业。
Question: You covered half of it which is trying to understand a business and buying a business. You also alluded to getting a return on the amount of capital invested in the business. How do you determine what is the proper price to pay for the business?
问题：你已经谈到了其中的一半，即努力去了解一家企业并买入这家企业。你也间接提到了投入到企业中的资金要获得回报。那么你如何确定为一家企业支付怎样的价格才是合适的呢？
Buffett: It is a tough thing to decide but I don’t want to buy into any business I am not terribly sure of. So if I am terribly sure of it, it probably won’t offer incredible returns. Why should something that is essentially a cinch to do well, offer you 40% a year? We don’t have huge returns in mind, but we do have in mind not losing anything. We bought See’s Candy in 1972, See’s Candy was then selling 16 m. pounds of candy at a $1.95 a pound and it was making 2 bits a pound or $4 million pre-tax. We paid $25 million for it—6.25 x pretax or about 10x after tax. It took no capital to speak of. When we looked at that business—basically, my partner, Charlie, and I—we needed to decide if there was some untapped pricing power there. Where that $1.95 box of candy could sell for $2 to $2.25. If it could sell for $2.25 or another $0.30 per pound that was $4.8 on 16 million pounds. Which on a $25 million purchase price was fine. We never hired a consultant in our lives; our idea of consulting was to go out and buy a box of candy and eat it.
巴菲特：这是个很难做的决定，但我不想买入任何我没有十足把握的企业。所以，如果我对某家企业有十足把握，它可能也不会带来令人难以置信的高回报。为什么一件基本上肯定会经营得很好的事情，却要给你每年40%的回报率呢？我们没想过要获得巨额回报，但我们确实想着不要有任何损失。我们在1972年收购了喜诗糖果公司。当时喜诗糖果每年销售1600万磅糖果，每磅售价1.95美元，每磅能赚20美分，也就是税前利润400万美元。我们花了2500万美元收购它，相当于税前利润的6.25倍，或者说税后利润的10倍左右。而且经营这家企业基本不需要投入什么资金。当我和我的合伙人查理审视这家企业时，我们需要判断它是否存在尚未挖掘的定价能力。也就是那盒售价1.95美元的糖果能否卖到2美元到2.25美元。如果它能卖到2.25美元，也就是每磅再提高0.3美元，那么1600万磅糖果就能多赚480万美元。对于2500万美元的收购价格来说，这是很不错的。我们这辈子从来没有雇用过顾问；我们所谓的咨询方式就是出去买一盒糖果，然后把它吃掉。
What we did know was that they had share of mind in California. There was something special. Every person in Ca. has something in mind about See’s Candy and overwhelmingly it was favorable. They had taken a box on Valentine’s Day to some girl and she had kissed him. If she slapped him, we would have no business. As long as she kisses him, that is what we want in their minds. See’s Candy means getting kissed. If we can get that in the minds of people, we can raise prices. I bought it in 1972, and every year I have raised prices on Dec. 26th, the day after Christmas, because we sell a lot on Christmas. In fact, we will make $60 million this year. We will make $2 per pound on 30 million pounds. Same business, same formulas, same everything–$60 million bucks and it still doesn’t take any capital.
我们当时确实知道的是，喜诗糖果在加利福尼亚州拥有较高的心智占有率。它有着一些特别之处。加利福尼亚州的每个人对喜诗糖果都有一定的印象，而且绝大多数都是好印象。有人曾在情人节时送了一盒喜诗糖果给某个女孩，然后那个女孩吻了他。要是女孩扇了他一巴掌，那我们的生意可就没戏了。只要女孩吻了他，这就是我们希望在人们心中留下的印象。喜诗糖果意味着会得到亲吻。如果我们能让人们有这样的想法，我们就能提高价格。我在1972年收购了这家公司，从那以后每年的12月26日，也就是圣诞节后的第二天，我都会提高价格，因为我们在圣诞节期间的销量很大。事实上，今年我们将盈利6000万美元。我们销售3000万磅糖果，每磅能赚2美元。同样的生意，同样的配方，一切都没变，却能赚6000万美元，而且依然不需要投入什么资金。
And we make more money 10 years from now. But of that $60 million, we make $55 million in the three weeks before Christmas. And our company song is: “What a friend we have in Jesus.” (Laughter). It is a good business. Think about it a little. Most people do not buy boxed chocolate to consume themselves, they buy them as gifts— somebody’s birthday or more likely it is a holiday. Valentine’s Day is the single biggest day of the year. Christmas is the biggest season by far. Women buy for Christmas and they plan ahead and buy over a two or three week period. Men buy on Valentine’s Day. They are driving home; we run ads on the Radio. Guilt, guilt, guilt—guys are veering off the highway right and left. They won’t dare go home without a box of Chocolates by the time we get through with them on our radio ads. So that Valentine’s Day is the biggest day.
而且十年后我们还能赚更多的钱。在这6000万美元的利润中，有5500万美元是在圣诞节前的三周内赚来的。我们公司的歌是：“主耶稣是我们多么好的朋友。”（笑声）这是一桩好生意。稍微思考一下就明白了。大多数人买盒装巧克力并不是为了自己吃，而是买来当礼物——比如给别人过生日，或者更常见的是在节假日时送。情人节是一年中最重要的单个日子。而圣诞节则是到目前为止最重要的节日季。女性会为了过圣诞节买巧克力，她们会提前计划，然后在两三个星期的时间里购买。男性则在情人节买巧克力。他们在开车回家的路上，而我们在电台播放广告。负罪感，负罪感，满满的负罪感——男人们纷纷偏离高速公路（去买巧克力）。在我们电台广告的“攻势”下，他们可不敢不带上一盒巧克力就回家。所以情人节是最重要的日子。
Can you imagine going home on Valentine’s Day—our See’s Candy is now $11 a pound thanks to my brilliance. And let’s say there is candy available at $6 a pound. Do you really want to walk in on Valentine’s Day and hand—she has all these positive images of See’s Candy over the years—and say, “Honey, this year I took the low bid.” And hand her a box of candy. It just isn’t going to work. So in a sense, there is untapped pricing power—it is not price dependent.
你能想象在情人节那天回家的情景吗？多亏了我的英明决策，我们的喜诗糖果现在每磅售价11美元。假设现在有每磅售价6美元的糖果。你真的想在情人节这天走进家门，要知道这么多年来她对喜诗糖果一直有着美好的印象，然后说：“亲爱的，今年我选了个便宜的。”接着递给她一盒糖果吗？这根本行不通。所以从某种意义上说，喜诗糖果还有尚未挖掘的定价潜力——它并不依赖于价格（来吸引消费者购买）。
Think of Disney. Disney is selling Home Videos for $16.95 or $18.95 or whatever. All over the world—people, and we will speak particularly about Mothers in this case, have something in their mind about Disney. Everyone in this room, when you say Disney, has something in their mind about Disney. When I say Universal Pictures, if I say \(20th\) Century Fox, you don’t have anything special in your mind. Now if I say Disney, you have something special in your mind. That is true around the world.
想想迪士尼吧。迪士尼的家庭录像带售价为16.95美元、18.95美元或者其他价格。在全世界范围内——就拿人们来说吧，在这种情况下我们尤其要说的是母亲们，她们对迪士尼都有着一定的印象。在座的每一个人，当听到“迪士尼”这个词的时候，脑海中都会浮现出一些与迪士尼相关的东西。当我说环球影业，或者说20世纪福克斯的时候，你们的脑海中不会有什么特别的印象。但现在要是我说迪士尼，你们的脑海中就会有特别的想法。这在全世界都是如此。
Now picture yourself with a couple of young kids, whom you want to put away for a couple of hours every day and get some peace of mind. You know if you get one video, they will watch it twenty times. So you go to the video store or wherever to buy the video. Are you going to sit there and premier 10 different videos and watch them each for an hour and a half to decide which one your kid should watch? No. Let’s say there is one there for $16.95 and the Disney one for $17.95—you know if you take the Disney video that you are going to be OK. So you buy it. You don’t have to make a quality decision on something you don’t want to spend the time to do. So you can get a little bit more money if you are Disney and you will sell a lot more videos. It makes it a wonderful business. It makes it very tough for the other guy.
现在，想象一下你自己带着几个年幼的孩子，你每天都想让他们自己待上几个小时，好让自己能清净一会儿。你知道，如果你买了一盘录像带，孩子们会看上二十遍。于是你去音像店或者别的什么地方买录像带。你会坐在那儿先预览十盘不同的录像带，每盘都看一个半小时，然后再决定让你的孩子看哪一盘吗？不会的。比如说，店里有一盘卖16.95美元，而迪士尼的那盘卖17.95美元——你知道要是买了迪士尼的那盘，就不会有问题。所以你就买了它。对于一件你不想花时间去仔细甄别的事情，你没必要去做关于其质量的抉择。所以，如果你是迪士尼，你就能多卖点儿钱，而且还能卖出更多的录像带。这就使得这成为了一桩很棒的生意。而这也让其他同行很难与之竞争。
How would you try to create a brand—Dreamworks is trying—that competes with Disney around the world and replaces the concept that people have in their minds about Disney with something that says, Universal Pictures? So a mother is going to walk in and pick out a Universal Pictures video in preference to a Disney. It is not going to happen.
你要如何努力打造一个品牌呢——就像梦工厂正在尝试的那样——使其能在全球范围内与迪士尼竞争，并把人们脑海中有关迪士尼的概念，替换为类似环球影业这样的概念呢？这样一来，一位母亲走进商店时，会优先挑选环球影业的录像带，而不是迪士尼的。但这种情况是不会发生的。
Coca-Cola is associated with people being happy around the world. Everyplace – Disneyland, the World Cup, the Olympics—where people are happy. Happiness and Coke go together. Now you give me—I don’t care how much money—and tell me that I am going to do that with RC Cola around the world and have five billion people have a favorable image in their mind about RC Cola. You can’t get it done. You can fool around, you can do what you want to do. You can have price discounts on weekends. But you are not going to touch it. That is what you want to have in a business. That is the moat. You want that moat to widen.
在全世界范围内，可口可乐都与人们的快乐联系在一起。在每一个地方——迪士尼乐园、世界杯、奥运会——这些人们感到快乐的场合，快乐总是和可口可乐相伴相随。现在，你给我钱——我不在乎有多少——然后让我在全球范围内对RC可乐（美国一种可乐品牌）也做到这一点，让50亿人心中都对RC可乐怀有好感。这是办不到的。你可以折腾，可以为所欲为，你可以在周末搞价格优惠活动。但你就是无法做到和可口可乐一样。这就是你希望一家企业所具备的特质。这就是护城河。你希望这条护城河不断变宽。
If you are See’s Candy, you want to do everything in the world to make sure that the experience basically of giving that gift leads to a favorable reaction. It means what is in the box, it means the person who sells it to you, because all of our business is done when we are terribly busy. People come in during theose weeks before Chirstmas, Valentine’s Day and there are long lines. So at five o’clock in the afternoon some woman is selling someone the last box candy and that person has been waiting in line for maybe 20 or 30 customers. And if the salesperson smiles at that last customer, our moat has widened and if she snarls at ‘em, our moat has narrowed. We can’t see it, but it is going on everyday. But it is the key to it. It is the total part of the product delivery. It is having everything associated with it say, See’s Candy and something pleasant happening. That is what business is all about.
