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BUFFETT!

May 12, 202541 min
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Episode description

BUFFETT! – With the recent retirement announcement from Warren Buffett, Chris Boyd, Jeff Perry, and Brian Regan reflect on the amazing life and the many financial lessons of Warren Buffett. Brian leads the conversation with a brief biographical summary of Buffett’s early years and reflections of how Buffett influenced his views on investing. Jeff weighs in with Buffett’s dislike of using leverage and specifically credit cards. Chris ends the episode discussing how Buffett plans to distribute his wealth through the “Giving Pledge.” For more information or to reach TEAM AMR, click the following link: https://www.wealthenhancement.com/s/advisor-teams/amr

 

Transcript

Welcome to Something More with Chris Boyd. Chris Boyd is a certified financial planner, practitioner, and senior vice president and financial advisor at Wealth Enhancement Group, one of the nation's largest registered investment advisors. We call it Something More because we'd like to talk not only about those important dollar and cents issues, but also the quality of life issues that make the money matters matter.

Here he is, your fulfillment facilitator, your partner in prosperity, advising clients on Cape Cod and across the country. Here's your host, Jay Christopher Boyd. Well, welcome to another show of Something More with Chris Boyd. So glad to have you with us. I'm here with Jeff Perry, my regular co -host, and we are joined today by Brian Regan, senior portfolio manager for the AMR team at Wealth Enhancement, the legend of Warren Buffett.

And he announced recently that he is going to be retiring early retirement after what, 60 years? How long has it been, Brian, of investment history there? I think he said he made his first investment when he was eight years old. So 87 years, let's call it. Warren Buffett is in his 90s. He was born August 30, 1930. So he is 94, seems to be 95, not too far off, 95. Legendary investor, amassed enormous amounts of wealth.

And not because he has this sense that he wants to go spend a lot of money or anything. He just is someone who loves to create investing companies that create wealth. And he's been a legend. We'll talk about some of the business structure decisions. We'll talk about some of his investment decisions and a little bit about his history and story. But that's what we're focusing on today in this episode. I'm glad everyone's here with us to enjoy this.

So I have some notes about Warren Buffett, but Brian, I'm going to start by giving you the opportunity to get us started. Well, I'll say that, for better or worse, I don't really feel like I've been lucky enough to find a mentor in this business. But thank God it's the 21st century and you can read and listen to as much as from anybody as you can possibly want. And Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have had a huge influence on my life personally. Rest in peace, Charlie Munger.

He died a couple of years ago. And Warren's still with us, just retiring. But I was thinking about this when I was driving my son to school today. What would my net worth be if I was never introduced to Warren Buffett? And it's hard to tell, but it's undoubtedly at least twice as high as it would be otherwise, I think. And he's had a remarkable career and evolution as an investor.

And if you just pay attention to him, I think you'll avoid a lot of headaches and you'll get to what's important very quickly. And I think there's a few tenets of his teachings that we'll probably talk about that I think are worth talking about and worth emphasizing today and well beyond when I'm in the ground. So I think this is an important conversation and one that we shouldn't just have once, but probably revisit the teachings of Warren Buffett as often as possible.

So the thing that I think investors, we've seen him in times of crisis be a voice of calm and a sense of perspective, thinking most recently in the financial crisis. And let's face it, some of the opportunities he took advantage of in the midst of that saved companies, but gave him a tidy profit through his company.

At the same time, he's kind of got this folksy way about him that, and he's very down to earth when it comes to his presentation, his demeanor, very relatable for considering the kind of wealth this man has. Lives, what is it? Lives in the same house since he first got married or whatever.

I mean, he's a very interesting individual in that respect, but I think what we want to ultimately do is talk about his lessons for investing, and probably want to talk about these annual meetings and things like that as well. So let's start with maybe his early life. He went to college at Columbia, met Ben Graham as a mentor, but maybe even before that, we can talk about a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit that he demonstrated. Yeah. So he was from Omaha, Nebraska, where he still lives.

As a young kid, he actually worked in Charlie Munger's father's grocery store, an amazing fortuitous, these geniuses who ended up being partners for many decades of their life, had a very geographically close relationship as well as personally close relationship. But yeah, he did stints at Columbia, he did stints at Wharton School, Wharton Business School, and he finished his graduate degree in Nebraska.

