巴菲特英文介绍——可做英文名人介绍作业用

The makings of the world’s greatest investor
Warren Edward Buffett was conceived approximately one month after the Wall Street crash in 1929, to be born in Omaha, Nebraska in the United States on 30 August, 1930. His early childhood was deeply affected by the crash and the great depression that follo wed. Buffett’s father, Howard, was a securities broker in Omaha, but he lost his job and his savings when the bank he worked for went bankrupt in 1931 –shortly before Warren’s first birthday. Howard responded by establishing his own stockbroking firm, but it was a tough way to earn a living in the early thirties. For a long while, as investors shunned the market, Buffett’s business was little more than a sign on a door. Buffett’s mother, Leila Stahl, had been brought up in West Point, Nebraska, with a family that owned and operated a local newspaper: the Cuming County Democrat. She moved to Omaha with Howard after they married in 1925.
Buffett’s tough early years probably helped to forge his parsimonious nature and his desire to make certain that he would never have to struggle for money. Combined with his early exposure to the stockmarket and investing, through his father’s work, Buffett was light years ahead of most children at money management by the time he began school at the age of six.
Around this time, Buffett is said to have embarked on the first of
many money making schemes, buying six-packs of Coca-Cola
for 25 cents and then selling the individual bottles for 5 cents
each. According to his mother, during a severe illness at age
seven, Buffett lay in a hospital bed calculating his future riches
on a sheet of paper, exclaiming to a nurse ‘I don’t have much
money now, but someday I will and I’ll have my picture in the paper’.
Howard Buffett was a man of high principles and this led him into politics. Politics, in turn, led to the family being relocated to Washington DC in 1942, when Buffett was twelve, after his father won a seat in congress. Warren was very unhappy about being away from Omaha, but his time in the capital was significant in terms of his fledgling business career. A paper round began a very profitable lifelong association with The Washington Post. When his paper round was at its peak, Buffett was making US$40 a week from it. To this could be added US$20 a week earnings from his share of a partnership with his friend Don Danly, owning, operating and servicing pinball machines in barber
shops. He filed a tax return in respect of his earnings and refused to let his father pay the taxes.
In 1947, the seventeen-year-old Buffett went, somewhat reluctantly, to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. He didn’t feel that he was learning very much from his university studies, however, and in 1949 he returned to Omaha, after his father lost an election, and he transferred to the University of Nebraska. In Omaha, he was rushing through his studies and at the same time adding to his funds with various jobs on the side, including one where he managed 50 paper boys for the Lincoln Journal.
For all his business acumen and earning power, though, Buffett was still unsure about what to do with the money. Buffett’s stockmarket epiphany came in 1949 when he first read Benjamin Graham’s legendary book on investing, The Intelligent Investor, which had been published that year. This encouraged him to enrol at the University of Columbia to study under Graham.
What Buffett learnt from Graham laid the foundations for his investing career, by ramming home the crucial distinction between price and value. After scoring the only A+ that Graham had awarded in 22 years of teaching, Buffett had hoped to be employed by Graham’s investment firm, Graham Newman, but he was rejected because the firm only employed Jews (since they were shunned by the traditional Wall Street investment houses). Buffett even offered his services for free, for the honour of working with the Master, but his approach was rebuffed.
So Buffett returned to Omaha, where he took employment with his father’s firm of Buffett Falk. Asked whether the firm would be renamed Buffett & Son, he is said to have retorted: ‘No, Buffett & Father.’ At this time, Buffett courted Susan Thompson, whose parents were family friends, and the two were married in 1952. They raised three children, Howard, Susan and Peter.
In 1954, Ben Graham relented and Buffett completed his education by working for two years, for US$12,000 a year, at Graham’s firm in New York, until Graham retired in 1956. The firm was wound up because, as one investor said at the tim e, ‘Graham Newman can’t continue because the only guy they have to run it is this kid named Warren Buffett. And who’d want to ride with him?’
It turned out that plenty of people did want to ride with Buffett. When he returned to Omaha, his own investing partnership began with friends and
family, but several notable clients of Graham Newman were directed his way, and word of mouth spread. Soon Buffett was managing many millions of dollars. His rule was that his partners were not to know anything about how their money was invested, but they would be given a simple annual statement of returns. In addition to this, and so that he wouldn’t be at the whim of fickle investors, he would allow partners to withdraw or add money on only one day each year.
The results of the Buffett Partnership were spectacular. Over the 14 years from 1957 to 1970, he never lost money and always beat the stockmarket index, compounding his investments at an average of 28% and multiplying each original dollar 32 times (for more detail, see here). A notable investment success was American Express, whose stock price was hammered by a fraud in New Jersey but whose business franchise and intrinsic value, Buffett famously surmised by watching the tills at his favourite steakhouse, was largely undamaged.
But by the end of the sixties, the markets were flying upwards to ever greater heights and Buffett was finding it increasingly hard to find suitable investment opportunities. In the end, he decided to liquidate the partnership in 1970 and, instead, he focused his investments on a small Massachusetts textile company named Berkshire Hathaway.
Buffett had first invested in Berkshire in 1962 when its stock price was just
US$8, compared with net working capital per share of US$16.50. As further stock came on the market, he just kept buying more, and soon the Buffett Partnership was the company’s largest shareholder. Berkshire Hathaway was, however, in an absolute mess, with huge mills that cost more to maintain than they generated in cash. Buffett either needed to get out for a small profit, or he needed to engineer a change in management. In the end, he opted for the latter course and, in 1965, with the stock price at US$18, Buffett took control of the company.
