沃伦·巴菲特《伯克希尔·哈撒韦 2020 年致股东信》· 2020 Chairman's Letter · 投资
As I’ve emphasized many times, Charlie and I view Berkshire’s holdings of marketable stocks – at yearend worth $281 billion – as a collection of businesses. We don’t control the operations of those companies, but we do share proportionately in their long-term prosperity. From an accounting standpoint, however, our portion of their earnings is not included in Berkshire’s income. Instead, only what these investees pay us in dividends is recorded on our books. Under GAAP, the huge sums that investees retain on our behalf become invisible.
Those two objectives do not necessarily go hand-in-hand as an amusing but value-destroying experience in our past illustrates. On that occasion, we had a significant investment in a bank whose management was hell-bent…
You will remember that our goal is to increase our per-share intrinsic value - for which our book value is a conservative, but useful, proxy - at a 15% annual rate. This objective, however, cannot be attained in a…
Those two objectives do not necessarily go hand-in-hand as an amusing but value-destroying experience in our past illustrates. On that occasion, we had a significant investment in a bank whose management was hell-bent…
Of all the profitable things which develop quickly under the hand, I have thought my young nurseries show the greatest yield. We keep a set of account books for each place, and I was amazed not long ago at the increase in value that a few years make in growing things, when we came to remove some young trees from Westchester County to Lakewood, New Jersey. We plant our young trees, especially evergreens, by the thousand--I think we have put in as many as ten thousand at once, and let them develop, to be used later in some of our planting schemes. If we transfer young trees from Pocantico to our home in Lakewood, we charge one place and credit the other for these trees at the market rate. We are our own best customers, and we make a small fortune out of ourselves by selling to our New Jersey place at $1.50 or $2.00 each, trees which originally cost us only five or ten cents at Pocantico.
Those two objectives do not necessarily go hand-in-hand as an amusing but value-destroying experience in our past illustrates. On that occasion, we had a significant investment in a bank whose management was hell-bent…