But he met Ben Graham, who he started working as an analyst under initially, first thing out of college. And after a couple of years of that, he decided he was ready to start his own partnership. And the Buffett partnership from 1957 to 1969 returned about 32% annually a year. Which is mind numbingly amazing, 32% a year. At that time, he specialized in what he called cigar butt investing.

So cigar butt investing was, you're buying a company that has more cash on its balance sheet than the company is trading for. And this is something that you could do in the late 50s and early 60s a little easier than you can now. Information was not as publicly available, it was not as easy to trade stocks. He could buy small companies and he could buy them whole. And this is what he did and very, very successfully. So this is a pretty short term trading strategy, as you can imagine, right?

He'd buy a stake in the company, get on the board or talk to the board and try to get them to disseminate the cash out to shareholders. And that was a very successful strategy for years until he met Charlie Munger and they ran separate partnerships for a long time. I don't know how many years, but Charlie Munger was very successful in his own right. He didn't start his career in finance. He was in the military service.

He was the only person I ever heard of to go to Harvard Law School without an undergraduate degree. He did go to Caltech, but never graduated. He went there because of military service, because he was basically a genius in the military, identified that. And he started as a lawyer. He made most of his money as a lawyer. And when he met Warren Buffett through a doctor that they had a mutual acquaintance with in Omaha, they had dinner together and became fast friends.

And what Charlie changed in Warren and something that I really admire is Warren had this amazingly successful strategy. And Charlie said, you know what would be even better? If we bought really good businesses and helped them for a really, really long time. And one of the things that I admire in him as a human being, and there's a lot to admire in him as a human being, I mean, for years, he never had any ethical issues. Vivi, I'm sorry, you got to go see your mother.

He never really had any significant ethical issues. And he changed his investment philosophy, which is really hard to do to go from something that's successful to going to something that's overwhelmingly successful. One of the things that he did was he bought GEICO pretty early. So GEICO stands for the Government Employees Insurance Corporation. And it was a failing insurance company. Why don't we pause for a minute there? What honey? What do you need? I'm not using it. I'm putting it away.

Oh yeah. But then it was GEICO, the Government Employee Insurance Corporation is what GEICO stands for. And one of the innovative things about GEICO was that he realized he could use the float. So float is you pay your insurance premiums and those premiums, you don't have a liability right away. You don't crash your car immediately. You don't die if you have life insurance. What the insurance company does is they invest it.

And when Warren figured this out, he said, this is free capital that I can invest. And he made that the cornerstone of Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway is the name of his firm now, but it was really a failing textile company and not a good investment. He'll be the first one to tell you that it was an awful investment, but he ended up using it as a holding company and putting GEICO under that umbrella and building out both operating companies and investment securities under that umbrella.

So him with Charlie Munger changed how they did things from basically a hedge fund to a holding company conglomerate that emphasized great management and good companies. And the trillion dollars later, it's one of the most amazing organizations in the world. One of his first forays into this, let's buy a great company and hold it, is See's Candy. He talks about it all the time. It's a relatively small company, considering that they own 2% of Apple, which is a $3 trillion company.

But he'll talk about See's Candy all the time because See's Candy was the first company he bought that on a valuation basis might've seemed expensive, but it ended up being the cheapest company you could have possibly imagined. And you guys hear me say a lot that I don't really appreciate PE ratios. I think this is a good example why, and one of the ways that I got around that was to listening to Warren.

If you have a great company that's consistent and growing, you might want to pay up a little bit of a premium rather than buying a business that's not doing so well that might not be with us for much longer. It might be a better value actually for paying more for the earnings. And I think that's one of the great lessons that he's personally given me. When you come to personal lessons too, I've used float in my life.

The idea of float is something that I have actively tried to do, but it was a lot easier to do during the 0 % interest era. But I'll give you some examples. When I graduated from college, I had a job I didn't make any money whatsoever to speak of, and I wanted to study for the CFA. Now the company that I worked for would pay for your books and your registration, but only if you passed.

So that means I needed to find a way to come up with, let's call it a thousand dollars to get the books and the registration. I got a 0% credit card. That was essentially my float. But that was a float and the investment was me actually doing the work and passing the test. Five years ago, I bought a new car at 0% interest that ended up being my float. That money stayed in my bank account rather than going towards the car payment. I invested that money. I made nice returns.

And ultimately that car was probably, ended up costing me half as much as it would otherwise. I own two homes with an interest rate around 3%. One of them, I actually make an operating earnings on. That's float. When I rent that other house, I make sure I get payment upfront before I deliver the house to the tenant so I can invest that money for free. That's free money. So I encourage people, and this is the exact opposite of whatever Dave Ramsey will say.