如果你是喜诗糖果公司，你就会想尽一切办法，确保赠送这份礼物所带来的体验基本上能引发积极的反应。这涉及到盒子里装的是什么，也关乎把糖果卖给你的那个人，因为我们所有的生意都在非常忙碌的时候进行。人们会在圣诞节前的那几周以及情人节期间光顾，店里常常排着长队。所以，在下午五点钟的时候，有位女售货员在把最后一盒糖果卖给某位顾客，而这位顾客可能已经等了前面二三十位顾客了。如果售货员对最后这位顾客微笑，我们的护城河就变宽了；要是她对顾客凶巴巴的，我们的护城河就变窄了。我们看不到这种变化，但它每天都在发生。而这就是关键所在。这是产品交付过程中不可或缺的一部分。与喜诗糖果相关的一切都意味着，只要提到喜诗糖果，就会联想到一些令人愉快的事情发生。这就是生意的真谛所在。
Question: If I have every bought a company where the numbers told me not to. How much is quantitative and how much is qualitative?
问题：我是否曾收购过一家数据显示不该收购的公司？在决策过程中，定量因素和定性因素各占多大比重？
Buffett: The best buys have been when the numbers almost tell you not to. Because then you feel so strongly about the product. And not just the fact you are getting a used cigar butt cheap. Then it is compelling. I owned a windmill company at one time. Windmills are cigar butts, believe me. I bought it very cheap, I bought it at a third of working capital. And we made money out of it, but there is no repetitive money to be made on it. There is a one-time profit in something like that. And it is just not the thing to be doing. I went through that phase. I bought streetcar companies and all kinds of things. In terms of the qualitative, I probably understand the qualitative the moment I get the phone call. Almost every business we have bought has taken five or ten minutes in terms of analysis. We bought two businesses this year.
巴菲特：最划算的收购往往是那种从数据上看几乎不应该去做的收购。因为那时你会对该公司的产品有着强烈的信心。这可不只是因为你能廉价买到一个“雪茄烟蒂”（指那些看似廉价但价值有限、没有发展潜力的公司）。那样的收购才是有吸引力的。我曾经拥有过一家风车公司。相信我，风车公司就是“雪茄烟蒂”式的企业。我以很低的价格买下了它，价格只有其营运资金的三分之一。我们从这家公司赚了钱，但没办法持续从它身上赚钱。这类公司只能带来一次性的利润。这可不是值得去做的事情。我经历过那个阶段。我买过有轨电车公司以及各种各样的公司。至于定性分析方面，可能在我接到电话的那一刻就对其定性有所了解了。几乎我们收购的每一家公司，从分析的角度来说，都只花了五到十分钟的时间。今年我们就收购了两家公司。
General Re is a $18 billion deal. I have never been to their home office. I hope it is there. (Laughter) “There could be a few guys there saying what numbers should we send Buffett this month?” I could see them going once a month and saying we have $20 billion in the bank instead of $18 billion. I have never been there.
通用再保险公司（General Re）那笔交易涉及金额达180亿美元。我从来没去过他们的总部办公室。我希望它确实在那儿。（笑声）“说不定那儿有几个人在商量这个月该给巴菲特送什么样的数据呢？”我能想象他们每个月来这么一次，然后虚报说银行里有200亿美元，而不是实际的180亿美元。可我从来就没去过那儿。
Before I bought Executive Jet, which is fractional ownership of jets, before I bought it, I had never been there. I bought my family a quarter interest in the program three years earlier. And I have seen the service and it seems to develop well. And I got the numbers. But if you don’t know enough to know about the business instantly, you won’t know enough in a month or in two months. You have to have sort of the background of understanding and knowing what you do or don’t understand. That is the key. It is defining your circle of competence.
在我收购“行政喷气机公司”（该公司提供飞机的部分产权服务）之前，我从没去过那儿。三年前，我给家人在该公司的项目中买了四分之一的产权份额。我体验过他们的服务，而且看起来发展得很不错。我也拿到了相关数据。但如果你没有足够的能力立刻了解这家公司的业务，那么给你一个月或者两个月的时间，你也还是了解不够。你必须具备一定的背景知识，能明白自己理解什么、不理解什么。这才是关键所在。这就是界定你自己的能力圈。
Everybody has got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is, the important thing is the size of the circle; the important thing is staying inside the circle. And if that circle only has 30 companies in it out of 1000s on the big board, as long as you know which 30 they are, you will be OK. And you should know those businesses well enough so you don’t need to read lots of work. Now I did a lot of work in the earlier years just getting familiar with businesses and the way I would do that is use what Phil Fisher would call, the “Scuttlebutt Approach.” I would go out and talk to customers, suppliers, and maybe ex-employees in some cases. Everybody. Everytime I was interested in an industry, say it was coal, I would go around and see every coal company. I would ask every CEO, “If you could only buy stock in one coal company that was not your own, which one would it be and why? You piece those things together, you learn about the business after awhile.
每个人都有不同的能力圈。重要的不是能力圈有多大，重要的不是能力圈的规模大小；重要的是要待在能力圈之内。如果在证券交易所上市的数千家公司中，你的能力圈里只有30家公司，只要你清楚这30家公司是哪些，那你就没问题。而且你应该对这些公司足够了解，这样你就不需要做大量的研究工作。在早年的时候，我确实做了大量的工作来熟悉各类公司，而我采用的方法就是菲利普·费雪所说的“闲聊调查法”。我会走出去，与客户、供应商交谈，在某些情况下，可能还会和前雇员交流。和所有相关的人交流。每当我对某个行业感兴趣时，比如说煤炭行业，我就会四处走访，去考察每一家煤炭公司。我会问每一位首席执行官：“如果你只能购买一家非自己公司的煤炭企业的股票，你会选哪一家，为什么？”你把这些信息拼凑起来，过一段时间后，你就会了解这个行业了。
Funny, you get very similar answers as long as you ask about competitors. If you had a silver bullet and you could put it through the head of one competitor, which competitor and why? You will find who the best guy is in the industry. So there are a lot of things you can learn about a business. I have done that in the past on the business I felt I could understand so I don’t have to do that anymore. The nice thing about investing is that you don’t have to learn anything new. You can do it if you want to, but if you learn Wrigley’s chewing gum forty years ago, you still understand Wrigley’s chewing gum. There are not a lot of great insights to get of the sort as you go along. So you do get a database in your head.
很有意思的是，只要你询问有关竞争对手的问题，得到的答案往往非常相似。如果你有一颗“银子弹”（杀手锏），可以用它来对付一个竞争对手，你会选哪个竞争对手，又为什么呢？通过这样的问题，你就会发现这个行业里谁才是最厉害的角色。所以，有很多方法你可以了解一家企业。过去，对于那些我觉得自己能够理解的企业，我就是这么做的，所以现在我不必再那样做了。投资这件事的美妙之处在于，你不必去学习任何新东西。如果你想学习新东西，当然也可以去学，但如果你在四十年前就了解了箭牌口香糖公司，那么现在你依然了解箭牌口香糖公司。在这个过程中，你并不需要获得很多那种高深莫测的见解。所以，你的脑海中确实会形成一个信息库。
I had a guy, Frank Rooney, who ran Melville for many years; his father-in-law died and had owned H.H. Brown, a shoe company. And he put it up with Goldman Sachs. But he was playing golf with a friend of mine here in Florida and he mentioned it to this friend, so my friend said “Why don’t you call Warren?” He called me after the match and in five minutes I basically had a deal.
我认识一个人，弗兰克·鲁尼，他经营梅尔维尔公司很多年。他的岳父去世了，生前拥有一家名为H.H. 布朗的鞋业公司。他通过高盛公司准备出售这家公司。当时他在佛罗里达和我的一个朋友一起打高尔夫球，他跟我这个朋友提到了这件事，于是我的朋友就说：“你为什么不给沃伦打个电话呢？”打完球后他就给我打了电话，五分钟内我基本上就敲定了一桩交易。
But I knew Frank, and I knew the business. I sort of knew the basic economics of the shoe business, so I could buy it. Quantitatively, I have to decide what the price is. But, you know, that is either yes or no. I don’t fool a lot around with negotiations. If they name a price that makes sense to me, I buy it. If they don’t, I was happy the day before, so I will be happy the day after without owning it.
但我了解弗兰克，也了解这个行业。我大致清楚制鞋业的基本经济状况，所以我能买下这家公司。从定量分析的角度来看，我得确定价格是否合适。不过，你知道的，这无非就是买或者不买的问题。我不太喜欢在谈判上过多纠缠。如果他们提出的价格我觉得合理，我就买下来。如果价格不合适，反正我在这之前的日子过得也很开心，那么即便不买下这家公司，之后的日子我也照样开心。
Question: The Asian Crisis and how it affects a company like Coke that recently announced their earnings would be lower in the fourth quarter.
问题：亚洲金融危机以及它对像可口可乐这样的公司有何影响，该公司最近宣布其第四季度收益将会下降。
Buffett: Well, basically I love it, but because the market for Coca-Cola products will grow far faster over the next twenty years internationally than it will in the United States. It will grow in the U.S. on a per capita basis. The fact that it will be a tough period for who knows—three months or three years—but it won’t be tough for twenty years. People will still be going to be working productively around the world and they are going to find this is a bargain product in terms of a portion of their working day that they have to give up in order to have one of these, better yet, five of them a day like I do.
巴菲特：嗯，基本上我对此持乐观态度，因为在未来二十年里，可口可乐产品在国际市场的增长速度将远远超过在美国市场的增长速度。在美国，从人均角度来看，它也会有所增长。虽然谁也不知道会有一段艰难时期持续多久——可能是三个月，也可能是三年——但不会艰难二十年之久。世界各地的人们仍将高效地工作，而且他们会发现，就为了能喝上一瓶可口可乐（要是能像我一样一天喝上五瓶就更好了）而需要付出的那部分工作时间而言，这是一种很划算的商品。
This is a product that in 1936 when I first bought 6 of those for a quarter and sold them for a nickel each. It was in a 6.5 oz bottle and you paid a two cents deposit on the bottle. That was a 6.5 oz. bottle for a nickel at that time; it is now a 12 oz. can which if you buy it on Weekends or if you buy it in bigger quantities, so much money doesn’t go to packaging—you essentially can buy the 12 ozs. for not much more than 20 cents. So you are paying not much more than twice the per oz. price of 1936. This is a product that has gotten cheaper and cheaper relative to people’s earning power over the years. And which people love. And in 200 countries, you have the per capita consumption use going up every year for a product that is over 100 years old that dominates the market. That is unbelievable.
