We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP 003 : Warren Buffett's 4 Rules to Stock Investing (Investing Podcast)

Episode Date: October 5, 2014

Have you ever wondered what rules Warren Buffett might use to analyze potential stock picks. In episode three, the Investors discuss Buffett's 4 rules to selecting a successful stock pick. You won't w...ant to miss this important discussion! BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Check out our Favorite Apps and Services. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock AnchorWatch Cape Intuit Shopify Vanta reMarkable Abundant Mines HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is episode three of The Investors Podcast. Broadcasting from Bel Air Maryland. This is the Investors Podcast. They'll teach you the basics so you can lay your businesses foundation. They'll teach you in steps so you'll never get lost. They'll give you actionable investing strategies. Your host, Preston Pish and Stig Broderson. Hey, hey, hey, how's everybody doing today?
Starting point is 00:00:29 This is Preston Pish, and I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broder. and today we've got a very special topic for you, an interesting one for you. And this one revolves around the idea of Warren Buffett's principles and his rules that he uses for investing in stocks and bonds. So he has four rules, and we're going to discuss each of those four rules through today's episode. So without further ado, let's just go and jump into the first rule and get this thing started. So the very first rule that Warren Buffett has, and something else I want to highlight is
Starting point is 00:01:01 Buffett makes sure that each of these four rules are met before he makes a selection of a stock pick. So just make sure as we're going through this, you can't pick and choose that you like the first two and you're just going to disregard the last two. You have to make sure that all four rules are met. So the very first rule that he has regards to vigilant leadership. So what Buffett's doing here is he's first taking a look at the leadership of the company. Who's in charge? Who's the CEO of the company? Also something that he's looking at is who's the chairman of the board of directors that's representing the shareholders.
Starting point is 00:01:34 So he's looking at that leadership role and how that basically, that's the starting point and everything within the company kind of falls out and trickles down to the lowest level employee from that leader. So that's why finding the right leader of a company in an organization is vitally important to Buffett. And that's really kind of his starting point as he's looking at that leadership role. And just so you guys know, the fourth rule, which we're going to get to later, is the value rule, which we were discussing in the two previous episodes. And I highly recommend that you listen to those episodes before this one. And that's really kind of where Buffett starts. He kind of looks at the value of it. And then he goes and he looks at some of these other rules.
Starting point is 00:02:14 Because like this rule here, the very first one, the vigilant leadership, this is a very qualitative rule. So he's not going to really start in something that involves a lot of research when he can quickly look at the numbers and say, oh, I'm not even interested. that. Okay. So just kind of remember that as we go through each of the four rules. But so back to the first one, this vigilant leader rule. So Buffett's trying to find that great leader within the organization. So there's a couple different ways that you could find or research this leader. A lot of them are very qualitative at first. So when you're looking at a business, you might want to look at how much does this CEO make? What's his annual salary? Do you like their decision making or have they made good decisions in the past. And that's kind of maybe a starting point for finding a vigilant leader.