I think it's kind of next level thinking to utilize float in debt intelligently in your life and you'll probably be better off for it. I started off this conversation by saying, I'm order of magnitude wealthier because of some of the lessons that I've learned from Warren Buffett. That's a good example of how that happened. Going back a little bit, one of the interesting things that I heard in the aftermath of Warren announcing his retirement was people reflecting like you are, Brian.

One of them was that Massachusetts and Rhode Island connection of the textile mills that you referenced. So we have a local connection to Massachusetts. The comment was, if you had invested $100 in those shares of Berkshire Hathaway around the textile mills time in 1965, today it would be worth $2.8 million. That's just talking about building wealth and capitalism.

To me, that's what Warren Buffett's legacy is as a business person of being a capitalist, being a moral capitalist, not an immoral capitalist, different show, different time, but someone who's built wealth, built companies, cared about the people, his employees along the way very much, cared about his shareholders very much. Now the legacy of Warren Buffett is all these lessons that he has left and all that money he's made, he's trying to give it away.

His quote this weekend at the meeting was, he didn't think he'd be able to give it away. It's too much. While that's on topic, maybe we can come back to this giving pledge and what's happening there. Let's talk more about this concept of economic moats that is a foundational concept. What does go into maybe some examples of companies that Buffett has bought because of this principle and the advantages that they've provided? Brian, I'm going to ask you to do that.

Sure. I think there's some great examples. He first bought Coca-Cola in 1988. Coca-Cola had gone through some spans where they made some pretty drastic mistakes. New Coke? That's one. I think that happened a little later, but they were actually investing in movie theaters and they were trying to afford to integrate. Warren identified then at that very, very cheap price that what they sell is sugar and it's distributed globally. Ultimately, that's a great business.

They don't even own the bottling. That's where all the expenses are. He was one of the first people to come on to this idea of a great brand with capital light business. He doesn't really invest in technology, but he did that before the internet in Coca-Cola when the stock was absolutely hated. He still holds it today. It pays in dividends per year more than he paid for it in 1988. It's just a remarkable example of identifying a great business and holding it.

Not selling it after you make a quick buck, but actually holding it for the long term because it's a great business and a great business model and has that moat that Chris was talking about. Another example is American Express. Again, he bought this company when it was absolutely hated, but what he identified was this was a globally recognized brand that was important to not just consumers, but it was almost a status symbol. He recognized this early.

American Express is different from Visa and MasterCard in the idea that they actually are a bank as well as a card provider. They aren't just processing the transaction, but they're actually extending the credit as well. It was a bit of a risk. This was before MasterCard and Visa even really existed. He still holds that today. Another great example. I mentioned earlier that Berkshire Hathaway owns 2 % of all of Apple. It's a remarkable thing.

He says he'll be the first one to tell you that he doesn't invest in technology, but what he did was he recognized that an iPhone is not technology so much as a consumer product. If you look at it as a necessary thing in people's lives rather than a technology product, then you can understand it more easily and not dismiss it. What he would say is it's within his circle of competence. This is something that I've taken into account in my life and tried to use that investing philosophy.

You don't necessarily need to know how the iPhone is made. You need to know why it's important, how it fits into people's everyday lives, and how it's going to continue to grow revenue into the future. I don't necessarily know the ins and outs of NVIDIA, for example, or how they actually build their H100 chips or their Blackwell chips, but I don't really think it matters. I understand what a GPU is. I understand why it's important.

I understand what people are trying to do from a competitive advantage to compete with them. I understand that generally people are behind and that software is really the competitive advantage and that NVIDIA has the CUDA software, which is going to be hard to overcome. Similar to how Microsoft was a dominant platform, Windows was a dominant platform on all PCs back in the late 80s and early 90s.

I think that the lesson is you can stay within your circle of competence, but your circle of competence, things might sneak in there that you don't necessarily need to know. I live in a house, but I don't know how to build one. You can find what's important in the business model. There's this notion of durable, competitive advantages, this economic moat. Maybe that's brand strength, scalability, customer loyalty. Difficulty to enter the market. Yeah, keep going.