这是一种产品。1936年，我第一次花25美分买了6瓶，然后以每瓶5美分的价格卖出去。当时的瓶子是6.5盎司装的，而且每个瓶子要付2美分的押金。那时，6.5盎司装的一瓶卖5美分；现在是12盎司装的听装可乐，如果你在周末购买，或者一次性多买一些，这样就没那么多钱花在包装上了——基本上12盎司的可乐花不了20多美分就能买到。所以，如今每盎司的价格相比1936年也就高了不到两倍。多年来，相对于人们的收入水平而言，这种产品变得越来越便宜了。而且人们都很喜欢它。在200个国家里，对于这么一款已经有100多年历史且占据市场主导地位的产品，人均消费量每年都在上升。这太不可思议了。
One thing that people don’t understand is one thing that makes this product worth 10s and 10s of billions of dollars is one simple fact about really all colas, but we will call it Coca-Cola for the moment. It happens to be a name that I like. Cola has no taste memory. You can drink one of these at 9 O’clock, 10 O’clock, 1 O’clock and 5 O’clock. The one at 5 o’clock will taste as good to you as the one you drank early in the morning, you can’t do that with Cream Soda, Root Beer, Orange, Grape. All of those things accumulate on you. Most foods and beverages accumulate; you get sick of them after a while. And if you eat See’s Candy—we get these people who go to work for us at See’s Candy and the first day they go crazy, but after a week they are eating the same amount as if they were buying it, because chocolate accumulates on you. There is no taste memory to Cola and that means you get people around the world who will be heavy users—who will drink five a day, or for Diet Coke, 7 or even 8 a day. They will never do that with other products. So you get this incredible per capita consumption. The average person in this part of the world or maybe a little north of here drinks 64 ozs. of liquid a day. You can have 64 ozs. of that be Coke and you will not get fed up with Coke if you like it to start with in the least. But if you do that with anything else; if you eat just one product all day, you will get a little sick of it after a while.
有一件事人们并不了解，而这件事正是让这种产品价值达数十亿乃至上百亿美元的原因之一，其实这是一个关于所有可乐的简单事实，但我们暂且以可口可乐为例来说明。恰好我也很喜欢这个品牌名。可乐没有味觉记忆。你可以在9点、10点、下午1点和5点分别喝上一瓶。下午5点喝的那瓶，在你品尝起来，味道会和你一大早喝的那瓶一样好。 但你没法对奶油苏打水、沙士汽水、橙汁或葡萄汁做到这一点。所有那些饮品都会让你的味觉产生累积效应。过不了多久，你就会喝腻它们。还有，如果你吃喜诗糖果 —— 那些来喜诗糖果公司为我们工作的人，第一天他们会狂吃糖果，可一周之后，他们吃的量就和自己掏钱买着吃时差不多了，因为巧克力会让你的味觉产生累积效应。可乐没有味觉记忆，这就意味着在世界各地，都有大量的重度可乐饮用者 —— 他们一天能喝五瓶普通可乐，如果是健怡可乐，一天能喝七瓶甚至八瓶。但他们绝对不会对其他饮品或食品有这样的消费量。所以就出现了这种令人难以置信的人均消费量。在世界上的这个地区，或者稍微偏北一点的地方，平均每人每天要饮用 64 盎司的液体。你可以这 64 盎司全都是可乐，而且只要你一开始就喜欢喝可乐，你一点都不会喝腻。但要是换成其他任何东西，如果你一整天都只吃同一种食物，过不了多久你就会有点厌烦了。
It is a huge factor. So today over 1 billion of Coca-Cola product servings will be sold in the world and that will grow year by year. It will grow in every country virtually, and it will grow on a per capita basis. And twenty years from now it will grow a lot faster internationally than in the U.S., so I really like that market better, because there is more growth there over time. But it will hurt them in the short term right now, but that doesn’t mean anything. Coca-Cola went public in 1919; the stock sold for $40 per share. The Chandler family bought the whole business for $2,000 back in the late 1880s. So now he goes public in 1919, $40 per share. One year later it is selling for $19 per share. It has gone down 50% in one year. You might think it is some kind of disaster and you might think sugar prices increased and the bottlers were rebellious. And a whole bunch of things. You can always find reasons that weren’t the ideal moment to buy it. Years later you would have seen the Great Depression, WW II and sugar rationing and thermonuclear weapons and the whole thing—there is always a reason.
这是一个极其重要的因素。所以如今，全球每天会售出超过10亿份可口可乐产品，而且这个销量还会逐年增长。实际上，在每个国家它的销量都会增长，人均消费量也会上升。从现在起的二十年后，它在国际市场的增长速度会比在美国快得多，所以我真的更看好国际市场，因为随着时间推移，那里有更大的增长空间。不过，目前从短期来看，这（亚洲金融危机等情况）会对可口可乐公司造成一定影响，但这其实没什么大不了的。可口可乐公司在1919年上市，当时股价是每股40美元。钱德勒家族在19世纪80年代末的时候，仅花了2000美元就买下了整个公司。到了1919年公司上市，股价每股40美元。一年之后，股价跌到了每股19美元，一年内跌了50%。你可能会觉得这是一场灾难，还可能会认为是食糖价格上涨了，或者装瓶商们起来反抗了，诸如此类的原因。你总能找到一些理由，来说明当时不是买入的好时机。多年后，你又会经历大萧条、第二次世界大战、食糖配给制、热核武器危机等等——总是会有各种各样的理由。
But in the end if you had bought one share at $40 per share and reinvested the dividends, it would be worth $5 million now ($40 compounding at 14.63% for 86 years!). That factor so overrides anything else. If you are right about the business you will make a lot of money. The timing part of it is very tricky thing so I don’t worry about any given event if I got a wonderful business what it does next year or something of the sort. Price controls have been in this country at various times and that has fouled up even the best of businesses. I wouldn’t be able to raise prices Dec 31st on See’s Candy. But that doesn’t make it a lousy business if that happens to happen, because you are not going to have price controls forever. We had price controls in the early 70s.
但最终，如果你当初以每股40美元的价格买入一股可口可乐股票，并且将股息再投资，那么现在这一股就价值500万美元了（40美元按14.63%的复利计算，经过86年的结果！）。这个因素远远超过了其他任何因素的影响。如果你对一家企业的判断是正确的，你就会赚很多钱。至于投资时机的把握是非常微妙的事情，所以如果我拥有一家很棒的企业，我不会为它明年会怎样之类的特定事件而担忧。在这个国家（美国），价格管制在不同时期都出现过，这甚至会对最优秀的企业造成干扰。我也许无法在12月31日提高喜诗糖果的价格。但即便发生了这种情况，也并不意味着喜诗糖果就成了一家糟糕的企业，因为价格管制不会永远持续下去。我们在20世纪70年代初就经历过价格管制。
The wonderful business—you can figure what will happen, you can’t figure out when it will happen. You don’t want to focus too much on when but you want to focus on what. If you are right about what, you don’t have to worry about when very much.
一家出色的企业——你能够弄清楚将会发生什么事情，但你无法确定这些事情何时会发生。你不应该过于关注事情发生的时间，而应该关注事情本身的走向。如果你对事情的发展方向判断正确，那么你就不必太担心它什么时候会发生了。
Question: What about your business mistakes?
问题：那你在商业方面犯过的错误呢？
Buffett: How much time do you have? The interesting thing about investments for me and my partner, Charlie Munger, the biggest mistakes have not been mistakes of commission, but of omission. They are where we knew enough about the business to do something and where, for one reason or another, sat they’re sucking out thumbs instead of doing something. And so we have passed up things where we could have made billions and billions of dollars from things we understood, forget about things we don’t understand. The fact I could have made billions of dollars from Microsoft doesn’t mean anything because I never could understand Microsoft. But if I can make billions out of healthcare stocks, then I should make it. And I didn’t when the Clinton health care program was proposed and they all went in the tank. We should have made a ton of money out of that because I could understand it. And didn’t make it.巴菲特：你有多少时间来听呢？对我和我的合伙人查理·芒格来说，投资方面有意思的地方在于，我们所犯的最大错误并非是因主动作为而犯下的，而是因不作为造成的。就是那些我们对业务已经有足够了解，本可以有所行动的情况，但出于这样或那样的原因，我们只是干坐在那里无所作为。所以我们错过了一些机会，而要是当初有所行动，我们本可以从这些自己了解的业务中赚到巨额财富，更别提那些我们不了解的业务了。我本可以从微软公司赚上数十亿美元这件事其实没什么意义，因为我从来就没能理解微软的业务。但要是我能从医疗保健类股票上赚上数十亿美元，那我就应该去赚这笔钱。当初克林顿的医疗保健计划提出来时，这类股票价格暴跌，我们本应借此大赚一笔的，因为我能理解这个行业。但我们却没有抓住机会。
I should have made a ton of money out of Fannie Mae back the mid-1980s, but I didn’t do it. Those are billion dollar mistakes or multi-billion dollar mistakes that generally accepted accounting principles don’t pick up. The mistakes you see. I made a mistake when I bought US Air Preferred some years ago. I had a lot of money around. I make mistakes when I get cash. Charlie tells me to go to a bar instead. Don’t hang around the office. But I hang around the office and I have money in my pocket, I do something dumb. It happens every time. So I bought this thing. Nobody made me buy it. I now have an 800 number I call every time I think about buying a stock in an airline. I say, “I am Warren and I am an air-aholic.” They try to talk me down, “Keep talking don’t do anything rash.” Finally I got over it. But I bought it. And it looked like we would lose all our money in it. And we came very close to losing all our money in it. You can say we deserved to lose our money it.
在20世纪80年代中期的时候，我本应该从房利美公司大赚一笔的，但我却没有这么做。这些都是价值数十亿美元甚至上百亿美元的错误，而一般公认会计原则是体现不出这些错误的。你能看到的那些错误，比如几年前我购买美国航空优先股就是一个错误。当时我手头有很多现金。当我现金充裕的时候就容易犯错。查理告诉我还不如去酒吧呢，别在办公室瞎晃悠。但我还是待在办公室里，而且口袋里又有钱，结果就做了蠢事。这种情况每次都会发生。所以我就买了美国航空优先股。没人逼我买。现在每当我想买入航空公司股票的时候，我就会拨打一个800开头的号码。我说：“我是沃伦，我对航空股上瘾。”他们就会劝我冷静下来，说：“继续说，别做任何冲动的事。”最后我终于克服了这种冲动。但我当时确实买了美国航空优先股。而且当时看起来我们会血本无归。实际上我们也差一点就血本无归了。可以说，我们亏掉那笔钱也是活该。
We bought it because it was an attractive security. But it was not in an attractive industry. I did the same thing in Salomon. I bought an attractive security in a business I wouldn’t have bought the equity in. So you could say that is one form of mistake. Buying something because you like the terms, but you don’t like the business that well. I have done that in the past and will probably do that again. The bigger mistakes are the ones of omission. Back when I had $10,000 I put $2,000 of it into a Sinclair Service Station which I lost, so the opportunity cost on that money is about $6 billion right now– fairly big mistakes. It makes me feel good when my Berkshire goes down, because the cost of my Sinclair Station goes down too. My 20% opportunity cost. I will say this, it is better to learn from other people’s mistakes as much as possible. But we don’t spend any time looking back at Berkshire. I have a partner, Charlie Munger; we have been pals for forty years—never had an argument. We disagree on things a lot but we don’t have arguments about it.