Starting point is 00:03:00 Now, as you get more involved and you conduct more research for this particular rule, you're going to want to probably look at things in a lot more detail. So what Stig's going to do is Sticks are going to kind of go through this level of detail of other aspects that you would want to look at within the company to identify a leader that's running the organization that has vigilant leadership. Yeah, so definitely agree with that Preston that it's really, really hard to to quantify something that is so qualitative. I guess it's like comparing to how to pick a spouse. Like you want to have a spouse that is intelligent who has a humor,
Starting point is 00:03:36 who's good looking perhaps, but how do you quantify that? And I think that we have the same problem here. A few things that we can quantify, though, is the debt level. A vigilant leader is definitely not going to allow a company to have a lot of debt. Yeah, and Stig, so I agree. So if you're fine in a business and it has, a very high debt to equity ratio, and that's what Stig's referring to here, if it has that real leveraged business, you can generally assume, hey, this is a leader who's either trying
Starting point is 00:04:07 to make the business survive because it's getting ready to die, or this person just makes very risky decisions. And so, you know, I mean, look at an individual person. If they're in debt up to their eyeballs, that's not necessarily somebody you would want to invest in if they said that they had some type of company that, you know, you wanted to invest in them. So use the exact same principle whenever you were applying this first rule that Buffett has is look at how the company is managed. Is the company having stable and predictable results? Is the company have low debt levels? And all those are kind of signs of a key leader,
Starting point is 00:04:42 a decision maker within that organization that is making wise and consistent decisions to not jeopardize the future of the business. And that's really where Buffett's concern is, is he doesn't want to invest in a company that has a leader that is prone to a lot of risks in his decisions because that jeopardizes future results. Yeah, I definitely agree with you, Preston, because the inverse of risk, that would be flexibility. If you have a company that has very low debt, you also have a leader that has a lot of flexibility. So if he finds a project that is really good or if he decides to buy another company, well, because he doesn't have debt, he has a lot of flexibility to take the the right decisions. So Stig has a great point here. When a company does not have a lot of debt,
Starting point is 00:05:26 that company has the ability to go left and right a whole lot easier. So the analogy that Stig and I like to use is think of a speedboat. That speedboat is representative of a company that doesn't have a lot of debt at all. Then think of like a cruise liner and that would be a company that would have a lot of debt. If that business has a competitor that comes into the water and is very difficult for them to, you know, beat or they need to kind of maybe take a different direction with their product or their service, that speedboat can kind of turn on a dime and go in that direction because they're not highly leveraged and not reliant on all these dollars that they borrowed that they've got to pay back in the future. And so think of that boats. Think of that
Starting point is 00:06:07 cruise liner. Now, it might be going, you know, steady and straight, but if they have to change course for whatever reason, it's going to be a major muscle movement and something that takes a lot of time. So that's kind of how we want you to picture that debt piece of this. And it all kind of wraps into this larger rule of having a vigilant leader that would not put the company in that position. So let's go ahead and jump to the second rule so that we can continue this discussions. And if there's anything that was covered in that first rule, like the debt to equity ratio, that was a little bit difficult for you to maybe conceptualize or understand, like I said in previous episodes, I highly recommend that you go to our website Buffett'sbooks.com. And
Starting point is 00:06:46 It has many of hours of information and lessons that would cover that and could show you graphically on your screen. And it would also show you how to look up some of that stuff on the internet so that you can find out what the debt levels of a company are. So let's go ahead and move into the second rule. And Stig, go ahead and introduce the second rule here. Thanks, Preston. So Bar-Buffet's second rule, that is the company must have long-term prospects. And if you think about it, it's actually very simple why. you want a company that can deliver you a nice return year after year.
Starting point is 00:07:19 So if a company has long-term prospect is selling product that you can expect them to be selling in like 30 years from now. And you might think, well, I don't know what will be selling 30 years from now. But instead, I would like to say, please disregard products that you are not certain of 30 years from now. So let me give you an example, starting with a Rambuffet quote. will the internet change the way that we use the product? And the example that Warren Buffett is using is actually Wrigley's gum. He's saying the internet will not change the way we chew gum. So as you guys know, he owns a major stake in Wrigley's,
Starting point is 00:07:58 and he's really fun on that because he knows that this is a persistent product. He knows that this company will make money 30 years from now. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three, days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists,
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Starting point is 00:12:32 And a lot of people are trying to find the next Microsoft. They're trying to find that company that is emerging, that has a lot of growth. And Buffett kind of takes a different approach. And I thought about something that I had read in an Alice Schroeder book, which was biography of Warren Buffett. And in that, she kind of talks about this speech that Buffett gave at a big, convention at Sun Valley. And for anyone who doesn't know what Sun Valley is, it's this really big convention where a bunch of multimillionaires and billionaires kind of show up, and it's kind of like
Starting point is 00:13:03 a weekend event. And so Buffett gave this speech at Sun Valley to all these investors back in the early 2000s. And during the speech, he was basically telling everyone, and this is the height of the internet bubble, and Buffett knew that the market was way overvalued. And Buffett told all the people there that investing in new technology was often counterproductive to the investor because in the end, there's only going to be one or two that basically survive this competitive nature. And so Buffett used an example of a car company back in the early 1900s, and he said there's something like 2,000 car companies back in the early 1900s, and now how many exist? And he said, you know, you just have the major three in the U.S. And so the whole point of me saying this story,
Starting point is 00:13:50 is Buffett was trying to find the company that had long-term prospects. He didn't want to invest in the company that was going to be the flash in the pan that only lasted for a couple years. And so when Stig is talking about the Internet and things like that, like chewing gum, that's something that's going to be around for a long time. And that's something that's going to produce consistent profits year after year after year. And it's just kind of an interesting way to look at things and how he took something that the common person looks at is, I've got to find the next Microsoft or I've got to find the next Apple and kind of flips that on its head and says, actually, you need to find something that's going to be around in 30 years from now or 40 years that you can really rely on. And I definitely agree with your president because it really doesn't take an expert.
