Preston Pysh  2:53  

Great comment.

Tobias Carlisle  2:55  

Buffet it’s very bullish, but I think he’s he’s always very optimistic. So I don’t know that you can draw any from that, but he’s also carrying a lot of cash, which means that he’s not funding a huge number of opportunities to deploy capital. So I’d be more of a case of looking at his actions rather than his words. Or maybe what he’s saying is he’s hoping for a downpour so you can run out with any Olympic-sized bathtub. 

Hari Ramachandra  3:19  

Actually, Toby, you brought up a very interesting point. I also have observed that Buffett is usually the optimistic person when you see Munger and Buffett. Munger is more realistic. A couple of weeks back, I was at the *inaudible Annual meeting. And Bangor was in his free flow, in terms of expressing his ideas and thoughts. In fact, after the meeting, he stayed back a couple of hours just talking to folks. And it was a very interesting discussion. Somebody has recorded that on their smartphone and uploaded on YouTube and I will share the link with Preston and Stig so that the listeners can also listen to some of the nuggets of wisdom shared by Mr. Munger. 

What I gathered from that meeting is Munger is not as optimistic as Buffett overall about the markets, and even the prospects of Berkshire earning returns going forward. I guess Buffett is also pretty forthcoming about there is advantage because of the size of funds they have.

Stig Brodersen  4:24  

Yeah, I agree with you, Hari, in terms of looking at Buffett and Charlie Munger differently. I definitely think that Warren Buffett places low emphasis on his legacy right now and is also like… He’s always starting off this letter by talking about the prosperity of the US. There’s something in institutions something in the spirit of America that he’s really bullish on, without being too concrete. I think this is definitely a classic Buffet in that sense.

But I did read the letter exactly the same way as Calin and it really made me think about Beatles. And that sounds super weird saying how Buffett’s letters are sort of like Beatles. We  are all looking for clues, right? Oh, this feels wrong, it probably means that the Beatles did XYZ, whereas it probably just meant, you know, it just rhymed or whatever. And I kind of feel the same way whenever I’m reading through Buffets I do read exactly the same as Calin but at the same time thinking like, perhaps it’s just a coincidence that he actually put it like that.

Calin Yablonski  5:18  

It’s interesting though, because two pages later, he goes into detail as to why share repurchases are not always a good idea. So I’m not sure if that’s an external pressure that he has on him from his investors saying, “Well, you’re carrying $86 billion in cash. Why are you not now making those share repurchases?”

Preston Pysh  5:37  

You know, for me when he talks about that, and we’ve mentioned this on the show a bunch of times, is when do you value liquidity over maybe being exposed to equities with some of your portfolio size? I think that he’s kind of talking to that and I’m sure he’s getting an enormous amount of pressure from a lot of shareholders of like, “Hey, you’re sitting on cash, why not just buy back your own stock? Why just continue to sit on all that cash?” I think that my personal opinion is he’s valuing the liquidity more than he is in having that ability to have flexibility, if something happens.

Tobias Carlisle  6:12  

I think Buffett’s always been fairly explicit about the fact that he doesn’t try to time the market. He’s also been fairly explicit about the way that he has used buybacks. When the stock is at a discount to its intrinsic value, then buying back shares concentrates the value for the remaining shareholders when it’s at a premium, the share price, then you sort of tearing up capital doing that, and you’re better off taking the buyback and leaving at that stage. 

I don’t think he’s saying anything other than he thinks that Berkshire Hathaway is within the range of being fairly valued to overvalued or it’s certainly not undervalued. And he’s put a floor, not a hard floor, but a floor around of I think 120% of book value where he won’t consider it until it gets to that level, which I think is a little bit higher than it was in the past. It might have been 110%.

Stig Brodersen  7:01  

Yeah, you’re definitely right, Toby, about the limits for repurchase. So back then, it was 110% and now it’s 120%. So today, when you look at the book value, it’s 1.5. So 150%. Berkshire Hathaway seems fairly valued. Now keep in mind, though, that in the portfolio, common stocks is currently priced at $122 billion, and some of those stocks definitely seem highly priced at the moment. But in general, yes, it seems to be a fair value stock, as you’re saying.