我们买下它（美国航空优先股）是因为它是一种很有吸引力的证券。但它所处的行业却并不吸引人。我在所罗门公司的事情上也犯了同样的错误。我买入了一种很有吸引力的证券，但对于这家公司的股票，我是不会去买的。所以可以说这是一种错误形式。因为喜欢其条款而买入某样东西，但却并不是很看好其所在的行业。我过去犯过这样的错误，而且以后可能还会再犯。更大的错误是那些因不作为而犯下的错误。当我只有1万美元的时候，我拿出其中2000美元投资了一家辛克莱加油站，结果这笔钱亏掉了，所以这笔钱的机会成本现在大概有60亿美元左右——这是相当大的错误了。当伯克希尔的股价下跌时，我心里会好受一些，因为我投资辛克莱加油站的机会成本也随之降低了。我那20%资金的机会成本啊。我想说的是，尽可能多地从别人的错误中吸取教训是比较好的。但我们不会花时间去回顾伯克希尔过去的失误。我有一个合伙人，查理·芒格；我们做了四十年的好伙伴了——从来没吵过架。我们在很多事情上都有不同意见，但我们不会为此争吵。
We never look back. We just figure there is so much to look forward to that there is no sense thinking of what we might have done. It just doesn’t make any difference. You can only live life forward. You can learn something perhaps from the mistakes, but the big thing to do is to stick with the businesses you understand. So if there is a generic mistake outside your circle of competence like buying something that somebody tips you on or something of the sort. In an area you know nothing about, you should learn something from that which is to stay with what you can figure out yourself. You really want your decision making to be by looking in the mirror. Saying to yourself, “I am buying 100 shares of General Motors at $55 because……..” It is your responsibility if you are buying it. There’s gotta be a reason and if you can’t state the reason, you shouldn’t buy it. If it is because someone told you about it at a cocktail party, not good enough. It can’t be because of the volume or a reason like the chart looks good. It has to be a reason to buy the business. That we stick to pretty carefully. That is one of the things Ben Graham taught me.
我们从不回头看。我们只是觉得有太多值得期待的事情了，去想我们本可能做过什么根本没有意义。这真的没什么影响。你只能朝着未来去生活。或许你可以从错误中吸取一些教训，但最重要的是坚持专注于你所了解的企业。所以，如果在你的能力圈之外犯了一些常见的错误，比如因为别人的小道消息而买入某样东西之类的情况。在一个你一无所知的领域里，你应该从中吸取教训，那就是要坚持去做你自己能够弄明白的事情。你真的应该通过审视自己来做决策。对自己说：“我以每股55美元的价格买入100股通用汽车的股票，是因为……” 如果你要买入，那你就得对这件事负责。必须得有一个理由，而如果你说不出这个理由，那你就不应该买它。如果仅仅是因为有人在鸡尾酒会上跟你提到了这只股票，那这个理由还不够充分。不能是因为股票的成交量（大），或者是因为股票走势图看起来不错之类的理由。必须得有一个买入这家企业（股票）的合理理由。我们一直都非常严格地坚持这一点。这也是本·格雷厄姆教给我的道理之一。
Question: The current tenuous economic situation and interest rates? Where are we going?
问题：当前脆弱的经济形势和利率情况如何？我们将走向何方？
Buffett: I don’t think about the macro stuff. What you really want to in investments is figure out what is important and knowable. If it is unimportant and unknowable, you forget about it. What you talk about is important but, in my view, it is not knowable. Understanding Coca-Cola is knowable or Wrigley’s or Eastman Kodak. You can understand those businesses that are knowable. Whether it turns out to be important depends where your valuation leads you and the firm’s price and all that. But we have never not bought or bought a business because of any Macro feeling of any kind because it doesn’t make any difference. Let’s say in 1972 when we bought See’s Candy, I think Nixon put on the price controls a little bit later, but so what! We would have missed a chance to buy something for $25 million that is producing $60 million pre-tax now. We don’t want to pass up the chance to do something intelligent because of some prediction about something we are no good on anyway. So we don’t read or listen to in relation to macro factors at all. The typical investment counselor organization goes out and they bring out their economist and they trot him out and he gives you this big macro picture. And they start working from there on down. In our view that is nonsense.
巴菲特：我不会去考虑宏观层面的事情。在投资中，你真正想要做的是弄清楚哪些事情是重要且可知的。如果一件事既不重要又不可知，那就把它抛诸脑后。你所谈论的这些（宏观经济形势和利率相关的事情）是重要的，但在我看来，它们是不可知的。了解可口可乐公司、箭牌公司或者伊士曼柯达公司是可知的事情。你能够理解这些可以弄明白的企业。而最终这些是否重要，取决于你对企业的估值以及企业的股价等等因素。但我们从来不会因为任何一种宏观层面的感觉而去买入或不买入一家企业，因为这毫无意义。比如说，在1972年我们收购喜诗糖果公司的时候，我记得尼克松不久后就实施了一些价格管制措施，但那又怎样呢！我们差点就错过了一个以2500万美元收购一家如今能产生6000万美元税前利润的企业的机会。我们不想因为对一些我们根本不擅长预测的宏观因素的担忧，而错过做明智投资决策的机会。所以我们根本不会去关注与宏观因素相关的信息，也不会去听这方面的分析。典型的投资顾问机构会请出他们的经济学家，让他出来给你描绘一幅宏大的宏观经济图景。然后他们就从这个宏观图景出发去开展后续工作。但在我们看来，这完全是无稽之谈。
If Alan Greenspan was on the one side of me and Robert Rubin on the other side and they both were whispering in my ear exactly what they were going to do the next twelve months, it wouldn’t make any difference to me what I would pay for Executive Jet or General Re or anything else I do.
如果艾伦·格林斯潘在我一边，罗伯特·鲁宾在我另一边，而且他们俩都在我耳边悄悄告诉我他们在未来十二个月里具体要做些什么，这对于我为商务喷气航空服务公司（Executive Jet）、通用再保险公司（General Re）或者其他任何我要投资的项目所愿意支付的价格，都不会产生任何影响。
Question: What is the benefit of being an out-of-towner as opposed to being on Wall Street?
问题：与身处华尔街的人相比，外地人有什么优势？
Buffett: I worked on Wall Street for a couple of years and I have my best friends on both coasts. I like seeing them. I get ideas when I go there. But the best way to think about investments is to be in a room with no one else and just think. And if that doesn’t work, nothing else is going to work. The disadvantage of being in any type of market environment like Wall Street in the extreme is that you get over-stimulated. You think you have to do something every day. The Chandler family paid $2,000 for this company (Coke). You don’t have to do much else if you pick one of those. And the trick then is not to do anything else. Even not to sell at 1919, which the family did later on. So what you are looking for is some way to get one good idea a year. And then ride it to its full potential and that is very hard to do in an environment where people are shouting prices back and forth every five minutes and shoving reports in front of your nose and all that. Wall Street makes its money on activity. You make your money on inactivity.
巴菲特：我曾在华尔街工作过几年，在美国东西海岸都有我最要好的朋友。我喜欢和他们见面。我去那里的时候也会获得一些灵感。但思考投资的最佳方式是独自待在一个房间里，然后专注思考。如果这样都不行，那其他方法也无济于事了。处于像华尔街这样极端的市场环境中的一大弊端在于，你会受到过度刺激。你会觉得自己每天都得做点什么。钱德勒家族当初花了2000美元买下了可口可乐公司。如果你选中了这样一家好公司，其实你不需要再做太多其他事情。而关键就在于别再去做其他多余的事。甚至在1919年公司上市时也别卖掉（股票），而钱德勒家族后来就这么做了。所以你要做的是想办法每年获得一个好的投资点子。然后充分挖掘它的潜力，而在一个人们每隔五分钟就喊出买卖价格，还把各种报告硬塞到你眼前的环境中，这是很难做到的。华尔街靠交易活动赚钱。而你则要靠不频繁交易来赚钱。
If everyone in this room trades their portfolio around every day with every other person, you will all end up broke. And the intermediary will end up with all the money. If you all own stock in a group of average businesses and just sit here for the next 50 years, you will end up with a fair amount of money and your broker will be broke. He is like the Doctor who gets paid on how often to get you to change pills. If he gave you one pill that cures you the rest of your life, he would make one sale, one transaction and that is it. But if he can convince you that changing pills every day is the way to great health, it will be great for him and the prescriptionists. You won’t be any healthier and you will be a lot worse off financially. You want to stay away from any environment that stimulates activity. And Wall Street would have the effective of doing that.
如果在座的每个人每天都和其他人频繁地交易自己的投资组合，最终你们都会破产。而那些中介机构会把所有的钱都赚走。如果你们所有人都持有一些普通企业的股票，然后就这么坐着，未来50年都不动这些股票，最终你们会赚到相当数量的钱，而你们的经纪人却会破产。经纪人就好比医生，他的收入取决于让你换药的频率。如果他给你一颗能治愈你且保你余生健康的药，那他就只能做成一笔买卖，一次交易，仅此而已。但如果他能说服你，让你相信每天换药才是保持健康的良方，那这对他和药剂师来说可太有利了。而你并不会因此变得更健康，而且你的经济状况会变得更糟。你要远离任何会刺激你频繁交易的环境。而华尔街就会产生这样的影响。
When I went back to Omaha, I would go back with a whole list of companies I wanted to check out and I would get my money’s worth out of those trips, but then I would go back to Omaha and think about it.
当我回到奥马哈的时候，我会带着一长串我想要考察的公司名单回去，而且我会充分利用那些行程，让花出去的钱物有所值。但之后我就会回到奥马哈，然后对考察的情况进行思考。
Question: How to evaluate Berkshire or MSFT if it does not pay dividends?
问题：如果伯克希尔（Berkshire）或微软（MSFT）不分红，该如何对它们进行估值？
Buffett: It won’t pay any dividends either. That is a promise I can keep. All you get with Berkshire, you stick it in your safe deposit box and then every year you go down and fondle it. You take it out and then you put it back. There is enormous psychic reward in that. Don’t underestimate it.
巴菲特：（伯克希尔）也不会支付任何股息的。这是我能保证做到的事。对于伯克希尔的股票，你所能做的就是把它放进你的银行保险箱，然后每年你去银行，爱抚一下它（的股票凭证）。你把它拿出来，然后再放回去。这其中有着巨大的精神回报。可别低估了这一点。
The real question is if we can retain dollar bills and turn them into more than a dollar at a decent rate. That is what we try to do. And Charlie Munger and I have all our money in it to do that. That is all we will get paid for doing. We won’t take any options or we won’t take any salaries to speak of. But that is what we are trying to do. It gets harder all the time. The more money we manage the harder it is to do that. We would do way better percentage wise with Berkshire if it was 1/100 \(1/100\) the present size. It is run for its owners, but it isn’t run to give them dividends because so far every dollar that we earned or could have paid out, we have turned into more than a dollar. It is worth more than a dollar to keep it. Therefore, it would be silly to pay it out. Even if everyone was taxfree that owned it. It would have been a mistake to pay dividends at Berkshire. Because so far the dollar bills retained have turned into more than a dollar. But there is no guarantee that happens in the future. At some point the game runs out on that. That is what the business is about. Nothing else about the business do we judge ourselves by. We don’t judge it by the size of its home office building or anything the like the number of people working there. We have 12 people working at headquarters and 45,000 employees at Berkshire, 12 people at HQ and 3,500 sq ft. and we won’t change it.真正的问题在于，我们能否留存美元资金，并以不错的回报率将它们增值到超过一美元的价值。这就是我们努力去做的事。查理·芒格和我把我们所有的钱都投入其中来实现这一目标。这也是我们因之而获得回报的唯一方式。我们不会拿任何股票期权，也可以说我们不会拿任何薪水。但这就是我们正在努力做的事情。而且这件事变得越来越难了。我们管理的资金越多，要做到这一点就越困难。如果伯克希尔的规模只有现在的百分之一，从百分比的角度来看，我们的表现会好得多。伯克希尔是为它的股东们经营的，但经营它并不是为了给股东分红，因为到目前为止，我们所赚取的或者本可以用来支付股息的每一美元，都已经增值到了超过一美元的价值。把这些钱留存下来比把它作为股息支付出去更有价值。所以，把钱作为股息支付出去是很愚蠢的做法，即使所有持有伯克希尔股票的人都不用交税。对伯克希尔来说，支付股息曾是个错误的决定，因为到目前为止，留存下来的每一美元都已经增值到了超过一美元。但无法保证未来还会如此。在某个时候，这种增值的情况可能就不会再出现了。这就是我们所从事的业务的本质。我们不会用其他任何标准来评判我们的业务，不会以公司总部办公楼的大小或者在那里工作的员工数量之类的标准来评判。我们总部有12名员工，而伯克希尔总共有45000名员工，总部占地3500平方英尺，而且我们不会改变这种状况。
But we will judge ourselves by the performance of the company and that is the only way we will get paid. But believe me, it is a lot harder than it used to be.
