Notes – Nintendo Back In The Saddle? ($NTDOY, @ActiveInvesting, @NintendoAmerica)

On January 23rd, 2013, Nintendo pushed out another “Nintendo Direct” communication from the company to the gaming public, discussing their upcoming plans and vision for the newly released Wii U home console. The reaction of one major gaming media outfit, IGN, was telling:

Finally.

That’s really the only word that comes to mind after watching Nintendo’s new ‘Direct’ broadcast. In just over 30 minutes, the game publishing giant not only made a better case for the future of Wii U than in the previous 12 months, it managed to surpass the hype it generated at its past two E3 outings - combined.

[...]

Today Nintendo did something remarkable, in a way that puts most other developers and publishers to shame. Though the Big N is often quiet and secretive, it has managed to find a modern, progressive format to deliver its news directly to its fans, while retaining its trademark sense of humility. In 30 minutes, over a dozen games were showcased, some coming in mere months, others perhaps years away. Regardless, the message was clear – Wii U is not only home to innovative new play styles for families, but epic, core experiences that rival the grandest, most ambitious endeavors available elsewhere.

And these games are entirely, completely exclusive, all tied to Nintendo directly as a software publisher, not as a licensor. The sheer glee of Wonderful 101 won’t be coming to Xbox 360. The visual brilliance of Yoshi’s Island won’t be appearing on a phone with loads of in-app purchases. PlayStation 3 will never get a HD remake of the timeless, gorgeous Wind Waker.

That’s what made today so remarkably potent – for any gamer who actually cares about games instead of arbitrary, meaningless console supremacy. Nintendo has started to provide a real sense of strategy for Wii U. The GamePad’s much-hyped innovation doesn’t matter without games. Neither does Miiverse’s social connectivity. Nor the fact that all those Wii remotes and games will still work. None of that matters without compelling games. But those features and ideas, once combined with software we can’t get anywhere else, collectively start to say something powerful. Something special. At the end of the day, gamers care about games. That’s what they want, and nothing else matters. [emphasis added]

What’s worth noting here is that the editors at IGN seem to have gotten a clear sense of Nintendo’s overarching strategy in this latest “Nintendo Direct”, a strategy which was laid bare in the book on the company I reviewed late last year called Nintendo Magic:

For some reason, Nintendo observers and critics don’t get this– why isn’t the company doing what everyone else is doing? Why are they making a console with a TV remote instead of HD graphics (the Wii)?

To Nintendo, the risk is in not trying these things and trying to do what everyone else does.

The guys at the top of the company and most responsible for its current development (Iwata and Miyamoto) are software guys at the end of the day, and the hardware innovations in the Wii U and predecessor systems were all about driving unique software experiences. Those software experiences are now being divulged en masse, to early critical acclaim.

There’s more in the original IGN.com article worth reading for the curious. And if you missed the review of Nintendo Magic, this is a good opportunity to go back and check it out, then compare those notes with how Nintendo has handled the Wii U rollout and how it comported itself in this latest “Nintendo Direct.”

Perhaps one might not agree with their direction and strategy, but at this point I think it’s hard to argue there is no consistency. And to a long-term investor who understands the strengths and success of this strategy in the past, I find that comforting.

(Click here for all coverage of $NTDOY on valueprax.)

Review – Nintendo Magic ($NTDOY, #videogames, #business)

Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars (buy on Amazon.com)

by Osamu Inoue, published 2009, 2010 (translated from Japanese)

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer.

Two Nintendo legends no one seems to know about

The original Nintendo started out as a manufacturer of playing cards and other toys, games and trinkets near the end of the Shogunate era in Japan, but the modern company we know today which gave the world the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy, the Wii and characters like Mario & Luigi and Pokemon, was primarily shaped by four men: former president Hiroshi Yamauchi, lead designer Gunpei Yokoi, the firm’s first software designer Shigeru Miyamoto and the first “outside hire” executive and former software developer, Satoru Iwata.

A family member of the then privately-held Nintendo, Yamauchi took the presidency in 1949 when his grandfather passed away. He tried adding a number of different businesses (taxis, foodstuffs, copiers) to Nintendo in true conglomerate fashion, managing in one 12 year period to grow sales by a factor of 27 and operating profits by a factor of 37.

But his most influential mark on Nintendo’s business came with his fortuitous hiring of Gunpei Yokoi, an engineer, who would head up hardware development for Nintendo’s game division. It was this strategic decision to concentrate Nintendo’s efforts on game development that would lead to the modern purveyor of hardware and software known around the world today.

Hardware engineer Gunpei Yokoi is not a well-known name outside the world of hardcore Nintendo fandom, which is not altogether surprising because most Nintendo fans alive today were not users of some of his first toy gadgets such as the “Love Detector” and the “Game & Watch” handheld mini-game consoles. On the other hand, it’s a shock that the man’s reputation is not larger than it is because he essentially single-handedly created the company’s hardware development philosophy in the 1960s which has remained with it today and continues to influence Nintendo’s strategic vision within the video game industry.