Preston Pysh  7:29  

You know, Toby, when we talked with Mohnish Pabrai, back around Christmas, he was saying the exact same thing that you just said. But you know, the other side of me, so I agree with you and I do believe Mohnish. I mean, he talks to Charlie Munger all the time. I mean, he’s an insider with these guys. So if he tells us that’s what they really are thinking, I believe that but at the same time, if you do a discount cash flow on Berkshire stock today, and you look at the free cash flow of the business, what kind of yield do you come up with? Anyone in the call know what the yield is, if you’re looking at it? I would guess it’s around 5% or 7%. Right, Stig?

Stig Brodersen  8:05  

Yeah, it’s close to 7%. 

Preston Pysh  8:06  

Yeah, 7%. So let’s look at that 7% yield on Berkshire stock. He buys back its own shares. He puts them into the Treasury, you know, on his balance sheet under the Equity Line, and he retires those shares. You know, he’s locking in a 7% return, the market right now is price that a Shiller PE of 30, which gives you a 3.3% return-ish, somewhere around there, 3%. And I just want to add, that’s the same valuation that we had in the 1929 crash, before the 1929 crash, it was a Shiller PE of 30. So I hear what you’re saying/ I hear what Mohnish Pabrai is saying, and you hear everyone in the value investing community say that but at the same time, he’s acting differently. And for me if your stock is priced more than double with the rest of the S&P 500 is, why aren’t you buying your own stock? It doesn’t make any sense. 

I guess what that does is that leads me back to Hari’s original point. Can you give us a synopsis or a quick summary of what Charlie Munger was saying on this video that we are absolutely going to share in the show notes? What was he saying, Hari?

Hari Ramachandra  9:17  

Sure. So you know how the *inaudible meetings go? It’s basically, folks are asking Munger questions and Munger sharing his wisdom along with his wit. He is much different than how he is at the Berkshire Meeting where he speaks much less. Here, he is the man of the show. He’s talking all the time. 

So a couple of things that I observed in that meeting. He was talking a lot about his own mortality. And he was even talking about he wrapping up his life in a way. He also spoke about diversification versus concentration. He said his entire net worth is three stocks but not really three, actually. The one he said is Berkshire obviously, the other one is Costco. The third one is leeloo. But Li Lu obviously runs the funds. 

He was very bullish about China and in fact, somebody from China, somebody from a financial news agency in China was there. He asked a question saying, “If I’m a millionaire in China and I want to diversify, how should I invest in US?” 

And Munger’s answer was, “If you’re a millionaire in China, why would you even think about investing in US when your country’s going so well?” So that’s kind of like, you know, overview I would say it was mixed. He was cautious. He was not pessimistic, but he was not optimistic as well. 

On final note, he said is that investment management business today is really, really hard. And he said kind of deals and the kind of opportunities that Munger and Buffett over the years when they were growing, they used to find, are not available anymore. The information arbitrage or the information edge you could get is really hard to get now. So he said it’s a tough business. But at the same time, he said, “Hey, why should it be easy?” So it was a fun conversation. I’ll definitely share the link with you guys.

Preston Pysh  11:15  

That sounds awesome. All right. So Calin, you said you had four main points. Did you want to hit any of the other ones?

Calin Yablonski  11:21  

Well, one of the points was just that Warren Buffett’s counter to Charlie did paint a really optimistic picture of the United States. I thought that that was really interesting, because again, he dedicated almost a full page in his letter to shareholders, going through how the United States, starting from a stationary position 240 years ago, has now grown to become one of the economic superpowers in the world. I just thought that narrative, given potentially the lack of confidence in the current administration in the United States, was really interesting to include in his letter to shareholders

Stig Brodersen  12:00  

Well, I guess one of the things that he really likes, and he doesn’t mention politics specifically, but he’s talking about legislation, just like his general concept. He’s also talking about how BNSF, the railroad company and energy, accounted for 33% of the operating earnings. So that’s one side of it that’s super interesting. 

The other thing is that, going back to the legislation is that they invested almost $9 billion in plant and equipment last year. I think that’s something that he’s really looking into right now, with the current administration might look interesting, in terms of building up America’s infrastructure. 