但我们会依据公司的业绩来评判自己，而这也是我们获得报酬的唯一方式。不过相信我，现在要做到这一点比过去困难多了。
Question: What tells you when an investment has reached its full potential?
问题：如何判断一项投资何时已经发挥出了全部潜力？
Buffett: I don’t buy Coke with the idea it will be out of gas in 10 years or 50 years. There could be something that happens by I think the chances are almost nil. So what we really want to do is buy businesses that we would be happy to own forever. It is the same way I fell about people who buy Berkshire. I want people who buy Berkshire to plan to hold it forever. They may not for one reason or the other but I want them at the time they buy it to think they are buying a business they are going to want to own forever.
巴菲特：我买入可口可乐股票的时候，可不是想着它会在10年或者50年后就失去发展动力。也许会有一些意外情况发生，但我觉得那种可能性几乎为零。所以我们真正想做的是买入那些我们乐意永远持有的企业。这就如同我对那些买入伯克希尔股票的人的看法一样。我希望那些买入伯克希尔股票的人打算永远持有它。他们或许会因为这样或那样的原因而最终没有做到永远持有，但我希望他们在买入的时候，认为自己买入的是一家他们想要永远拥有的企业。
And I don’t say that is the only way to buy things. It is just the group to join me because I don’t want to have a changing group all the time. I measure Berkshire by how little activity there is in it. If I had a church and I was the preacher and half the congregation left every Sunday. I wouldn’t say, “It is marvelous to have all this liquidity among my members.”
我并不是说这是唯一的投资方式。只是我希望那些人和我秉持同样的理念，因为我不想总是面对一群不断变动的投资者。我衡量伯克希尔的一个标准就是它的股票交易活跃度有多低。这就好比我要是掌管着一座教堂且担任牧师，结果每个星期天都有一半的教众离开。我肯定不会说：“我的教众们有这么高的流动性，真是太棒了。”
Terrific turnover… I would rather go to church where all the seats are filled every Sunday by the same people. Well that is the way we look at the businesses we buy. We want to buy something virtually forever. And we can’t find a lot of those. And back when I started, I had way more ideas than money so I was just constantly having to sell what was the least attractive stock in order to buy something I just discovered that looked even cheaper. But that is not our problem really now. So we hope we are buying businesses that we are just as happy holding five years from now as now. And if we ever found a huge acquisition, then maybe we would have to sell something. Maybe to make that acquisition but that would be a very pleasant problem to have.
极高的换手率…… 我更愿意去那种每个星期天所有座位都被同样一批人坐满的教堂。嗯，这就是我们看待所收购企业的方式。我们几乎是想永远持有我们所买入的企业。而这样的企业我们并不能找到很多。在我刚开始投资的时候，我的想法比资金要多得多，所以我总是不得不卖掉那些最没有吸引力的股票，以便去买入我刚发现的看起来更便宜的股票。但现在这确实不是我们面临的问题了。所以我们希望买入那些，五年后我们还会像现在一样乐意持有的企业。而且要是我们遇到了一笔非常重大的收购机会，那或许我们就得卖掉一些东西。也许是为了完成那笔收购，但那会是一个非常令人开心的 “麻烦”。
We never buy something with a price target in mind. We never buy something at 30 saying if it goes to 40 we’ll sell it or 50 or 60 or 100. We just don’t do it that way. Anymore than when we buy a private business like See’s Candy for $25 million. We don’t ever say if we ever get an offer of $50 million for this business we will sell it. That is not the way to look at a business.
我们从来不会在心里想着一个价格目标才去买东西。我们从不会在股价为30美元时买入一只股票，然后想着如果它涨到40美元、50美元、60美元或者100美元我们就把它卖掉。我们就是不这么做。这就如同我们以2500万美元收购像喜诗糖果这样的私人企业时一样。我们从不会说如果有人出价5000万美元收购这家企业，我们就会把它卖掉。看待一家企业不能用那样的方式。
The way to look at a business is this going to keep producing more and more money over time? And if the answer to that is yes, you don’t need to ask any more questions.
看待一家企业的方式应该是：随着时间的推移，这家企业是否会持续创造出越来越多的利润呢？如果答案是肯定的，那你就无需再问其他问题了。
Questions: How did you decide to invest in Salomon?
问题：你当初是如何决定投资所罗门公司的呢？
Buffett: Salomon like I said, I went into that because it was a 9% security in 1987 in September 1987 and the Dow was up 35% and we sold a lot of stuff. And I had a lot of money around and it looked to me like we would never get to do anything, so I took an attractive security form in a business I would never buy the common stock of. I went in because of that and I think generally it is a mistake. It worked out OK finally on that. But it is not what I should have been doing. I either should have waited in which case I could have bought more Coca-Cola a year later or thereabouts or I should have even bought Coke at the prices it was selling at even though it was selling at a pretty good price at the time. So that was a mistake.
巴菲特：就像我说的，关于所罗门公司，我投资它是因为在1987年，1987年9月的时候，它是一种收益率为9%的证券，当时道琼斯指数上涨了35%，我们卖出了很多资产。我手头有大量资金，而且在我看来我们似乎再也找不到可投资的项目了，所以我就选择了这家公司的一种有吸引力的证券产品，而这家公司的普通股我是绝不会买的。我当初是出于这个原因才进行投资的，而且我认为总体而言，那是个错误。不过最终结果还算可以。但那并不是我本应做的事情。我要么就应该再等等，那样的话大约一年后我就可以多买些可口可乐的股票，要么即便当时可口可乐的股价已经相当高了，我也应该直接买入它的股票。所以，那次投资所罗门公司是个错误。
On Long-Term Capital that is—we have owned other businesses associated with securities over the years-–One of them is arbitrage. I’ve done arbitrage for 45 years and Graham did it for 30 years before that. That is a business unfortunately I have to be near a phone for. I have to really run it (arbitrage operations) out of the office myself, because it requires being more market-attuned because I don’t want to do that anymore. So unless a really big arbitrage situation came along that I understood, I won’t be doing much of that. But I’ve probably participated in about 300 arbitrage situations at least in my life maybe more. It was a good business, a perfectly good business.
关于长期资本管理公司（Long-Term Capital）——多年来，我们还拥有过其他与证券相关的业务——其中之一就是套利业务。我从事套利交易已经有45年了，在我之前格雷厄姆从事这一行有30年之久。不幸的是，从事这项业务我得守在电话旁边。我必须亲自在办公室里实际运作（套利业务），因为这需要更加密切地关注市场动态，因为我不想再做这方面的事了。所以，除非出现我能理解的真正重大的套利机会，否则我不会再大量涉足套利业务了。但在我的一生中，我可能至少参与过大约300起套利交易，也许更多。套利曾是一项不错的业务，完全算得上是好业务。
LTCM has a bunch of positions, they have tons of positions, but the top ten are probably 90% of the money that is at risk, and I know something about those ten positions. I don’t know everything about them by a long shot, but I know enough that I would feel OK at a big discount going in and we had the staying power to hold it out. We might lose money on something on that, but the odds are with us. That is a game that I understand. There are few other positions we have that are not that big because they can’t get that big. But they could involve yield curve relationships or on the run/off the run governments that are just things you learn over time being around securities markets. They are not the base of our business. Probably on average,they have accounted for \(1/2 – 3/4\) a percentage point of our return a year. They are little pluses you get for actually having been around a long time.
长期资本管理公司（LTCM）有大量的头寸，他们的头寸数量极多，但排名前十的头寸可能占了其面临风险资金的90%左右，而我对这十个头寸的情况有所了解。远非说我对它们了如指掌，但我了解的程度足以让我觉得，在大幅折价的情况下介入是可行的，而且我们有足够的耐力坚持持有。我们可能会在某些方面因此而亏损，但从概率上来说对我们是有利的。这是我能理解的一种交易。我们持有的其他头寸规模没有那么大，因为它们无法达到那么大的规模。但这些头寸可能涉及收益率曲线关系，或者新发行国债与已发行国债之间的关系，这些都是你在证券市场浸淫久了就能逐渐了解的东西。它们并非我们业务的核心。大概平均算下来，它们每年为我们的回报率贡献了0.5到0.75个百分点。它们是你在这个领域长期摸爬滚打后获得的一些小的收益加成。
Arbitrage 套利
One of the first arbitrages I did involved a company that offered cocoa beans in exchange for their stock. That was in 1955. I bought the stock, turned in the stock, got warehouse certificates for cocoa beans and they happen to be a different type but there was a basis differential and I sold them. That was something I was around at the time, so I learned about it. There hasn’t been a cocoa deal since. 40 odd years, I have been waiting for a cocoa deal. I haven’t seen it. It is there in my memory if it ever comes along. LTCM is that on a big scale.
我做的第一笔套利交易之一涉及一家公司，该公司提出用可可豆来交换其公司股票。那是在1955年。我买入了该公司的股票，交出股票后，得到了可可豆的仓储凭证，而且那些可可豆碰巧是不同的品种，但存在基差，于是我把它们卖掉了。当时我正好接触到了这样的机会，所以就做了这笔套利并了解了其中的门道。从那以后就再也没有出现过可可豆相关的套利交易了。四十多年来，我一直在等这样一笔可可豆交易，可一直都没再见到。如果以后再出现的话，我还能记起这件事。长期资本管理公司（LTCM）的套利业务就是在更大规模上进行的类似操作。
Question: Diversification?
问题：多样化（投资）吗？
Buffett: The question is about diversification. I have a dual answer to that. If you are not a professional investor. If your goal is not to manage money to earn a significantly better return than the world, then I believe in extreme diversification. I believe 98% – 99% who invest should extensively diversify and not trade, so that leads them to an index fund type of decision with very low costs. All they are going to do is own part of America. And they have made a decision that owning a part of America is worthwhile. I don’t quarrel with that at all. That is the way they should approach it unless they want to bring an intensity to the game to make a decision and start evaluating businesses. Once you are in the businesses of evaluating businesses and you decide that you are going to bring the effort and intensity and time involved to get that job done, then I think diversification is a terrible mistake to any degree. I got asked that question the other day at SunTrust. If you really know businesses, you probably shouldn’t own more than six of them.
