Labitan.沃伦.巴菲特文集(EN)——The_Warren_Buffett_Bu(19)

long-term expectations for both earnings and returns on incremental capital. Since the long-term corporate outlook changes only infrequently, dividend patterns should change no more often. But over time distributable earnings that have been withheld by managers should earn their keep. If earnings have been unwisely retained, it is likely that managers, too, have been unwisely retained.

Historically, Berkshire has earned well over market rates on retained earnings, thereby creating over one dollar of market value for every dollar retained. Under such circumstances, any distribution would have been contrary to the financial interest of shareholders, large or small.

Intelligent Investing

On December 6, 1994, we attended a session at the New York Society of Financial Analysts entitled "A Tribute to Ben Graham". Ben Graham would have been celebrating his 100th birthday if he had been alive. Three of Graham's former students spoke at length: Warren Buffett, Irving Kahn, and Walter Schloss, all very successful investors.

"This is the 100th anniversary of Ben's birth, I believe. And on the creative side, if what I consider his three basic ideas are really ground into your intellectual framework, I don't see how you can help but do reasonably well in stocks. His three basic ideas - and none of them are complicated or require any mathematical talent or anything of the sort - are:

1. that you should look at stocks as part Ownership of a business,

2. that you should look at market fluctuations in terms of his "Mr. Market" example and make them your friend rather than your enemy by essentially profiting from folly rather than participating in it, and finally,

3. the three most important words in investing are "Margin of safety" - which Ben talked about in his last chapter of The Intelligent Investor - always building a 15,000 pound bridge if you're going to be driving 10,000 pound trucks across it.

I think those three ideas 100 years from now will still be regarded as the three cornerstones of sound investment. And that's what Ben was all about. He wasn't about brilliant investing. He wasn't about fads or fashion. He was about sound investing. And what's nice is that sound investing can make you very wealthy if you're not in too big a hurry. And it never makes you poor - which is even better. So I think that it comes down to those ideas - although they sound so simple and commonplace that it kind of seems like a waste to go to school and get a Ph.D. in Economics and have it all come back to that. It's a little like spending eight years in divinity school and having somebody tell you that the ten commandments were all that counted. There is a certain natural tendency to overlook anything that simple and important. But those are the important ideas. And they will still be the important ideas 100 years from now. And we will owe them to Ben.

In Berkshire’s investments, Charlie and I have employed the principles taught by Dave Dodd and Ben Graham. I think the best book on investing ever written is “The Intelligent Investor”, by Ben Graham. Ben wrote “Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.” I learned from Ben that the key to successful investing was the purchase of shares in good businesses when market prices were at a large discount from underlying business values. Ben identified this "margin of safety" in bargain purchasing as