One thing that I find particularly interesting is that if you look at the power grid in the US, it’s very old, and it’s very expensive to work with at the moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were looking at a company like Berkshire that’s definitely not like cash in terms of helping the nation building up that infrastructure, because it gives Buffett what he really likes. It gives him a chance to create a monopoly of power, right? So he can make what we call supernormal earnings. Basically, he can make more than market return by investments like this. He can’t make, you know, 20% a year like he has been used to, but he can definitely make more than the market. And it’s very, very hard for all the players to interrupt you like that. That was one of the takeaways I had from the letters that we’ll probably see even more than that in the years to come.

Preston Pysh  13:26  

So what did you guys think about the ETF conversation at the tail end of the letter? Hari, I know you got an opinion.

Hari Ramachandra  13:34  

Yes. One of the things I was thinking is if Buffett is so far indexing, and since he has such a huge capital base, and it’s really hard for him to earn supernormal returns, why doesn’t it just come off his funds and index fund himself?

Preston Pysh  13:49  

I think that’s a great point. So he talks about how difficult it is, I mean, he has the bet with the portfolio managers and all that. When you look at his market marketable securities, you don’t see any ETFs for marketable securities, which I find kind of interesting, especially as different markets kind of dip and accelerate and gain. You think that maybe he would invest more of his marketable securities into some of those industries that are maybe struggling and just kind of take a basket approach using ETF vehicles. I mean, he had a huge… For anybody that’s not read the shareholders letter, really big write up about ETFs and how Jack Bogle is probably one of the most important people that’s contributed to providing the common person a vehicle to invest and have great returns at very little fees. I would completely agree with that, 100%. I think Jack Bogle is going to go down in the books as somebody who’s really kind of changed the industry for the good in a major way. I mean, he already has.

Hari Ramachandra  14:50  

I also had a question to Toby about index funds. One of the ironies of index fund is that if everybody starts doing it then it might lead to a inefficient market, and we might end up making less return. So I wanted to hear Toby’s thought on index investing and how active fund managers take advantage. The reason I’m asking this is a couple of fund managers recently have commented about the perils of index investing, including Seth Klarman in his latest letter to investors.

Tobias Carlisle  15:28  

I think it’s a great thing, if everybody starts becoming index investors. I think everybody should do it right now. Stop trying to beat the market. Partially, that’s a selfish comment. Partially, I think that Buffett’s got the best approach to races if you’re not prepared to spend some time studying the market, then the best place for your money is in the lowest cost index fund that you can find which is probably an ETF because it has attractive tax implications. 

An ETF is just a wrapper, it can be a mutual fund, that can be any other the sort of wrapper as well. But the the idea is that attracts some broad market index like the S&P 500, which is not exactly but it’s close enough to just tracking the largest 500 companies with that sort of an extensive float, which is stock that’s not held by insiders. And it’s sized by market capitalization so the biggest of the companies that gets the most amount of capital. 

I think what your objective is, is to replicate the S&P 500 or the US stock markets, and that’s a pretty good approach. The problem is that they do have these problems with them, that have these systematic errors built into them, they call them and if you think about it for a little bit, you can see one obvious problem. If you’re a value guy and you believe in value investing, which I do, the bigger a company gets, everything else being equal… If you’ve got two companies with 100 million dollars in earnings and one trades 20 times earnings of $2 billion company, the other one trades at two times earnings, it’s a $200 million company, the $20 billion dollar company gets 10 times as much capital allocated to it in that sort of market structure. Everything else being equal, what you would try to do is maximize the intrinsic value that you’re buying. So you might want to buy more of the better company or more of the cheaper company. 

So to the extent that everybody rushing into index funds distorts the market, when the money’s flowing in which it has been for quite a while, those distortions can keep on growing and growing and growing. And often, it’s the investment strategy that looks the best over the recent history, that is the strategy that’s about to stop working really well. And I think it’s been a great period of time to just be a long stock market investor index funds.

Hari Ramachandra  17:40  

So I had a follow up to the topic on index funds. What I wanted to bring up for discussion is the recent moves in the indexes, whether it is Dow Jones or S&P, all of them have broken new records. And recently, one of my friends shared a newspaper clipping from March 2000, where the headline on financial times read, “If this is a bubble, it is sure hard to pop.” And after this article was published, the Dow went from 10,000 to 11,700. So it had just hit 10,000, at that point of time. And in the article, it says that the fund managers of the world’s largest mutual fund, Fidelity, bet billions that the bull market was over at the end of 1995. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has doubled since then, and that particular fund manager is no longer at fFdelity. 