巴菲特：问题是关于多元化投资的。对此我有双重答案。如果你不是专业投资者，而且你的目标不是通过管理资金来获得比市场平均水平显著更高的回报，那么我认为要进行极度的多元化投资。我认为98%到99%的投资者都应该广泛地分散投资，并且不要频繁交易，这就会让他们做出选择低成本指数基金的决定。他们所要做的就是持有美国市场的一部分份额。而且他们已经认定持有美国市场的一部分是值得的。对此我完全没有异议。除非他们想全身心投入到投资中，去做决策并开始评估企业，否则这就是他们应该采取的投资方式。一旦你从事评估企业的工作，并且你决定要付出努力、投入精力和时间去做好这件事，那么我认为在任何程度上进行多元化投资都是一个严重的错误。前几天在太阳信托银行（SunTrust）有人问了我这个问题。如果你真的了解企业，你持有的企业可能不应该超过六家。
If you can identify six wonderful businesses, that is all the diversification you need. And you will make a lot of money. And I can guarantee that going into a seventh one instead of putting more money into your first one is gotta be a terrible mistake. Very few people have gotten rich on their seventh best idea. But a lot of people have gotten rich with their best idea. So I would say for anyone working with normal capital who really knows the businesses they have gone into, six is plenty, and I probably have half of what I like best. I don’t diversify personally. All the people I’ve known that have done well with the exception of Walter Schloss, Walter diversifies a lot. I call him Noah, he has two of everything.
如果你能找到六家非常出色的企业，那这就是你所需要的全部“多元化”了。而且你会赚很多钱。我可以保证，与其把更多的钱投入到你最初看好的企业中，却选择去投资第七家企业，那肯定是个严重的错误。很少有人是靠他们第七好的投资想法发家致富的。但很多人都是靠他们最好的投资想法而变得富有的。所以我想说，对于任何拥有普通资金量、并且真正了解自己所投资企业的人来说，六家企业就足够了，而且我持有的企业数量可能只有我最看好的企业数量的一半。就我个人而言，我不会进行多元化投资。在我认识的所有投资做得好的人当中，除了沃尔特·施洛斯（Walter Schloss）之外，沃尔特进行大量的多元化投资。我称他为诺亚，他什么东西都有两份。
Question: How do you distinguish the Cokes of the world from the Proctor & Gambles of this world?
问题：你如何区分世界上的可口可乐公司和宝洁公司这类企业？
Buffett: Well, P&G is a very, very good business with strong distribution capability and lots of brand names, but if you ask me and I am going to go away for twenty years and put all my family’s net worth into one business, would I rather have P&G or Coke? Actually P&G is more diversified among product line, but I would feel more sure of Coke than P&G. I wouldn’t be unhappy if someone told me I had to own P&G during the twenty-year period. I mean that would be in my top 5 percent. Because they are not going to get killed, but I would feel better about the unit growth and pricing power of a Coke over twenty or thirty years.
巴菲特：嗯，宝洁是一家非常非常出色的企业，它有着强大的分销能力，还拥有众多品牌。但如果你问我，要是我要离开20年，并且把我全家的净资产都投入到一家企业中，我是会选择宝洁还是可口可乐呢？实际上，宝洁在产品线方面更为多元化，但相比宝洁，我对可口可乐更有信心。如果有人告诉我在这20年里我必须持有宝洁的股份，我也不会不开心。我的意思是，宝洁会在我最看好的企业中排名前5%。因为宝洁不会被击垮，但对于可口可乐在未来二三十年的销量增长和定价能力，我会更有信心。
Right now the pricing power might be tough, but you think a billion servings a day for a penny each or $10 million per day. We own 8% of that, so that is $800,000 per day for Berkshire Hathaway. You could get another penny out of the stuff. It doesn’t seem impossible. I think it is worth a penny more. Right now it would be a mistake to try and get it in most markets. But over time, Coke will make more per serving than it does now. Twenty years from now I guarantee they will make more per serving, and they will be selling a whole lot more servings. I don’t know how many or how much more, but I know that.
目前，可口可乐的定价权或许面临挑战，但你想想，每天售出10亿份产品，每份提价1美分，那就是每天多收入1000万美元。我们（伯克希尔·哈撒韦）持有可口可乐8%的股份，所以这意味着伯克希尔·哈撒韦每天能多进账80万美元。把产品价格提高1美分并非没有可能。我觉得它就值多这1美分的价格。目前在大多数市场试图提价可能是个错误。但随着时间的推移，可口可乐每份产品的利润会比现在更高。我敢保证，20年后，每份产品的利润肯定会比现在高，而且产品的销售份数也会大幅增加。我不知道具体会增加多少份数或多少利润，但我知道肯定会增加。
P&G’s main products–I don’t think they have the kind of dominance, and they don’t have the kind of unit growth, but they are good businesses. I would not be unhappy if you told me that I had to put my family’s net worth into P&G and that was the only stock I would own. I might prefer some other name, but there are not 100 other names I would prefer.
宝洁的主要产品——我认为它们没有那种（像可口可乐那样的）统治地位，也没有那样的销量增长态势，但宝洁仍是很不错的企业。要是你告诉我，我必须把我全家的净资产都投入到宝洁公司，而且这将是我持有的唯一一支股票，我也不会不开心。我可能会更倾向于其他一些公司的股票，但也没有100家我会更青睐的公司。
Question: Would you buy McDonald’s and go away for twenty years?
问题：你会买入麦当劳的股票，然后放着不管二十年吗？
Buffett: McDonald’s has a lot of things going for it, particularly abroad again. Thee position abroad in many countries is stronger than it is here. It is a tougher business over time. People don’t want to be eating–exception to the kids when they are giving away beanie babies or something–at McDonald’s every day. If people drink five Cokes a day, they probably will drink five of them tomorrow. The fast food business is tougher than that but if you had to pick one hand to have in the fast food business, which is going to be a huge business worldwide, you would pick McDonald’s. I mean it has the strongest position.
巴菲特：麦当劳有很多优势，尤其是在海外市场方面更是如此。它在许多国家的海外市场地位比在美国本土还要稳固。随着时间的推移，经营麦当劳这样的业务难度越来越大。人们并不想每天都在麦当劳用餐——除了孩子们在麦当劳有赠送豆豆娃之类活动的时候。要是有人一天喝五罐可口可乐，那他们明天很可能还是会喝五罐。快餐业务的情况比这要复杂棘手一些。但如果你必须在快餐行业中选择一家企业（而快餐行业在全球范围内将会是一个庞大的产业），你会选择麦当劳。我的意思是，麦当劳有着最强大的市场地位。
It doesn’t win taste test with adults. It does very well with children and it does fine with adults, but it is not like it is a clear winner. And it is gotten into the game in recent years of being more price promotional–you remember the experiment a year ago or so. It has gotten more dependent on that rather than selling the product by itself. I like the product by itself. I feel better about Gillette if people buy the Mach 3 because they like the Mach 3 than if they get a Beanie Baby with it. So I think fundamentally it is a stronger product if that is the case. And that is probably the case.
在成年人参与的口味测试中，它（麦当劳食品）并非胜出者。它很受孩子们欢迎，成年人对它的接受度也还不错，但它并非是毫无悬念的优胜者。而且近年来，麦当劳卷入了更多以价格促销为主的竞争之中——你还记得大概一年前做的那个实验吧。它变得更加依赖这种（价格促销）手段，而不是单纯靠产品自身来销售。我喜欢产品本身的魅力。如果人们是因为喜欢吉列锋速3（剃须刀）而购买它，而不是因为购买锋速3能获赠一个豆豆娃才买，那我对吉列这个品牌会更有信心。所以从根本上来说，如果（产品靠自身魅力销售）是这种情况的话，产品本身会更具竞争力。而很可能事实就是如此。
We own a lot of Gillette and you can sleep pretty well at night if you think of a couple billion men with their hair growing on their faces. It is growing all night while you sleep. Women have two legs, it is even better. So it beats counting sheep. And those are the kinds of business…(you look for). But what type of promotion am I going to put out there against Burger King next month or what if they sign up Disney and I don’t get Disney? I like the products that stand alone absent price promotion or appeals although you can build a very good business based on that. And McDonald’s is a terrific business. It is not as good a business as Coke. There really hardly are any. It is a very good business and if you bet on one company in that field bet on (garbled) McDonald’s. We bought Dairy Queen a while back that is why I am plugging it shamelessly here.
我们持有大量吉列的股份。当你想到全球有几十亿脸上会长胡子的男性时，你晚上都能睡得特别安稳。你睡觉时，他们的胡子一整晚都在生长。女性还有两条腿（要刮毛），这情况就更好了。这可比数羊有用多了。这就是我们所寻找的那种业务……但下个月我该推出什么样的促销活动来对抗汉堡王呢？要是他们和迪士尼签约而我没能签到迪士尼该怎么办？我喜欢那些无需价格促销或额外噱头就能畅销的产品，尽管基于促销手段也能打造出非常出色的业务。麦当劳是一家很棒的企业。但它不像可口可乐那么出色。真的很难有企业能和可口可乐媲美。麦当劳是非常优秀的企业，如果你要在快餐领域押注一家公司，那就选麦当劳（此处garbled可能导致部分信息缺失）。不久前我们收购了冰雪皇后（Dairy Queen），所以我才在这里不遗余力地宣传它。
Question: What do I think about the utility industry?
问题：我对公用事业行业有什么看法？
Buffett: I have thought about that a lot because you can put big money in it. I have even thought of buying the entire businesses. There is a fellow in Omaha actually that has done a little of that through Cal Energy. But I don’t quite understand the game in terms of how it is going to develop with deregulation. I can see how it destroys a lot of value through the high cost producer once they are not protected by a monopoly territory.
巴菲特：我对公用事业行业思考过很多，因为你可以在这个行业投入大量资金。我甚至曾考虑过收购一整家相关企业。实际上，在奥马哈有个人通过加州能源公司（Cal Energy）在这方面有所尝试。但就该行业在放松管制的情况下将如何发展而言，我还不太清楚其中的门道。我能预见到，一旦那些高成本的生产商不再受到垄断区域的保护，放松管制会让它们损失大量价值。
I don’t for sure see who benefits and how much. Obviously the guy with very low cost power or some guy has hydro-power at two cents a KwH has a huge advantage. But how much of that he gets to keep or how extensively he can send that outside his natural territory, I haven’t been able to figure that out so I really know what the Industry will look like in ten years. But it is something I think about and if I ever develop any insights that call for action, I will act on them. Because I think I can understand the attractiveness of the product. All the aspects of certainty of users need and the fact it is a bargain and all of that. I understand. I don’t understand who is going to make the money in ten years. And that keeps me away.