Buffett’s first step was to put a new man, Ken Chace, in charge of the textile operations. He explained that he needn’t bend over backwards to chase unprofitable sales, but that he would be judged according to cash return on invested capital. Buffett was about thirty years ahead of his time in using this measure, which achieved buzzword status in the 1990s (and was consequently badly abused), but it set the scene for his long tenure at the company: the Berkshire subsidiaries should only utilize cash at attractive rates of return, otherwise Buffett himself would take it and find other opportunities.
And there were plenty of other opportunities. The Washington Post Company, Gillette and Coca-Cola are among the more famous listed companies in which Berkshire has made huge profits. But equally successful have been the company’s purchases of entire businesses, such as the Government Employees’ Insurance Company (GEICO) (a former favorite of Ben Graham’s), See’s Candies, the Buffalo News, Nebr aska Furniture Mart and Borsheim’s Jewelry. Whether purchased in full or in part, all of these businesses benefit from having a strong, defensible business franchise, enabling them to churn out increasing quantities of cash for investment in new opportunities. There is more about Buffett’s investing approach in this section, and on The Intelligent Investor website.
In April 2005, the Berkshire Hathaway share price was edging towards
US$100,000, giving an average annual return of about 26% per year since Buffett first took control. The market value of the company is now well over US$100 billion and its main challenge is finding big enough investment opportunities to make a difference to such a huge company—a fact that Buffett frequently moans about in his annual letters to shareholders. Having too much money, though, is a problem that few people get to complain about.
Warren Buffett is one of the world's richest men, with an estimated personal wealth of approximately US$40 billion. He began his journey by cobbling together a few thousand dollars during his childhood: collecting golf balls, operating a pinball-machine business (with a mechanically minded friend), running paper rounds and doing any other odd jobs that came his way.
By the time he took Ben Graham’s investing course at the University of Columbia at the age of 20, Buffett had accumulated $9,800 (see Note 1). Working with Ben Graham in New York, Buffett analysed stocks all day and he achieved the best returns of his career, compounding his money at 56% per year to reach a total of $140,000 when he returned to Omaha, Nebraska in 1956.
Buffett then placed this money into his investing partnership, with various friends, family members and acquaintances. Between 1957 and 1970, he compounded his investments at an average rate of 28% per year. However,
through this period, his own personal wealth benefited from a kicker effect thanks to performance bonuses from the partnership.
When he liquidated the Buffett Partnership in 1970, he was able to convert his share into a stake of approximately one third in Berkshire Hathaway. Since then, Berkshire Hathaway’s net assets have compounded at an average rate of 23% per year (though the intrinsic value of Berkshire Hathaway, and its shares, have compounded at a slightly higher rate).
Over the full 54 years, therefore, Buffet t’s investments have grown at an average rate of 27.6%. The graph below charts the progress of one of Buffett’s 1950 investment dollars up until 2004, compared to how one might have fared being invested in the overall US stockmarket (see Note 2).
$1 travelling with Warren Buffett compared to $1 travelling
with the US Stockmarket
You’ll see that we’ve done the chart on a logarithmic basis. It sounds a bit scary, but it’s the best way to do charts of things that compound over time, because it gives equal weight to the same proportional increases. But there’s another very good reason for doing it this way, and that is that if we didn’t, then the US stockmarket would not even register on the same chart as Buffett –quite literally, because the dollar invested with the US stockmarket dollar ends
up at just less than a thousandth as much as the dollar invested with Warren Buffett. Don’t believe us? Well here’s the normal chart then.
$1 travelling with Warren Buffett compared to $1 travelling
with the US Stockmarket
See – we told you. Anyway, going back to the logarithmic chart, there are three main points to note.
Firstly, notice how much higher up Warren Buffett’s line is. This reflect s the awesome power of compound interest – a little extra return each year (well quite a lot, in fact, in Buffett’s case) adds up to a colossal amount over the long term.
Secondly, notice how much smoother Buffett’s line is. While the US stockmarket has bo unced about over the years, Buffett’s investing approach has produced more consistent returns.
Finally, notice how Buffett’s line doesn’t go down at all. While the US stockmarket takes two steps forward and one step back, Buffett just keeps taking steps fo rward. Well, OK, that’s not entirely true. Buffett did blot his copy book, after 50 years of investing, with a loss of 6% in 2001 (compared to a loss of 12% by the S&P 500 index that year). But we figure that one small annual loss in 54 years is pretty reasonable going.
One way or another then, Buffett’s approach beats the overall stockmarket by a country mile and it does it with less risk and many fewer setbacks.
You can learn more about the approach by subscribing to The Intelligent Investor.
Note 1.Buffett’s returns: The returns for Warren Buffett are comprised of three main sections. Firstly, there are Buffett’s own personal returns between 1950 and 1956, when he turned $9,800 into $140,000 [data taken from Davis, Buffett Takes Stock via Lowenstein, Buffett – The Making of An American Capitalist]. Secondly, there are the returns of the Buffett Partnership, between 1957 and 1969. Finally, there are the returns of Berkshire Hathaway since 1970.
Note 2. US stockmarket returns: From 1965 to 2004, the returns of the US stockmarket are taken as the return of the S&P 500 Index, with dividends reinvested. From 1950 to 1964, they are taken as the return of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with 5% added each year as an approximate adjustment for dividends.。