It's just these kinds of qualities that not something that's speculative or a fad, but something that's long lasting. Brian, you look like you were about to chime in there. Yeah. One of the big ones that I look for personally is backlogs. Stocks tend to get hammered in market or the sector, but you'll notice that some companies have backlogs with deposits on them. Sometimes they're non-refundable deposits. I'll give you an example. We own Toll Brothers. We've owned Toll Brothers for a long time.

During the pandemic, it traded down to, I'd say, a fourth of its land value, so the land that they actually owned. Not only that, they're a luxury home builder and they take non-refundable deposits from their clients. You can actually see years out how many houses they're going to build. I talk about consistency and growth and predictability, and Chris is talking about moats and Warren Buffett. That's a good example.

You know, even through hard times, how many houses and how much revenue Toll Brothers can lock in the book. That is just an example of one of these competitive advantages that Chris is talking about. Another really interesting thing to talk about when it comes to Warren Buffett is leverage or lack of leverage. Cash, the retention of cash, and lack of debt. Do you want to talk a little bit about that principle of using debt cautiously in some respects?

Is that a fair characterization, do you think? I mean, you had some comments earlier about moats, but it does seem like in the dire times, there have been, they've had a lot of cash on the books and ready to put it to work with opportunities. What are your thoughts? I love his quote. He has a lot of quotes on every subject. He's been around a long time, but he says two things to avoid in this world is liquor and leverage.

Brian, to your earlier point about you using credit cards, I don't think he'd agree with you. He is pretty outspoken about the use of credit cards and the dangers that people get into them with them. He encourages people not to use them. Yeah. He's kind of complicated on the subject. Yes, he says over and over and over and over again, don't use margin, be careful with debt. I think it's very, very good advice. We talked about float earlier. Float is basically a liability, which is debt.

It's intelligent debt, is what it is. It's debt that is long lasting and fairly predictable. Not predictable in the sense that when people are going to get in a car accident, but predictable in the sense that you have actuaries that can kind of statistically game out how long that cash is going to sit on your balance sheet. Then when you have a surplus, so if you invest that money and you do really well and you have a surplus, well then that ends up being free money that you can invest.

I think what Jeff said is true. I don't think he won't be a proponent of credit card debt. The example that I gave was 0% credit card debt and it was termed out for a year. I think he is a proponent of using debt in a smart way. Float is a good example, but even in recent years, he's been buying Japanese banks and he borrowed in yen at 0%, so he hedged his currency rate, but he actually took out some debt. So, there's not like there's no debt on Berkshire Hathaway's balance sheet.

There's debt on their balance sheet. When he says that, I think he's saying, hey look, I'm a genius and I'm the best investor in the world. I know how to use debt intelligently. You can learn from me if you want to be like that. Or if you're not a genius and not the greatest investor in the world, it might be smart just to stay away from it altogether. I'm not sure he would have framed it like that. He's a pretty humble guy. He is a humble guy and I'll say it for him. I admire the guy greatly.

What can I say? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. There's all kinds of great anecdotal stuff in terms of the isms. That could be its own show someday, but Jeff, go ahead. I think one of the interesting questions is what motivates Warren Buffett? Brian, you've talked about some of the successes in his history and Chris, you noted that he lives in the same house that he's lived in and he's known to be humble and conservative. What motivates the guy to keep going? What drives him?

It seems like he just loves what he does. It's a passion for the process, not about money anymore. It's a passion for the process. I'm sure he's a competitive guy. He wants to win in the sense of finding these great deals, these great values and benefit. In the process, it benefits the company oftentimes too. If you've got Warren Buffett as a buyer, you know there's continuity that's not just a quick turnover.

One of the things I admire about him as a man is I think he actually really does care about his shareholders. One of the reasons why Berkshire A shares are so expensive is because he wants to keep the same shareholders. I think he generally looks upon them as partners. There's a reason why the Berkshire Hathaway annual event is in a stadium. It's important to him that these people come and feel like they're part of the organization.

That is admirable and a lot that you could take away from in your own life and your own business. I think at this point, he cares about leaving a lasting legacy. I don't know how much time you guys have, but he's not infallible. It's not like he's never made any bad investments. I find that just as interesting as some of his wins. He's not shy about talking about it. One of the things about being a very rich man is he can just say, I gooped up. I made a mistake.

It's harder for other people to do that for marketing purposes or lack of humility or the fact that if you're raising a surrender flag all the time, who's going to want to hire you? He will tell you that he made a mistake and he'll tell you what he did wrong. There is an enormous amount of value in learning from that. One of the things that I found is he goes back to the same mistakes over and over again sometimes. He'll be the first one to tell you.