我并不确切知道谁会从中受益以及受益多少。显然，那些拥有成本极低电力的人，或者那些能以每度电两美分的价格获得水电的人，有着巨大的优势。但我不清楚他们能保留多少这样的优势，也不知道他们能在多大程度上将电力输送到其原本的自然供应区域之外，所以我确实无法确定这个行业十年后会是什么样子。不过这是我一直在思考的问题，如果我有了任何值得采取行动的深刻见解，我会付诸行动的。因为我认为我能理解这类产品的吸引力。包括用户需求的确定性等所有方面，以及这类产品其实是物有所值的这一事实，这些我都能理解。但我不明白十年后谁会在这个行业里赚到钱。而这正是让我对这个行业望而却步的原因。
Question: Why do large caps outperform small caps (1998)?
问题：为什么1998年大盘股的表现优于小盘股？
Buffett: We don’t care if a company is large cap, small cap, middle cap, micro cap. It doesn’t make any difference. The only questions that matter to us:
巴菲特：我们不在乎一家公司是大盘股、小盘股、中盘股还是超小盘股。这没有任何区别。对我们来说，唯一重要的问题是：
- Do we understand the business?
- 我们是否了解这家企业的业务情况？
- Do we like the people running it?
- 我们是否喜欢经营这家公司的人呢？
- And does it sell for a price that is attractive?
- 它的售价是否具有吸引力呢？
From my personal standpoint running Berkshire now because we got, pro forma for Gen. Re, $75 to $80 billion to invest in and I only want to invest in five things, so I am really limited to very big companies. But if I were investing $100,000, I wouldn’t care whether something was large cap or small cap or anything. I would just look for businesses I understood.
从目前我个人经营伯克希尔的角度来看，因为算上通用再保险公司（Gen. Re）的备考数据，我们有750亿到800亿美元的资金可用于投资，而我只想投资于五个项目，所以我实际上只能局限于投资非常大型的公司。但如果我要投资10万美元，我才不会在意是否某家公司是大盘股还是小盘股之类的问题。我只会寻找我能理解的企业。
Now, I think, on balance, large cap companies as businesses have done extraordinarily well the last ten years–way better than people anticipated they would do. You really have American businesses earning close to something 20% on equity. And that is something nobody dreamed of and that is being produced by very large companies in aggregate. So you have had this huge revaluation upwards because of lower interest rates and much higher returns on capital. If America business is really a disguised bond that earns 20%, a 20% coupon it is much better than a bond with a 13% coupon. And that has happened with big companies in recent years, whether it is permanent or not is another question. I am skeptical of that. I wouldn’t even think about it–except for questions of how much money we run–I wouldn’t even think about the size of the business. See’s Candy was a $25 million business when we bought it. If I can find one now, as big as we are, I would love to buy it. It is the certainty of it that counts.
现在，我认为总体而言，大盘股公司在过去十年里作为企业取得了极为出色的业绩——比人们预期的要好得多。实际上，美国企业的净资产收益率接近20%。这是没人曾想到过的，而且这是众多大型公司总体所实现的成绩。所以，由于利率降低以及资本回报率大幅提高，（这些公司的价值）出现了大幅的向上重估。如果美国企业真的是一种收益率为20%的隐性债券，那么票面利率为20%的它可要比票面利率为13%的债券好得多。而这正是近年来大公司所发生的情况，至于这种情况是否会持续下去则是另一个问题了。对此我持怀疑态度。若不是考虑到我们可用于投资的资金规模问题，我甚至都不会去考虑企业的规模大小。我们收购喜诗糖果公司（See’s Candy）时，它的业务规模只有2500万美元。如果以我们目前的资金体量，现在还能找到像这样的公司，我会很乐意收购它。关键在于其（业务和盈利等方面的）确定性。
Question: The securitization of real estate?
问题：房地产的证券化？
Buffett: There has been enormous securitization of the debt too of real estate and that is one of the items right now that is really clogging up the capital markets. The mortgage back securities are just not moving, commercial, not residential mortgage backs. But I think you are directing your question at equities probably. The equities, if you leave out the corporate form, have been a lousy way to own equities. You have interjected a corporate income tax into something that people individually have been able to own with a single tax, and to have the normal corporate form you have a double taxation in there. You really don’t need it and it takes too much of the return.
巴菲特：房地产债务也存在着大规模的证券化，而这正是当前真正堵塞资本市场的因素之一。抵押支持证券根本卖不动，无论是商业地产的抵押支持证券，还是住宅地产的抵押支持证券都是如此。但我想你可能问的是房地产相关股票方面的问题。就房地产股票而言，如果你抛开公司这种组织形式来看，持有这类股票一直以来都不是个好的投资方式。人们原本个人可以直接持有相关资产并只缴纳一次税，但（以公司形式持有）却引入了公司所得税，而且在常规的公司形式下还存在双重征税的情况。你其实并不需要（这种公司形式），而且它会侵蚀掉太多的投资回报。
REITS have, in effect, created a conduit so you don’t get the double taxation, but they also generally have fairly high operating expenses. If you get real estate, let’s just say you can buy fairly simple types of real estate at an 8% yield, or thereabouts, and you take away close to 1% to 1.5% by the time you count stock options and everything, it is not a terribly attractive way to own real estate. Maybe the only way a guy with a $1,000 or $5,000 can own it but if you have $1 million or $10 million, you are better off owning the real estate properties yourself instead of sticking some intermediary in between who will get a sizable piece of the return for himself. So we have found very little in that field.
实际上，房地产投资信托基金（REITs）创造了一种渠道，这样就不会出现双重征税的情况，但它们通常也有着相当高的运营成本。比如说，如果你投资房地产，假设你可以买到收益率在8%左右的相当简单类型的房地产，而当你把股票期权以及其他所有费用都算进去后，差不多会扣除掉1%到1.5%的收益，那么通过这种方式持有房地产并不是特别有吸引力。也许对于只有1000美元或5000美元资金的人来说，这是唯一能投资房地产的方式，但如果你有100万美元或1000万美元，你最好还是直接持有房地产，而不是通过某个中间人来投资，因为中间人会从收益中拿走相当大的一部分。所以我们在这个领域没发现什么太好的投资机会。
You will see an announcement in the next couple of weeks that may belie what I am telling you today. I don’t want you to think I am double crossing you up here. But generally speaking we have seen very little in that field that gets us excited. People sometimes get very confused about–they will look at some huge land company, like Texas Pacific Land Trust, which has been around over 100 years and has got a couple of million acres in Texas. And they will sell 1% of their land every year and they will take that (as income? Garbled) and come up with some huge value compared to the market value. But that is nonsense if you really own the property. You can’t move. You can’t move 50% of the properties or 20% of the properties, it is way worse than an illiquid stock. So you get these, I think, you get some very silly valuations placed on a lot of real estate companies by people who really don’t understand what it is like to own one and try to move large quantity of properties.
在接下来的几周内，你会看到一则公告，这则公告可能会与我今天告诉你的内容相悖。我不希望你认为我在这里对你耍两面派。但一般来说，在那个领域（房地产领域），我们很少看到能让我们兴奋的东西。 人们有时会非常困惑——他们会关注一些大型的土地公司，比如德克萨斯太平洋土地信托公司（Texas Pacific Land Trust），这家公司已经存在了100多年，在德克萨斯州拥有几百万英亩的土地。他们每年会出售1%的土地，然后他们会把（出售所得当作收入吗？此处表述含混不清），并且得出与市场价值相比非常高的估值。 但如果你真的拥有这些地产，这种（估值方法）是毫无意义的。你无法随意处置（这些土地）。你不可能一下子卖掉50%或者20%的地产，这比持有流动性差的股票还要糟糕得多。所以我认为，很多房地产的估值都非常荒谬。
REITS have behaved horribly in this market as you know and it is not at all inconceivable that they become a class that would get so unpopular that they would sell at significant discounts from what you could sell the properties for. And they could get interesting as a class and then the question is whether management would fight you in that process because they would be giving up their income stream for managing things and their interests might run counter to the shareholders on that. I have always wondered about REITS that have managements they say their assets are so wonderful, and they are so cheap and then they (management) go out and sell stock. There is a contradiction in that. They say our stock is very cheap at $28 and then they sell a lot of stock at $28 less an underwriting commission. There is a disconnect there. But it is a field we look at.
如你所知，房地产投资信托基金（REITs）在当前市场中的表现极为糟糕。完全可以想象，它们会成为一类极不受欢迎的投资产品，其售价可能会大幅低于房产本身的出售价格。 它们有可能作为一个类别变得具有投资吸引力，然而问题在于，在这个过程中管理层是否会与投资者作对，因为他们将放弃管理这些资产所带来的收入流，而且在这方面他们的利益可能与股东的利益背道而驰。 我一直对一些房地产投资信托基金感到疑惑，这些基金的管理层声称他们的资产非常优质，而且股价十分低廉，可随后他们（管理层）却对外发售股票。这其中存在着矛盾之处。他们说自家股票每股28美元已经很便宜了，然而却以28美元减去承销佣金的价格大量发售股票。这其中存在脱节的情况。但这仍是我们会关注的一个领域。
Charlie and I can understand real estate, and we would be open for very big transactions periodically. If there was a LTCM situation translated to real estate, we would be open to that, the trouble is so many other people would be too that it would unlikely go at a price that would get us really get us excited.
查理和我能够理解房地产相关业务，而且我们会时不时地愿意参与规模很大的交易。如果出现类似于长期资本管理公司（LTCM）那种情况在房地产领域重演（的机会），我们会愿意考虑的，问题在于其他很多人也会对这样的机会感兴趣，所以（交易达成的）价格不太可能低到让我们真正心动的程度。
Question: A down market is good for you?
问题：下跌的市场对你来说是好事吗？
Buffett: I have no idea were the market is going to go. I prefer it going down. But my preferences have nothing to do with it. The market knows nothing about my feelings. That is one of the first things you have to learn about a stock. You buy 100 shares of General Motors (GM). Now all of a sudden you have this feeling about GM. It goes down, you may be mad at it. You may say, “Well, if it just goes up for what I paid for it, my life will be wonderful again.” Or if it goes up, you may say how smart you were and how you and GM have this love affair. You have got all these feelings. The stock doesn’t know you own it.
巴菲特：我完全不知道市场会走向何方。我倒是希望市场下跌。但我的偏好和市场走向毫无关系。市场才不会理会我的感受呢。这是你在投资股票时首先要明白的事情之一。比如你买了100股通用汽车（GM）的股票。突然间，你就会对通用汽车产生一种特殊的情感。要是股价下跌了，你可能会对它感到恼火。你也许会说：“唉，要是它能涨回到我买入的价格，我的生活就又美好了。” 或者要是股价上涨了，你可能会觉得自己多么聪明，还会觉得自己和通用汽车之间有着某种特殊的关联。你会产生各种各样这样的情绪。但股票可不知道你持有它。
The stock just sits there; it doesn’t care what you paid or the fact that you own it. Any feeling I have about the market is not reciprocated. I mean it is the ultimate cold shoulder we are talking about here. Practically anybody in this room is probably more likely to be a net buyer of stocks over the next ten years than they are a net seller, so everyone of you should prefer lower prices. If you are a net eater of hamburger over the next ten years, you want hamburger to go down unless you are a cattle producer. If you are going to be a buyer of Coca-Cola and you don’t own Coke stock, you hope the price of Coke goes down. You are looking for it to be on sale this weekend at your Supermarket. You want it to be down on the weekends not up on the weekends when you tend the Supermarket.