Starting point is 00:14:37 You don't need to be an expert to realize what people would use in 30 years because you're probably using this product every day. So you can just look around in your living room and look around in your kitchen and see which products you expect. to use the next 30 years. Okay, so why does Buffett have this rule? Why does he have this long-term prospects rule? And it really comes down to one thing. He wants to avoid the friction of tax. Okay?
Starting point is 00:15:04 And this is very important to understand. So whenever you buy something and then you sell it one year later, you're tax at a very high rate within one-year time frame. So like these day traders, they pay extremely high tax on the gains, if they even make gains for owning that stock. But if you continue to own something, let's say, for 30 years and those profits continue to mature and continue to grow within the company, he's not taxed at all on that growth until he would eventually sell the stock.
Starting point is 00:15:35 You know, one of the things that Buffett is quoted for saying is that his term for ownership is forever. He plans on owning his picks forever. He doesn't plan on ever selling them. And so if he continues to hold for 30, 40, 50 years, He never pays the effect of tax on that growth from his initial purchase price. So there's some statistics out there that show that if a person would sell their stock every single year and pay that high tax and a person who would just buy one time and let the pick grow and never sell it until maybe like 30 years later, if you compared those 30-year analysis of each pick and both picks were growing at 10% annually, the difference at the end is enormous. That you might have one person make $150,000 where the other person makes almost double that because they were able to hold that pick and not have to pay the taxes every year.
Starting point is 00:16:28 So, guys, basically, Preston is saying two different things here. He's saying that if you sell your stocks really fast, you're on another tax bracket. But what you guys need to understand is that even if the tax bracket was the same, no matter if you held the stock for one year or for five years, it's not the same. It might sound like the same, but I'm really going to stress it is not the same. So I think that pretty much rounded up the second rule that Warren Buffett uses for his stock investing. The third rule, that is that the stock is stable and understandable. So Preston, why don't you introduce that rule? So Stig, this one's a very important one.
Starting point is 00:17:06 When you go through Benjamin Graham's books, The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, one common theme that you're really going to see that throughout both of those books is that stability is one of the most important things that you can find in a stock pick. Because without stability, you can't determine what the trend line is. You can't determine what you think the future cash flows of the business are. And this rule really kind of ties to the fourth one, which is the intrinsic value calculation and finding something that's undervalued. And without finding a business that has stable results, stable earnings, stable levels of debt,
Starting point is 00:17:41 all those factors that are very crucial to properly defining and properly determining what a company is worth, you're not going to be able to figure out and come up with a high level of confidence that your projections for the future are attainable or probable. So when you're looking through some of the key factors that you want to use in order to find a stable business, you're obviously going to start with some of the stuff that we talked about in the two previous episodes. So earnings or the profit is extremely important. You don't want to find a company that has earnings that are really high in one year, really low in the following year. You want to find that company that can produce stable and consistent earnings and growing earnings over time. So it should look like a really nice, clean chart.
Starting point is 00:18:29 If you were going to graph it, it should look nice and clean. The other thing that you might want to look at so that it stays nice and stable is the dividend. So you're receiving those dividend payments. whenever you would plot that on a graph for the past 10 years. And you want to look at that. And that's typically what Stig and I would look at would be the previous 10 years. You want to see something that's consistent, something that's trending in the right direction. You don't want it trending down.