One of the things that stood out to me recently, I think he talked about this in the last week's annual meeting. He's lost money on airlines multiple times. I think it was the 80s, the airlines started to get deregulated. There was more and more airlines available and they started to compete on price. Warren Buffett thought that this was an interesting technology. And people are going to want to fly and I don't think he was wrong about that.

But what he was wrong about was the fact that it wasn't a good business. And then he owned it again going into the pandemic. So he got killed on airlines twice. One, I think it was Continental Airlines. He might have got creamed on decades ago. And then I know he owned multiple airlines going into the pandemic and creamed on that again. And it's just kind of interesting, he's human. Even the greats make mistakes like that. Yeah, good point. You talked about the annual meeting. I've never been.

Sounds like it's an amazing event. I wish I had gone while he was there. But tell us a little bit about the shareholder letter as well, because it sounds like there's a few people that just write these shareholder letters that are filled with perspective. I put Jamie Dimon in that category, but Warren Buffett- He's on the top of the list. Yeah. So he's written one annually and they're all online and they're all available. And it is a educational process to go back and read them.

And we had an intern a couple of years ago and I made him read them. And I don't think he got through all of them, but I'm not even quite sure he tried. But I thought that was a good way of, hey, look, go learn from this guy. That's an excellent exercise. There's also a book, The Complete History of Berkshire Hathaway, which I've read, which is interesting. There's a good biography called Snowball, which is interesting.

It talks about him as a kid, he started a vending machine operation and he was putting that in grocery stores. This guy was an entrepreneur from jump. Those are all great, great reading. And if you're not a reader, I recommend The Acquired Podcast. The Acquired Podcast has multiple parts. It's like seven hours of listening on The Complete History of Berkshire Hathaway to have their own interview with Charlie Munger, like weeks before he died.

If you're interested in this, I can't recommend that more on learning from these individuals. Also, these events are on YouTube. Just watch them. I mean, he's 95 years old. He stood on stage, did not know the questions in advance, and spoke for four hours right before he announced his retirement. That's pretty amazing. And I'm telling you, I listened to at least half of it on two times speed. And he sounds like a bit of a chipmunk at two times speed, but still as sharp as he was a decade ago.

Well, I wanted to come back to one thing that we just kind of skipped past a little bit because we got a little sidetracked. But it seems that Berkshire has this capacity and tendency to retain cash and to build up cash, which oftentimes provides them opportunities. They don't pay a dividend on their stock, right, Brian? But is that part of how these companies that are productive pay into essentially this accumulation of profitability from these various companies that Berkshire owns?

And that gives them an opportunity to say, how are we going to deploy this? And sometimes that leads them with cash when things happen. Yeah. So basically it's a conglomerate where they pay dividends back to the home office and the home office is Warren Buffett. And so Warren Buffett not only has the float, but he has the earnings from these operating companies. And he says that he paid a dividend once and he regretted it.

And the reason being is he thinks that that cash is more valuable under his advisement than it is in our pockets. It's tough to argue that. He's right. I mean, there's no argument. I mean, he's absolutely right. And we own Berkshire Hathaway shares for our discretionary plans. And I am unfazed by the amount of cash that he has, because what I know what's going to happen is if he gets that fat pitch, he's going to invest it. He's going to invest it well.

Now, part of the reason that he owns all that cash is because of those liabilities that I mentioned before in the float. So he's not just being irresponsible. I've talked many times before about how insurance companies are almost impossible to analyze because you do not know their contracts that they're underwriting. And you don't know how they're investing the excess. You don't know how they're investing that float.

And one of the ways that I get exposure to insurance companies is by buying Berkshire Hathaway. I know that they have those liabilities covered. I'm unconcerned about it. And I know that he is massively concerned about it. Let's talk about Solomon and maybe the financial crisis a little bit. Some of these instances where people have turned to Warren Buffett in challenging times. Yes, I think John Goodfriend was the CEO of Solomon Brothers when they rigged the Treasury auction.

And if that sounds hyperbolic, it's not. That's what happened. The traders in Solomon Brothers rigged the Treasury auction. So as you can imagine, that wasn't good for the company, which is no longer with us. But Warren Buffett owned preferred shares in the company at the time against Charlie Munger's advisement. So they begged him to become the CEO of the company to use his reputation, which was very solid, to put a foothold under the disaster that had become Solomon Brothers from the scandal.