It also goes on to say that Professor Shiller declared in July 1996, “We appear to be flying at the wrong altitude, and that correction could be substantial and lasting.” The Dow Jones has risen 87% since then. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan uttered the most memorable phrase of his career, “irrational exuberance,” in December 1996. Since then the Industrial Average has climbed 55%.

Perhaps those predictions were right, just very premature. Or maybe they have entered a new era of prosperity and profits. That’s how the article ends. And recently, I saw an article in Wall Street Journal, it says, “Reluctant bull days, this rally isn’t about fundamentals.” And there, they talk about how a lot of analysts are now throwing the towel and saying that, “Hey, it might be a overvalued market. But if you miss this, then you’re gonna miss the boat.”

Preston Pysh  19:43  

I mean, I love what you just throw out there because I mean, if anything that describes why these cycles exist, it’s because everyone thinks, well, it must be able to go higher. And so then it just keeps going higher until everyone stops thinking that it can keep going higher. I mean, it’s a psychological thing that you’re really describing here and I’m sure when people go back and listen to this, recording three years from now, they’re gonna be like, “How did these fools not see what happened”? Or five years or whatever it might be? Who knows? 

Now, for me whenever I think about what you’re describing there, we had the pleasure of talking to Bill Miller back in December of 2016. And for anybody who doesn’t know who Bill Miller, so Bill Miller is the Chief Investment Officer at Legg Mason. He’s managed over $60 billion in his career, fund manager of the decade back in the 2000 timeframe. And so, the thing with Bill Miller when I was talking to him, he made this comment to me, he said, “Back in 2000, when the Shiller PE was…” How highdid it get a 37 or 35 or something like that? Significantly higher than…

Tobias Carlisle  20:51  

44, I think.

Preston Pysh  20:52  

Okay, so it’s way higher than what I even said, but drastically higher than we are today. He said, “We got there when interest rates were at like 5& or 6%, or something like that so how in the world do you think we can get there again, when interest rates are at 2.4%.”

So for anybody who understands how assets are valued, it all comes down to interest rates, it all comes down to that risk free rate. And you’re using that number, the lower that the risk free rate goes, the higher the valuation on the asset or security, the premium that you’ll pay will go. 

So what his point was if we’re using five or 6%, which is a much higher number than we are today, and we were getting prices that were sky high at the multiple that Toby said, which was 44. You know, what makes you think we can’t do it now? And that’s a great point. For me, when he said that, to me, I was like, “Well, I don’t even know what to say to something like that. How do you even argue with that?” And that’s because of his experience, he’s seen these things. I mean, it was such a profound moment for me to hear say that. 

I’m not saying that that’s what’s going to happen here and be quite honest with you, I think that this thing is just… Are we at the longest credit cycle we’ve seen ever at this point? Are we at that point? I think we are, we’re getting pretty close to it. It might be number two by, you know, a little bit. But we’re getting to the point where this is the longest credit cycle in the history of the market. And the prices are high, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t get higher. 

Just one more comment. I know, I’m going on a little long here. But we were just talking to Ed Thorp last week, the guy’s net worth is $800 million, personal net worth $800 million. And I’m talking to him about credit cycles and he’s just like, Well, it’s not like you can predict when these things are going to change.” You know, I mean, he just said so matter of fact, like, “Do you actually think you can figure out when this thing is going to turn and start going the other way?” And he’s like, “It’s like an avalanche. You know, you can’t predict when the avalanche is gonna fall. You just know that there’s a lot of snow there and it’s probably due for a collapse and for the fall, but you don’t know when that’s gonna happen.” 

So those two individuals, I think Bill Miller’s net worth is 500 million and then Ed Thorp is 800 million. When those two guys say things like that, it really makes you think, like, “Wow, you can see why they’ve gotten to where they got, because they understand these things.” I don’t know what that means for the way that you should approach this moving forward. But I can say this, you got to be on your toes, because this thing could turn very quickly. The whole Trump rally and everything I mean, this could turn really quickly in the opposite direction. But that doesn’t mean that we know when that’s going to happen. I think that’s really important for people to understand.