Starting point is 00:18:52 And then one final thing that you would maybe want to look at would be maybe the book value or the return on equity of the business. Both two terms that we really haven't previously discussed, but something that you can do a little research on your own. And again, go back to the Buffett's Books website if you want to watch like video. and graphics that kind of describe how this stuff works. But you're trying to look at different metrics, and I just name some of the big metrics that you want to refer to. And you want to see those plotted and you want to see that those are trending in the right direction and that they are consistent and stable so that you can use that as predictive analysis of what's going to happen into the future. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your
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Starting point is 00:23:06 last two years or the last three years, well, you might see that product X is making a lot of money. But Warren Buffett does not like to invest in companies if it hasn't given good returns for 10, 15, 20 or even 30 years in a row. Okay, so that kind of, we're just going to leave the discussion there pretty general. But in, In short, without that stability factor, you can't move into this last rule, the fourth rule, which is calculating the value of the business, because you're just not going to have really anything to base it on. You're not going to have a baseline analysis in order to project.
Starting point is 00:23:38 Okay. So let's go ahead and talk about the fourth rule, and this is the big one. This is the one that he really truly starts with because he's able to quickly filter out companies that he doesn't think are going to be, you know, worthy of his purchase. So, and this is buy a business at a very attractive price. And I read somewhere that the only tweak or the only change that Buffett and Charlie Munger had to these four rules was in this last one. And they originally when they wrote this rule, it was buy the business at an attractive price. And the thing that they did is they changed it to, they need to buy a business at a very attractive price.
Starting point is 00:24:16 So they haven't adjusted these rules for, you know, decades. they've been investing off of these rules. So this one here's kind of a trickier rule to do because what you're doing is you're actually calculating or you're using a discount cash flow calculation in order to determine the value of something today. And what I think a lot of people don't understand is that a dollar tomorrow is not the same as a dollar today. And that's where you need to start when you're trying to understand how do I calculate
Starting point is 00:24:47 the intrinsic value of a business. And so in very short terms, and I'm just going to say this as briefly as I can, what Buffett is doing is he's trying to calculate all the future cash flows of the business. So he thinks this year the company might earn $10 a share. Next year, he might think it earns $11 a share. The year after that, 12, 13, so clear out into infinity. And so he has a calculation and a formula. We have that on Buffett's books. If you go to the website, you can use the calculator.
Starting point is 00:25:18 It's 100% free, so you don't have to worry about giving us your email or anything like that. You just go there, it's completely free. And what you're going to do is you're going to assess and you're going to use a trend line in trying to figure out what are these future cash flows of the business. Once you figure out what all those future cash flows are, what he then does is he discounts those future cash flows, those dollars that are not the same value as today dollars. He's going to discount those cash flows back to today so he knows what the value of all those future dollars are today.
Starting point is 00:25:51 Okay. And that's what's really important is what's the value of that future cash today. And when you know that and you figure that out, then you can put the price on the company and you might be able to say, hey, this company's worth $100 a share. Okay. And just using that simple discount cash flow calculator. And it's very simple to use. If you check it out, you'll see it's not all that difficult.
Starting point is 00:26:14 It might sound difficult in concept because maybe you've never done something like that before. But after you get a little bit of practice, it's going to make a lot more sense and it's going to be pretty easy to do. Yeah. So guys, I just want to add a word of caution here. I think that the president, I think we need to introduce the margin of safety concept here. And the way that Warren Buffett likes to introduce the concept of margin of safety is by saying if you would build a bridge and you knew that 10,000 pounds trucks would drive over that bridge every day, how strong would you make that bridge? What would you say, Preston? I'd say it needs to support a 20,000 pound vehicle. So some people might think, okay, let's just make the bridge strong enough to what, 10,000
Starting point is 00:27:02 pound, because that should be sufficient in ways there will only be trucks driving over the brits of 10,000 pounds. But the thing is, when we talk about intrinsic value, it's really really, really hard to have an exact value of that stock. Every time I hear people say, well, the value of this stock is $120.52.52. Then I probably stop listening to what they're saying because it's completely impossible to make an exact measure of the intrinsic value of a stock with two decimals. Wouldn't you agree with that, Preston? Yeah, I talk about it in more general terms. Like, I think that company is worth about 100. if it's discounted at 10%. So Stig brought up a great point about this margin of safety, and that's really kind of the two points that we want to highlight here in this final fourth
Starting point is 00:27:52 rule is that you've got an intrinsic value that you've got to determine what you think the company is worth, and then you also have to make sure that that value that you come up with has enough variance from what it's actually trading for on the stock market. So the margin of safety is what gives you that. So let's say that you determine that you think that a company is worth $100, at a 10% discount rate. So you're going to get a 10% return if you can buy it for $100. Okay.
