2007年股东大会 · 巴菲特：不要预测市场走势，股市过热时我也会做投资 — 文稿

M10:00

早上好，Warren，Charlie。

Good morning, Warren and Charlie.

我叫 Frank Martin，来自 Indiana 的 Elkhart。

My name is Frank Martin from Elkhart, Indiana.

我是股东。

I'm a shareholder.

M20:09

对，Frank，你也写了一本很不错的书。

Yeah, you've written a good book too, Frank.

M10:11

谢谢，Warren。

Thanks, Warren.

我会尽量把这个问题说得简短一点。

I'll do my best to be succinct with this question.

你也知道，我一向不擅长把话写得简短。

As you know, my long suit is not brevity in the written word.

最近，我按时间顺序读了自一九九九年以来你和 Charlie 写过的所有东西，以及所有关于你们的文章，包括你在年报里那则招聘广告——你要找的不是 Ted Williams，而是一位真正顶级的防守型球员——还有上周一《Wall Street Journal》里那些措辞很强烈的引语。

Recently, I sequentially read everything that you and Charlie have written or that has been written about you since 1999, including your help wanted ad in the annual report, which sought not a Ted Williams but the consummate defensive player, and your forcefully worded quotations in last Monday's Wall Street Journal.

在梳理这个时间脉络时，我感觉到，你们对 marketable securities 投资环境的看法，出现了一种缓慢但 unmistakable 的重大转变。

When contemplating the chronology, I sensed a gradual but unmistakable sea change in your perspective on the investment environment for marketable securities.

你们对风险管理越来越强烈的关注非常明显；可与此同时，市场边际上其他那些最大的参与者——hedge funds、private equity、mutual funds——却恰恰没有这种警觉。他们对未来大概率会很疲弱的预期回报避而不谈，对为了拿到这些回报而承担的离谱风险也闭口不言，却还厚着脸皮为这种几乎没创造多少价值的服务收取天价费用。

The intensification of your preoccupation with managing risk is conspicuous by its absence among the other biggest players at the margin—hedge funds, private equity, mutual funds—who are shamefully mute both about what are likely to be anemic prospective returns and the unconscionable risks assumed to achieve them, all the while charging a king's ransom for such low-value-added services.

当我放开直觉去想的时候，一九九九年后的 Warren Buffett，让我想起了一九六九年后的那个谨慎的 Warren Buffett。

When I give free rein to my intuition, the post-1999 Warren Buffett reminds me of the wary Warren Buffett of post-1969.

那时候，Berkshire 的规模还只是现在的一小部分。你当时说过，去玩一场自己并不理解的游戏有多难，而且整体上看，股票市场几乎没什么安全边际。

Back then, when Berkshire was a small fraction of its current size, you spoke of the difficulty in playing a game you did not understand, that there was little margin of safety in the equity markets in general.

你当时并不是在预测后来发生的一九七三到一九七四年熊市，但你显然凭直觉意识到了 Greenspan 多年以后一再警告的那件事——在股票风险溢价长期偏低之后，清算的日子终究会来。

You weren't forecasting what in its own time became the bear market of '73-'74, but you were surely intuitively aware of what Greenspan years later has repeatedly warned—the inevitable day of reckoning that follows long periods of low equity risk premia.

如果你愿意的话，请设想一下，你一夜之间被放进了一个全新的角色里，从零开始，担任一家一百亿美元 pension fund 投资委员会的负责人。

Imagine yourself, if you are willing, cast overnight into a new role with a clean slate as head of the investment committee of a $10 billion pension fund.

如果是今天，你的决策会不会体现出和一九六九年后那段时期一样的厌恶风险心态？

Today, would your decisions reflect the same risk-averse mindset that dominated your behavior in the post-1969 period?

而且你会不会预期，在这一切之后，可能会出现像一九七三到一九七四年那样令人垂涎欲滴的机会？

And might you anticipate that following all of this might appear opportunities that were as mouthwatering as appeared in '73-'74.

请解释一下，我也希望 Charlie 能就这个问题谈谈。

Please explain, and I hope Charlie will weigh in on the subject as well.

谢谢。

Thank you.

M23:41

对，Frank，当年我关闭 partnership 的时候，如果那时我手里管理的是一个 endowment fund，未来的预期回报——其实我在给合伙人的一封信里写过这个，我很乐意寄一份给你——未来的预期回报，我当时是按个人、税后口径来看的，我觉得接下来十年，equities 和 municipal bonds 的回报大概差不多。

Yeah, Frank, when I closed up the partnership, if I'd had an endowment fund to run then, the prospective return—and actually, I wrote this in a letter to my partners that I'd be glad to send you a copy of—the prospective return—and I was looking at them as individuals on an after-tax basis—was about the same, I felt, from equities and from municipal bonds over the next decade.

结果后来基本上也确实是这样。

And it turned out to be more or less the case.

