when i was 11 i picked stocks i had the whole wrong idea i was interested in watching stocks and i thought stocks were things that went up and down and i charted them i read books on technical analysis i read edwards and mickey i think that was the classic then hundreds and hundreds of pages and i read that whole thing over and over again i read everything and i thought the first eight years i thought the important thing was to predict what a stock would do and predict the stock market and then i read ben
graham you know when i was 19 or 20. and i realized that i was doing it exactly the wrong way but didn't hurt that i had that background and everything and i rejiggered my mind and when i read the book the intelligent investor at from that point i never bought another stock i bought businesses that happened to be publicly traded but i became an owner of a business and i did not care whether a stock went up or down the next day or the next week or the next month or the next year and i
didn't have any idea what it would do i didn't know what the stock market would do but i knew businesses i'm a bright guy who's terribly interested in what he does i've spent a lifetime doing it i've surrounded myself with people that bring out the best in me and you don't need to be a genius in what i do that's the good thing about it if i went into physics on a whole lot of other subjects i'd be an also ran but i am in a game that you probably need 120 points of iq yeah
but 170 doesn't do any better than 120 it may do worse probably do worse but you don't really need brains what do you need you need the right orientation you know ninety percent of the people pulling the figure out of the air but ninety percent of the people that buy stocks don't think of them the right way they think about something that they hope goes up next week and think about the market as something they hope goes up and if it's down they feel worse i feel better and you think about i think about what
the company is going to be worth 10 or 20 years now and i hope it goes down when i buy it because i'll buy more i try to keep my competitive experience in a game where i can win i do know this when i want to do something i always want to do it big i put my whole net worth in city service preferred 114.75 and i've never since that day and now march 11 1942 i have never had less than eighty percent of my money in american business you can call them stocks all right
but i see them as american business i've owned a piece of american business at least 80 at all times i just i don't want to own anything else i want to own a home and you know things my family wants and all that but owning five homes doesn't mean anything to me because i'm going to be happy in one home and there's a certain amount of things that go wrong with everything and if i got two homes i know i've got more problems and i don't have more happiness what brings you the happiness what makes
me happiest is what i'm doing what i'm doing i enjoy two things about it one i know i'll win over time that's me don't beat everybody else or anything like that but i mean the game is very very very easy if you have the right lessons in your mind about what you're buying i'm not buying stocks i'm my pieces of overwhelmingly american business and i'm happy when i'm doing it i'm happier when stocks are going down because i can buy more of them with the same amount of money i'd be happy if i was a
farmer i'd want farmland to go down so i could buy more acreage it just makes sense i'll tell you the second thing i really like i like being trusted by people i would rather do what i do with partners than do it sitting in a room myself even though i might make more money that way let's pretend there is no stock market let's say i had to buy these privately like you buy a farm privately like you buy a department house product they're investments so you're looking to say what can i do with money i've
saved to put it away so i feel good about getting it back later under any circumstances but not necessarily on a given moment but if i have a farm it's going to take me a while but people would be so much better if they if they actually didn't have a stock market in terms of buying businesses united states economy and it's very easy to look at the statistics on it i mean more people a greater percentage of the american population is uh wealthy now or having more income now than they've ever had and if you
look at whether bank of america would give you their average deposit i mean you just look at the wealth that doesn't mean everybody's wealthy but it does mean relative to any other period of time i mean people have more money now they get mortgages at lower rates than they've ever gotten so if they want to buy a house or something right today you live in an environment where the bottom two percent in terms of income in the united states the bottom high percent and for sure the top one percent all live better than john d
rockefeller was living when i was six years old john dre rockefeller was the richest man in the world and today you can get better medicine better education better entertainment better transportation you can do everything better than he could it's astounding that's in my lifetime if he wanted to watch a football game he still had to go there and i can sit there with this big screen and they keep showing me the replay i saw that explaining to me what happened and every and maybe everybody doesn't have a screen as big as mine but damn near
everybody has a screen or an iphone or a computer or access to one and they have access when i was born the dentist didn't use novocaine so there has been progress obviously and nowhere more than in the united states there's no country that's done what our country's done if you go back three of my lifetimes you're looking at less than one percent of the world's population closer to half of one percent are sitting in this land they don't work harder than people in all the rest of the world i mean in terms of hours of
unpleasant labor everybody's got hours of dozen labor in those days practically they don't come laden with gold and you know they are half of one percent and they work the same hours they got the same iqs they may be a little self-selected in terms of enterprise in terms of going across oceans and things and fast forward a couple of lifetimes and they've got 20 plus of all the bounty in the world i mean that is something that has worked like nothing just imagine that if you've gone to anybody constitutional congress you know 1789 if you
go to any one of the representatives there and you said i want to tell you what this place is going to look like you know in three more of your lifetimes your great-great-grandchildren are going to be flying in the skies they're going to be watching sports all over the world they're going to be entertaining their medicine they'd hold you off to a lunatic society of what he's doing he's getting 50 cars and he's getting a whole bunch of little claim checks just think of it everything when thomas edison did all the things he did he
made some money but we're using it it belongs to us if you take what an hour of labor delivered to you 100 years ago and what an hour of labor delivers to you now for you and your family it's unbelievable capitalism say get rid of a referee and a government we've got a government that can tell capitalism what to do they do and that's what they should do and they do in different ways at different times and all kinds of things but it's claimed checks on future output then within and the climbing tax belonged to
me so if i want to buy 50 super yachts i can do it but what does it mean to me they can buy more things for other people that are useful to them it's not evil the federal government is the boss in the end and they shouldn't screw up capitalism and capitalism screw up the federal government it's very simple it's evolving always we started in 1789 we had business and it's gotten far far far unbelievably more productive for people and the only thing you can do with what it produces is give it to other people
it isn't like the 50 richest guys in the country can say i'm just going to eat everything they're turning out products iphone that i have which i'm probably the least capable guy in the world of working with it but it makes life better but that comes with government so far we've got the best system we've got a better system than we used to have and we'll have a better system 50 years from now why are you so sure well i've seen 91 years of it i've never seen a period where i didn't believe that not
every aspect we'd go backwards to some and now it's not but it's unbelievable what has happened we just think of it you know we've had a civil war we've got a great depression we've had all these things pandemics yeah i'll guarantee you well i thought you get them next year and the year after the year after but in a herky jerky but dramatic matter business moves forward government moves forward more important people move forward i mean i am happy to tell people that uh the same thing i've told them before but they'll never get the
message most of them but if you do that's the most you know best thing to do if you want to invest for the long term is index and it's the s p 500 index right and what's happened of course is that organizations like to grow so they set up indexes on different industries different countries and as soon as you do that you're violating basically what jack bobel said he says you don't know enough to pick the right businesses which means you don't know enough to pick the right countries you're right you know enough