Starting point is 00:28:18 And let's say that the company is trading on the stock market for $50. Okay? That's a very large difference between what you think it's worth and what the market's currently trading it for. And when you have that large difference, that's a golden opportunity for you as an investor to purchase that stock. Now, let's say that the, let's say that you, determine an intrinsic value of $100 at, say, a 3% discount rate. And the discount rate might not
Starting point is 00:28:47 make a lot of sense to you right now, but if you play around with the calculator and you maybe study this topic a little bit more, it'll make perfect sense. But the discount rate is telling you what percent yield you think you'll get annually by owning that particular stock at that price. So if I say the stock is worth $100 at a $3% discount rate, I buy it $100, I'll get 3% annually for owning it. Okay. So, the let's say that that's what we're working with right now. And let's go back to this margin of safety idea. So if the stock is trading on the stock market for $90, okay, and you think it's worth a hundred at a 3% discount rate, you're going to have a much harder time getting a margin
Starting point is 00:29:28 of safety there. You're pretty much going to get maybe a 3% rate because it's so close and that's what Stig's referring to as you can't go down to the decimal. It's kind of more in general terms of what you think that the company is worth. So if you're comfortable getting a 3% return, I wouldn't be for a for a common stock. That's something that you have to make the decision of whether you're willing to assume that risk or if you think that you have enough margin of safety on the pick. So two very important concepts that you've absolutely got to understand to cover it in the podcast, you know, to get into the depth of how the calculations done and all that. That's something that I don't think we can do through an audio medium. So I would definitely recommend that you go to the Buffett's Books website, watch the free videos there, use the free calculator, and see how it kind of works and try to understand it more so that you can start applying it.
Starting point is 00:30:22 Yeah, and what's really interesting here is that the intrinsic value I would come up with, for instance, for Coca-Cola, it's probably not the same value as Preston has come up with. And I think that might be something that would confuse you in the beginning. you might think that if I use this calculator or no matter which form I would use, I must come up with some kind of finite value for, say, Coca-Cola stock. So even though Stig and I would come up with different values, our values aren't going to be at a difference of, you know, a couple percent. So let's say I think that I'm going to get a 10% return at the current market price. Stig isn't going to come back and say he thinks he's going to get a 5% return.
Starting point is 00:31:03 He might say, oh, yeah, I think I'd get a 9 or like an 11. It's going to be pretty close, but it's not going to be the same. And I really want to encourage you guys when you have made your first calculations to ask the other users in the forum. Because I think it's really interesting when I have made an analysis of a stock and see what kind of intrinsic value that the other users have found. Okay, so this kind of concludes our introduction and our basic lessons on Warren Buffett. For next week's show, we have a very special guest. His name is Hari Ramachandra. and what he's going to be doing is he's going to be talking about a billionaire investor who has adopted very similar methods as Warren Buffett.
Starting point is 00:31:43 And this gentleman's name is Monish Pabri, and he has an equity fund that has returned a cumulative of 517% to his investors whenever the S&P 500 only did 43% since his fund was incepted back in 2000. So that's going to be a very interesting exchange. Hari recently went to his shareholders meeting just about a month ago, and so he's going to be on the show, and he's going to be talking about this great investor and some of the things that he's doing. So we can't thank you enough for listening today. If you have an opportunity to leave us a review on iTunes, we would greatly appreciate your feedback. Also, if you would like to ask any questions on our show, go to AsktheInvesters.com and record your question there. If your question gets on the air, we'll send you a free signed copy of the Warren Buffett Accounting Book. and we really look forward to working with you in future episodes and tuning in.
Starting point is 00:32:34 So thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to The Investors Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www.com. Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to The Investors Podcast by going to www.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of the Warren Buffett Accounting Book.
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