我会说，我并不认为现在还是同样的情况。

I would say that I do not regard that as being the same situation now.

如果我是在管理一个规模非常大的 endowment fund，首先，它要么就是百分之百投股票，要么就是百分之百投长期债券，要么就是百分之百投短期债券。

If I were managing a very large endowment fund, for one thing, it would either be 100% in stocks or 100% in long bonds or 100% in short-term bonds.

我的意思是，我不相信那种层层铺开的配置方式，说我要百分之六十配这个，百分之三十配那个。

I mean, I don't, I don't believe in layering things and saying I'm going to have 60% of this and 30% of that.

如果我觉得那百分之六十更有道理，那我为什么还要留那百分之三十呢？

Why do I have the 30% if I think the 60% makes more sense?

所以，如果你告诉我，我必须为一个基金做二十年的投资，而且我可以在买 index，也就是 S&P 500，和买一只二十年期债券之间二选一，那你知道，我会买股票。

So, and if you told me I had to invest a fund for 20 years and I had a choice between buying the index, the S&P 500, or a 20-year bond, you know, I would buy stocks.

呃，你知道，这并不代表它们不会大跌很多，但如果是我——我还是更愿意持有股票投资。

Uh, you know, that doesn't mean they won't go down a lot, but if you—I would, I would rather have an equity investment.

不过，如果这个股票投资是我要付一大笔钱给别人管理，而那会把我的股票回报大幅拉低，那我就不愿意了；但如果只是二十年持有一个 equities 的 index fund，和买一只二十年期债券之间做选择的话，我会——我会觉得这根本不是个难选的决定。

I wouldn't rather have an equity investment where I paid a ton of money to somebody else that took my stock return down dramatically, but simply buying an index fund for 20 years of equities or buying a 20-year bond, I would, I would—it would not be a close decision with me.

我会买股票。

I would, I would buy the equities.

当然，我更希望能买得便宜一点；你知道，我也同样希望债券的收益率能更高一点。

I'd rather buy them cheaper, you know, but I'd rather buy the bond with a bigger yield too.

但就今天摆在我面前的选项来说，我会这么选。

But in terms of what's offered to me today, that's the way I would come down.

Charlie？

Charlie?

对，我觉得那不是大家期待的答案，但答案就是这个。

Yeah, I don't think that was the answer that was expected, but that's the answer.

这跟我们怎么看股票会到哪里——或者说，我们根本不会去想两三年后股票会在哪里、债券会在哪里——一点关系都没有。

That doesn't have a thing to do with where we think stocks— or we don't think at all about where stocks could be or bonds could be in 2 or 3 years.

我们完全不知道三年后 S&P 会在什么位置，也不知道长期债券三年后会是什么样，但我们知道，如果按二十年来看，我们更愿意持有什么。

We don't have the faintest idea where the S&P will be in 3 years or where the long-term bond will be in 3 years, but we do know which we would rather own on a 20-year basis.

我们也会预计，眼下这种局面会带来一些真正的扰动。

We'd also expect that the current scene will cause some real disruption.

对，但不会拖到很多年以后。

Yeah, but not too many years ahead.

这倒没错，不过如果你把时间往前倒一百年看，几乎可以说，你知道，几乎任何一个时期都可以这么讲，而且时不时就会出现一些扰动。

That's true, but if you go back 100 years, you can almost say that, you know, at almost any period, and you will get disruptions from time to time.

而且如果那时候你手上有很多现金，又有胆量拿它去做点什么，那就非常好了。

And it's very nice if you have a lot of cash then and you have the guts to do something with it.

但去预测这些事，或者坐等这些事发生，这种做法不是我们的路子。

But predicting them or waiting around for them, that sort of thing, is not our game.

我的意思是，我们第一季度买了大概五十亿美元的股票，差不多就是这个数。

And I mean, we bought $5 billion worth of equities in the first quarter or something like that.

而且，你知道，我们不觉得它们有任何像——嗯，它们确实不像。

And, you know, we don't think they're anything like— well, they aren't.

就是不像。

They're not.

拿现在跟一九七四年，或者跟其他很多时期相比，简直都像个笑话。

It'd be a joke to even compare them to 1974 or a whole bunch of other periods.

但我们还是决定，我们宁愿持有它们，也不愿意拿着现金，或者坐在那里盼着价格变得便宜得多。

But we decided we would rather have them than cash, or we would rather have them than sit around and hope that things get a lot cheaper.

我们不会花很多时间干这个。

We don't spend a lot of time doing that.

M16:59

这——

It—

M26:59

你这么做，可能会让自己一直都进不了场。

You can, you can freeze yourself out indefinitely.

所以任何时候，只要我们发现有件事做起来是明智的，我们就直接去做，而且希望能做得大一点。

So anytime we find something that we think is intelligent to do, we just do it, and we hope we can do it big.

第七个问题。

Number 7.