股票就摆在那儿，它才不在乎你当初花了多少钱买它，也不在乎你持有它这一事实。我对市场抱有的任何情绪都不会得到回应。我的意思是，我们在这里谈论的可是彻头彻尾的被冷落。实际上，在座的各位在未来十年里，成为股票净买家的可能性很可能要比成为净卖家的可能性大，所以你们每个人都应该希望股价更低。如果你在未来十年里是汉堡的净消费者，你就希望汉堡价格下跌，除非你是养牛的牧场主。如果你打算买入可口可乐公司的股票，而你又尚未持有可口可乐的股票，你就会希望可口可乐的股价下跌。你会盼着这周末超市里的可口可乐打折促销。当你去逛超市的时候，你希望周末时可口可乐的价格是下降的，而不是上涨的。
The NYSE is one big supermarket of companies. And you are going to be buying stocks, what you want to have happen? You want to have those stocks go down, way down; you will make better buys then. Later on twenty or thirty years from now when you are in a period when you are dis-saving, or when your heirs dis-save for you, then you may care about higher prices. There is Chapter 8 in Graham’s Intelligent Investor about the attitude toward stock market fluctuations, that and Chapter 20 on the Margin of Safety are the two most important essays ever written on investing as far as I am concerned. Because when I read Chapter 8 when I was 19, I figured out what I just said but it is obvious, but I didn’t figure it out myself. It was explained to me. I probably would have gone another 100 years and still thought it was good when my stocks were going up. We want things to go down, but I have no idea what the stock market is going to do. I never do and I never will. It is not something I think about at all.
纽约证券交易所就像是一个大型的公司超市。而你打算买入股票，那你希望发生什么情况呢？你希望那些股票下跌，大幅下跌；这样你就能以更好的价格买入了。从现在起再过二三十年，当你处于动用储蓄的阶段，或者当你的继承人动用储蓄来供养你的时候，那时你或许会在意股价上涨。格雷厄姆所著的《聪明的投资者》一书中，第八章讲的是对待股市波动应持有的态度，第二十章则是关于安全边际的内容。 这两章内容是有史以来写得最为重要的文章。因为我 19 岁时读到第八章，就明白了我刚才所说的那些道理，道理虽然显而易见，但我自己却想不明白，是书里给我解释清楚的。要不然的话，我可能再过 100 年还会觉得自己的股票上涨是件好事呢。我们希望股价下跌，不过我根本不知道股市会如何表现。我从来都不知道，以后也不会知道。这压根就不是我会去考虑的事情。
When it goes down, I look harder at what I might buy that day because I know there is more likely to be some merchandise there to use my money effectively in.
当股市下跌时，我会更加仔细地研究当天我可能买入的股票，因为我知道，此时更有可能出现一些值得我投入资金、让资金得到有效利用的投资标的。
Moderator: Ok, Warren, we will let you take one more question from the audience….
主持人：好的，沃伦，我们（只能）再让你回答一个观众提出的问题……
Buffett: I will let you pick who get it. You can be the guy…(laughter).
巴菲特：你来选谁可以提问吧。这个（坏）人你来当吧……（笑声）
Question: What would you do to live a happier life if you could live over again?
问题：如果你能重新活一次，你会做些什么来让自己过上更幸福的生活呢？
Buffett: This will sound disgusting. The question is how would I live my life over again to live a happier life? The only thing would be to select a gene pool where people lived to 120 or something where I came from.
巴菲特：这听起来可能会有点怪。问题是如果要重新活一次，怎样才能过上更幸福的生活呢？唯一想做的事就是选择一个基因库，在那里的人都能活到120岁左右，也就是我出生在那样的环境里。
I have been extraordinarily lucky. I mean, I use this example and I will take a minute or two because I think it is worth thinking about a little bit. Let’s just assume it was 24 hours before you were born and a genie came to you and he said, “Herb, you look very promising and I have a big problem. I got to design the world in which you are going to live in. I have decided it is too tough; you design it. So you have twenty-four hours, you figure out what the social rules should be, the economic rules and the governmental rules and you and your kids and their kids will live under those rules.
我一直都极其幸运。我的意思是，我会举这个例子，且会花上一两分钟来讲，因为我觉得这值得大家稍微思考一下。我们就假设在你出生的24小时前，有一个精灵来到你面前，它对你说：“赫伯（Herb），你看起来很有潜力，而我有个大麻烦。我得设计一个你即将生活的世界。但我觉得这太难了，你来设计吧。所以你有24个小时的时间，去想好社会规则应该是怎样的，经济规则以及政府规则又该是怎样的，而且你、你的孩子以及他们的孩子都将在这些规则下生活。
You say, “I can design anything? There must be a catch?” The genie says there is a catch. You don’t know if you are going to be born black or white, rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, bright or retarded. All you know is you are going to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion (balls). You are going to participate in the ovarian lottery. And that is going to be the most important thing in your life, because that is going to control whether you are born here or in Afghanistan or whether you are born with an IQ of 130 or an IQ of 70. It is going to determine a whole lot. What type of world are you going to design?
你说：“我可以设计任何东西吗？肯定有什么陷阱吧？” 精灵说确实有个条件。你不知道自己出生时会是黑人还是白人，是富有还是贫穷，是男性还是女性，是体弱多病还是身体健全，是聪明伶俐还是智力迟钝。你只知道你要从一个装有58亿个（彩球）的桶里摸出一个球。你将参与这场 “卵巢彩票”。而这将是你一生中最重要的事情，因为这将决定你是出生在这里还是阿富汗，以及你出生时的智商是130还是70。它将决定很多事情。那么你会设计出一个怎样的世界呢？
I think it is a good way to look at social questions, because not knowing which ball you are going to get, you are going to want to design a system that is going to provide lots of goods and services because you want people on balance to live well. And you want it to produce more and more so your kids live better than you do and your grandchildren live better than their parents. But you also want a system that does produce lots of goods and services that does not leave behind a person who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well wired for this particular system. I am ideally wired for the system I fell into here. I came out and got into something that enables me to allocate capital. Nothing so wonderful about that. If all of us were stranded on a desert island somewhere and we were never going to get off of it, the most valuable person there would be the one who could raise the most rice over time. I can say, “I can allocate capital!” You wouldn’t be very excited about that. So I have been born in the right place.
我认为这是审视社会问题的一个好方法，因为在不知道自己会摸到哪个“球”（即处于何种人生境遇）的情况下，你会希望设计出一个能提供大量商品和服务的体系，因为总体而言，你希望人们生活优渥。而且你希望这个体系能够产出越来越多的成果，这样你的孩子就能比你生活得更好，你的孙辈也能比他们的父母生活得更好。但你也希望这个确实能产出大量商品和服务的体系，不会抛下那些不巧摸到“错球”、不太适应这个特定体系的人。我非常适合我所身处的这个体系。我投身于能够让我进行资本配置的领域。要是我们所有人都被困在某个荒岛上，而且永远都无法离开，那么在那里最有价值的人会是那个能够长期种出最多稻米的人。而我要是说：“我能进行资本配置！” 你们肯定不会为此感到兴奋。所以说，我出生在了合适的地方。
Gates says that if I had been born three million years ago, I would have been some animal’s lunch. He says, “You can’t run very fast, you can’t climb trees, you can’t do anything.” You would just be chewed up the first day. You are lucky; you were born today. And I am. The question getting back, here is this barrel with 6.5 billion balls, everybody in the world, if you could put your ball back, and they took out at random a 100 balls and you had to pick one of those, would you put your ball back in?
盖茨说，如果我出生在三百万年前，我早就成了某种动物的午餐了。他说：“你跑不快，也不会爬树，什么都做不了。” 你可能第一天就会被吃掉。你很幸运，因为你出生在当今这个时代。而我也是如此。回到刚才的问题，假设有这么一个装着65亿个球的桶，代表着世界上的每一个人。如果你可以把自己的 “球” 放回去，然后随机取出100个球，而你必须从这100个球中选一个，你会把自己的那个球放回去吗？
Now those 100 balls you are going to get out, roughly 5 of them will be American, 95/5. So if you want to be in this country, you will only have 5 balls, half of them will be women and half men–I will let you decide how you will vote on that one. Half of them will below average in intelligence and half above average in intelligence. Do you want to put your ball in there? Most of you will not want to put your ball back to get 100. So what you are saying is: I am in the luckiest one percent of the world right now sitting in this room–the top one percent of the world. Well, that is the way I feel. I am lucky to be born where I was because it was 50 to 1 in the United States when I was born. I have been lucky with parents, lucky with all kinds of things and lucky to be wired in a way that in a market economy, pays off like crazy for me. It doesn’t pay off as well for someone who is absolutely as good a citizen as I am (by) leading Boy Scout troops, teaching Sunday School or whatever, raising fine families, but just doesn’t happen to be wired in the same way that I am. So I have been extremely lucky so I would like to be lucky again.
现在，从那里面取出的这100个球中，大概有5个代表的是美国人，比例是95比5。所以，如果你想生在美国，那就只有5个球可供选择（代表有机会生在美国），而且这5个球里一半是女性，一半是男性—— 这方面的选择就由你自己决定了。这100个人里，一半人的智力会在平均水平以下，另一半人的智力会在平均水平以上。你想把自己的球放回去参与这100个球的抽取吗？你们中的大多数人都不会想把自己的球放回去再从这100个球里选。所以，你们其实是在说：我现在坐在这个房间里，就已经属于世界上最幸运的那1% 的人了—— 属于世界上最顶尖的1% 的幸运儿。嗯，我也是这么觉得的。我很幸运能出生在我所出生的地方，因为在我出生的时候，出生在美国的概率是50比1（即概率很低却幸运地出生在美国）。我幸运地拥有好父母，在各种事情上都很幸运，而且幸运的是，我的天赋秉性在市场经济中让我获得了巨额回报。对于那些和我一样绝对称得上是好公民的人来说，比如那些带领童子军、在主日学校教书，或者做其他事情，还养育着美满家庭的人，他们就不会像我这样获得丰厚回报，只是因为他们碰巧没有我这样的天赋秉性。所以，我一直都极其幸运，因此我还想继续这么幸运下去。
Then the way to do it is to play out the game and do something you enjoy all your life and be associated with people you like. I only work with people I like. If I could make $100 million dollars with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I would say no because in way that is very much like marrying for money which is probably not a very good idea in any circumstances, but if you are already rich, it is crazy. I am not going to marry for money. I would really do almost exactly what I have done except I wouldn’t have bought the US Air.
那么，实现（幸福生活）的方法就是好好地过好这一生，去做一些你一生都喜欢做的事情，并且和你喜欢的人交往。我只和我喜欢的人一起共事。如果和一个让我心里不舒服的人合作能赚1亿美元，我会拒绝，因为这在很大程度上就好比为了钱而结婚，无论在什么情况下，这可能都不是个好主意，而且要是你已经很富有了，这么做就更荒唐了。我不会为了钱而结婚。除了不会买下美国航空公司之外，我基本上还会做我已经做过的那些事情。
Thank you.
谢谢各位
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PptOSHwUtuArO1S_y0MPhw