Tobias Carlisle  23:38  

I’ve been strident in the past about the importance of getting very overvalued on those basis. It doesn’t really matter which one you use. Buffett’s favorite one is gross national product at total market capitalization. And then there’s Tobin’s Q or Equity Q, which are essentially the same thing. They look at the replacement value of assets versus the market price of those assets. And this should be relationship between those two over the long run when they get very far out of whack. Basically what that means is that you’re incentivized to go and start businesses and sell equity. 

For a long time, they’ve been soaring above their very long run averages. You can calculate these averages back to 1850. I think I’ve got data, you can pull data off the internet, you can do it yourself. I’ve put up on my website Greenbackd in the past, one thing that I have noticed I have run Shiller PE for starting in sort of 1850. And then using it at each stage as if you only had the information that you had up to that point. So I built these little models that how would you invest based on CAPE if all you had was the data that you had to that point? So what do you find? 

Basically, the market from about 1850 to 1930, the market got consistently more and more expensive. So for that entire period, you’re almost always in uncharted territory. You’ll almost always sort of getting to points where you’ve never seen this sort of valuation before. And then from 1930 through to the 1950s, tt was sort of undervalued for that entire period. But all of a sudden, you had a most expensive period to sort of look back on, which was the 1930s. And you could say, “Well, if we ever get back to that level, I’m gonna punch out, because that would be a silly level of overvaluation to get to.”

And then, you know, what happens is that gets you to 1996. I understand why the Fidelity guys are getting nervous in 1995, because they would have been looking back and saying this market, and Shiller would have been doing the same thing, “This market is now as expensive as it was in 1930.”

And what happened is that it ran up for another four years, there was an almighty crash in the market rallied for about five or six years through to 2007, June 2007. There was another almighty crash and the market has rallied, basically, I think today is the eight year anniversary, today is March 6. It’s the eight year anniversary of the bottom of the last crash. So it’s rallied eight years. 

If you’ve taken all your chips off the table in 1996, you’ve missed out on an enormous period of growth in the market. I’ve thought about that a lot, I think you’ve got two options: you either have to embrace the fact that you are going to have these almighty crashes every now and again. We’re probably closer to an almighty crash now that we have been in a long period of time. But I would have said the same thing in 2012-2013. And I’d have been wrong. You just have to sort of accept that it’s going to happen and I think Buffett and Munger also say, “Don’t put any money into the market that you’re afraid to see torn in half, because that’s sort of that’s a regular occurrence in the market.”

Preston Pysh  26:35  

Yeah, when we were talking to Ed Thorp last week, he said, just sell down to the sleeping point, put on as much of a position that if you do see a 50% meltdown in the market, you’re still okay with that and you can still stomach it. So for the people that are trying to enter the stock market today, let’s say you came across, you know, a couple thousand bucks and you want to put it in the market and you want to get your feet wet. I think the best advice because it is so highly valued, doesn’t mean it can’t go higher. It might go up to 45. How high did the Japanese market get? The Nikkei got….

Tobias Carlisle  27:10  

100 times? China was 100 times two.

Preston Pysh  27:13  

PE of 100. That means the market would go three times higher than where we are right now. So here we are talking about how overvalued as well. There’s examples around the world where these things have gone three times higher than we are right now, just to throw that out there. I’m not saying it’s going there. I highly doubt it’s going there. But it could. So that’s something that people need to be aware of. So if you’re worried about that, get into the market to a point that you’d be comfortable with. And then slowly gradually build yourself into it more and more as you go along.

Stig Brodersen  27:46  

I think it’s a really interesting discussion we have about comparing different decades in terms of stock returns. It’s very important not to be blind at all about looking at the down numbers because it comes down to fundamentals. 

Also to refer back to what Hari was talking about before. Not in the short run, but in the long run fundamentals are the most important thing. So whenever we are talking about fundamentally the market was overvalued at 1929 at 260. Well, that’s because that is what the fundamentals set back then. 

Now we’re looking at what is the fundamental saying in Q1 2017. And they’re simply just saying that the market is overvalued. I think what Preston brought up earlier about the bet that he made with the hedge funds, I think that symbolizes more than anything why fundamentals matters because it’s not only one hedge fund he’s competing agains.