And as much as he disliked it, he was able to, let's just say, save the foundation of what the company was. And I think he eventually sold it. He didn't want any part of it. And from what I understand, the biggest lessons that he came out of that is he spent a lifetime, he was in his early 70s, late 60s when this happened. He spent his lifetime building up a great reputation, and being attached to Solomon Brothers sullied it real quick.

So one of the things that he learned from this is know who you're getting into bed with. And be very, very careful about how you judge both the character of people, but also the businesses that you invest in. When it comes to the financial crisis, he was one of the people who stepped in and put a foundation on the Goldman Sachs. He was basically the first person that company out. I believe he got preferred shares at 10%.

This is at a time when interest rates were put to zero, still getting 10% preferred shares that could convert to common. A brilliant stroke, a brilliant stroke. I was a junior in college at that time, so a little fuzzier on the details and the exact investment. It was amazing stuff though. To the extent, that's essentially what it was. I think he did that most notably in the one you mentioned, but I think he did it in some smaller opportunities as well.

In any case, and I think there was a lot of effort to try to see if he would do more in the midst of that. But it's one of those instances where I think at that time, the public was familiar with Warren Buffett in the midst of those times because he was on CNBC quite a bit trying to offer perspective and help people to make sense of what was going on, how to behave. What's the expression about blood in the streets? But you want to be a buyer when there's blood in the streets type of thing.

In any case, just an amazing legacy and lots of lessons to be learned, lots to - I suspect there's more coming from him in the remaining time he has with us. We didn't mention this, but that giving pledge. Warren Buffett has pledged his wealth to go to charitable purposes. I think almost all of it's the Gates Foundation, as obviously the Gates have made that pledge as well.

I think it started that process of trying to urge the super wealthy who've had this enormous wealth to identify how are they going to have an impact with their wealth after they're gone? What are they going to do with it? What kind of impact? You see lots of other wealth people have made similar pledges to some extent. I think it's an important thing in a society where we don't talk about this often. Oftentimes there's this sense of, is it right?

Is it fair that so few people can amass so much wealth? That's the nature of capitalism that it doesn't mean other people are unfair, that they can't do that. It's just that these people have had great success. I think it's also societally, there is a virtue to this notion that maybe it's something that we want to give people the opportunity to decide how they want that money to be influencing society long-term rather than have it be a taxed decision by government.

In any case, another topic for another day as well. I think the good news is even after he's gone, which I hope isn't for a very, very long time just because he's retiring doesn't mean he's leaving here, but his son and daughter are going to take up that mantle. The philanthropic ventures are going to continue and I think he's going to make sure that in his estate planning, if you will, to bring it back full circle, that wealth is going to be given to good causes for generations to come.

I think that is great news. We talked about what's motivating him. Maybe that's motivating him. The wealthier he can become, the more philanthropic he can be and the better off the world will be. I actually believe that to be true with a guy like Warren Buffett. With other people, I just think they're mostly being self-serving, but with him, I think it's genuine and it's true.

One thing I wanted to bring up because I imagine we're probably running out of time, but I know this is near and dear to Jeff's heart particularly and definitely to me too. Warren says it's impossible to time the market. He doesn't even try. That's coming from a guy who seems to be awfully good at it. He is awfully good at it. What lessons do we take from that? Well, he's not timing. He's looking for great value.

You tend to get great values at bottoms and you tend to get excessive values at tops. I think that's the lesson that I take from that. Don't necessarily try to time the market. I think you could throw out your charts for the most part altogether, but look for good value. Look for actual businesses. You're investing in businesses, even when you're buying an individual stock, even if you're buying one share, you're buying into the prospects and cash flows of that business.

If you evaluate your stocks on that basis, I think Warren has shown that over generations and generations, and I think this will continue to be true for generations, that that is the best way to invest and outperform by finding great businesses and investing in them. Not market timing, and one of your favorites, Chris, having a robust liquidity bucket. Yeah, there you go. Well, I think these are some of the lessons.

If you are in a position where you think investing is challenging, and it is, it's something you sometimes can benefit from getting help in the process and a helpful perspective on how to approach things, whether it's good times or bad. If that's something that you'd benefit from, please don't hesitate to reach out to our firm to see if we could be a resource to you. We offer a complimentary consultation and would be happy to speak with you. Everybody, thanks for being with us, guys. Thank you.

Until next time, keep striving for something more. Transcribed by https://otter.ai https://otter.ai

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