The way it is outlined, it’s something like there’s this guy and he was picking five other guys and their funds or something like that. And then there were comparing that to the S&P 500. Well, that’s not the full story because it was actually fund-to-fund. So these guys were picking more hedhe funds. We’re talking about hundred funds here. Basically, they’re saying we have hundred people and they can beat the market, which kind of doesn’t make any sense if 100 people because more or less you have someone like the market, and some of these guys even invest in asset classes that typically doesn’t perform as good as stocks. And still you think you can beat the market. That really shows you the strength or the weakness, if you will, of last numbers. So how can you have a market? This is all the hedge fund managers, how can you have something that’s close to the market that has really expensive fees compete with the actual market with very low fees? It just doesn’t make any sense and that’s also why they lost the bet.

Preston Pysh  29:28  

Just so people know what Stih’ss talking about there is for a little context is he’s talking about this bet that Warren Buffett has with protege partners. And what the bet is, is that they could pick a fund-to-fund financial instrument that goes out there and picks multiple fund managers and then they lump them into a basically a basket. So you have like double overhead with these fund-to-funds that Buffett was basically saying that ETF would crush. So he had a bet, it was a 10 year bet, the performance over a 10 year period at the time. I think we’re in the ninth year of it at this point, and he talks about this in the shareholder letters.  I think the closest performance of five different fund-to-funds was like 30% or 40% off of what the index has performed? Somewhere around those numbers.

Stig Brodersen  30:17  

Yeah. So the S&P index fund have done 85.4%. And the thing to fund-to-funds, as far as I remember, that’s close to 20 or something like that.

Preston Pysh  30:27  

Yeah. So he’s crushing it. And there’s a huge write up in the shareholders letter, which we’ll put into the show notes so if you guys want to read through this, you can see all the analysis that Buffett’s done and talks about how criminal like some of these can be that the managers are sucking off these fund-to-fund type assets. Go ahead, Hari.

Hari Ramachandra  30:44  

Yeah, it’s done. I think this is a great discussion. And this goes back to Buffett’s advice to a no-nothing investor is best off doing indexing. However, I wanted to bring up one point that you made regarding making sure that you can sleep well when you’re investing, that’s great advice. A lot of people will eventually do well, if they invest only sums that they can leave even if they lose 50% of it. 

However, I wanted to highlight one thing: a lot of folks don’t apply that when they’re buying real estate or their homes. Alot of their net worth is actually tied to their home and if their home price fall by 50%, I’m not sure how many people will be able to sleep well.

Stig Brodersen  31:33  

I really like your comment, Hari, and I have a statistic about that. I think I brought up once or twice and the earlier show, but it’s about how people have a hard time valuing their own home. So in this behavioral finance book, I just read more than 90% of the respondents, and I just want to say this was just after the great financial crisis. So after that, more than 90% have seen that there have been a lot of foreclosures in their neighborhood. And more than 80% are sure that because of the financial crisis, the general valuation of the homes in the neighborhood would be lower. 

Now, still, two thirds of the respondents thought that it wasn’t their home, that it was all the other homes, but their home hadn’t lost anything in value. I think it’s very important all of us, both as homeowners and as investors in the stock market, to understand how our brain can trigger us into distorting our own perception of valuation. It’s really interesting how this can happen.

Tobias Carlisle  32:33  

That’s because they’re all in those neighborhoods where everybody’s an above average driver, which is every night.

Stig Brodersen  32:38  

That’s true. Yeah, there was another statistic. It was like 85% or something like that that said they were above average.

Preston Pysh  32:44  

All right, I want to go around the horn real quick. Anyone read a good book lately that you guys want to talk about on the show?

Hari Ramachandra  32:51  

I recently picked up a book called “The Platform Revolution.” One of my friends suggested it. It’s an interesting book, it talks about the new dominant companies today like whether Uber, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and he tries to distinguish between the supply side companies like the Marriott or the old economy companies where they had to invest a lot of their time and energy and capital in order to build up the supply so that the demand will come. Versus the new platform companies where they don’t have to invest in any fixed capital like Airbnb not having any room is now valued almost as much as Marriott because they work on the demand side of the economy.

Preston Pysh  33:42  

Anyone else have something they want to highlight before we wrap things up?

Calin Yablonski  33:45  

Well, I was just going to say the one book I’m reading right now, and I’m sure everybody on the call has read this book already, is Seth Klarman’s “Margin of Safety.” It’s a heavy read, but if you enjoyed “Security Analysis” and were able to get through it, Seth Klarman’s book could be a good one to check out as well.

Preston Pysh  34:03  

Did you pay the thousand dollars on Amazon for it?

Calin Yablonski  34:06  

I got a bootleg copy. I hope, Seth, if you’re listening right now just let me know and I’ll send you a check in.

Preston Pysh  34:14  

Seth, if you’re listening right now, put it back in print my friend. Put it back in print. Create space. Make it happen, baby. 

That’s all we have for you guys. I want to highlight our panel here so you guys have more information on them. So Toby Carlisle has two websites, he has the acquirersmultiple.com he has greenbackd.com. You want to get some good reading in you want to see some fantastic tools, check out both of those locations. We’ll have it in the show notes.

Calin Yablonski, if you want to optimize your business for search engine optimization online, especially if it’s local in your local area, Calin has some of the best tools and best services. We’ll have links to his service on our show notes as well. But if your business needs that boost with the search engine optimization, he’s your guy. I promise you He knows this stuff inside out. 

And then Hari, he has a blog at bitsbusiness.com. I’m sure you wrote about the Charlie Munger engagement on BitsBusiness. Correct?

Hari Ramachandra  35:12  

Not yet. 

Preston Pysh  35:13  

Come on, man. You need to get with it. Well, by the time this airs, knowing Hari, he probably will have something written. But that’s what he does. He goes out he does these fantastic things. I know when I got my Christmas card this year, and I saw your mug there with Charlie Munger, I was very jealous. But he does some really neat stuff and he writes about it on his blog bitsbusiness.com. 

So check those out. And we’ll have it in the show notes in case you guys forget while you are driving. So the one thing that I want to highlight before we wrap this up is that we are going to the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders’ Meeting on May 6. It’s coming up very soon. It’s about two months away. Toby Carlisle is going to be with us. Toby’s smiling and he’s coming , right? You got your tickets. You get your room booked, Toby?

Tobias Carlisle  35:56  

I’ve got the flights. I got the room booked. I’m a total Berkshire virgin. So don’t anybody follow me because I’ll be going in the wrong direction.

Preston Pysh  36:05  

Well, we got the thing mapped out. Anyone who was with us last year knows that we have a special way of getting into the building faster than anybody else. And we get the best seats. So if you want to get the best seats for Berkshire and learn our secret sauce, you might want to come hang out with us this year. 

Hari, you’re gonna be there as well. 

Hari Ramachandra  36:26  

Most probably yes. 

Preston Pysh  36:27  

Oh, what’s this? Most probably you’re gonna be there right?

Hari Ramachandra  36:31  

I have not booked my tickets yet.

Tobias Carlisle  36:33  

You just take the LinkedIn Jet. Won’t you, Hari?

Preston Pysh  36:39  

If you want to hang out with Toby, myself, and Hari, if he comes, which I’m sure he will, we would love to have you guys there. So on our website, we’ll also shoot something out on email. But if you go to the website and you go under “live events,” it’s under I think the About Us tab on our website, go there and then there’s “live events. ” You’ll see a link for the Berkshire Hathawa. Go there, sign up on the email list. We email out the schedule where we’re going to be, what to do, where to meet up, where we’re eating. And basically, we just hang out the whole weekend all together. We do everything together, and it’s just a blast. 

If you guys want to listen to our episode on Berkshire last year, you can hear the stories about the pub crawl that we go on, and all that kind of stuff. So go to the link, sign up, you got to move out, you got to get your tickets sooner, you’re not going to be able to g. The hotels are already booked up. You got to sign up on Airbnb probably at this point. You won’t be able to get a room but you can still make this happen if you want to go. So that’s all we have on that note. We would really like to see you guys there. It’s gonna be a blast. 

Stig Brodersen  37:41  

Okay, guys, that was all that Calin, Hari, Toby, Preston, and I had for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We’ll see you again next week.

Outro  37:50  

Thanks for listening to The Investor’s Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www.theinvestorspodcast.com. Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to The Investor’s Podcast by going to www.asktheinvestors.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of The Warren Buffett Accounting Book. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP Network and must have written approval before commercial application.