That hardware philosophy was summed up by Nintendo’s first head of its hardware development section as “Lateral thinking with seasoned technology”. In concrete terms, it is the idea of using widely available, off-the-shelf technology that is unrelated to gaming in new and exciting ways of play, for example:

• Yokoi’s “Love Detector” game, which used simple circuitry and electrical sensors to create an instrument that could supposedly detect romantic chemistry between two users when they held hands and held the machine
• A blaster rifle toy that used common light-sensing equipment to deliver accuracy readings of the users target shots to the rifle, registering hits and points
• More recently, the Nintendo “Wiimote” concept, which was simply the idea of repurposing the common household TV remote into a tool for play

Yokoi’s lasting impact on the hardware (and software) philosophy at Nintendo is best captured by current president Satoru Iwata who once said,

It’s not a matter of whether or not the tech is cutting egde, but whether or not people think it’s fun

Similarly, this focus on repurposing existing technology for fun rather than investing in brand new technology helps to explain why many of Nintendo’s systems have been knocked for their not-so-hardcore hardware (think non-HD Wii vs. HD-enabled Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360) but nonetheless became massive consumer hits– the focus was on fun, not flash.

The Wii particularly was the response to the failure of two systems which preceded it (Gamecube and N64), which were extremely technologically advanced for their era and which departed as swiftly from Yokoi’s philosophy as they posed monumental development challenges for software developers due to their complex, proprietary nature. Instead of creating yet another whizbang console, Nintendo decided that if Wii’s costs were kept down and developers were free to focus on things like a new, intuitive controller and built-in connectivity functions, fun and market success would follow.

Essentially, the game hardware is a commodity with zero barriers to entry. Anyone can have the latest, greatest technology if they’re willing to pay for it. There is no way to establish a competitive advantage on the basis for hardware sophistication alone. It must come from design, or, as Yokoi put it,

In videogames, these is always an easy way out if you don’t have any good ideas. That’s what the CPU competition and color competition are about

Nintendo’s two leading lights: Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto

Rounding out the Fantastic Four are Satoru Iwata, the company’s current president, and Shigeru Miyamoto, the star software developer.

Iwata came from relative privilege and studied computer programming in school. He had a passion for making and playing games from an early age. He joined a software developer, HAL Laboratory, early on. He successfully turned around the flagging HAL Lab before it was acquired by Nintendo.

Meanwhile, Miyamoto first came to fame through development of his Donkey Kong arcade game, which introduced the characters Donkey Kong and Mario and which was originally based off of Popeye until the IP could not be acquired for licensing. As a small boy he spent hours running around the hills, forests and mountains outside his home, which inspired many of his later game creations such as Pikmin, Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, etc. He was the first designer Nintendo had ever hired. Miyamoto often utilizes his “Wife-o-meter” to help him understand how to make games that are more broadly appealing.

Miyamoto’s design ethic is best synthesized as populist-perfectionist:

When creating a game, Miyamoto will occasionally find employees from, say, general affairs who aren’t gamers and put a controller in their hands, looking over their shoulder and watching them play without saying anything

He creates game characters, game designs and immersive environments that appeal to everyone, not just the archetypical “hardcore gamer.” But this desire to serve a mass, unsophisticated audience does not mean that Miyamoto considers quality as an afterthought. Miyamoto will “polish [an idea] for years, if he has to, until it satisfies him” and “shelving an idea does not mean throwing it away. Those huge storehouses are full of precious treasure that will someday see the light of day.”

This is part of the value of Nintendo– they have many unrealized ideas waiting to be turned into hardware and games and the only thing preventing them from seeing the light of day is someone like Miyamoto who wants to make sure that when they eventually emerge into the light, they don’t just shine but sparkle.

And this thinking carries over to the company’s hardware efforts, as well. According to a lead engineer, the DS

had to work consistently after being dropped ten times from a height of 1.5 meters, higher than an adult’s breast pocket

Nintendo is “obsessed about the durability of their systems due to an overriding fear that a customer who gets upset over a broken system might never give them another chance.”

“Nintendo-ness”: how Nintendo competes by not competing

In 1999, then-president Yamauchi saw a crisis brewing for video game developers:

If we continue to pursue this kind of large-scale software development, costs will pile up and it will no longer be a viable business. The true nature of the videogame business is developing new kinds of fun and constantly working to achieve perfection

The solution was to adhere ever more closely to “Nintendo-ness”. Nintendo picks people with a “software orientation.”

“Nintendo-ness” is the company’s DNA, once someone has grasped Nintendo-ness, it is rare for them to leave the company. That tendency protects and strengthens the company’s lineage and makes employees feel at home

Manufacturing companies create hardware which are daily necessities, which compete based on being better, cheaper products. Nintendo is in an industry of fun and games, software, where polished content is the goal. Compare this to rival Sony, where hardware specs are key and the software is to follow.

According to Iwata,

Do something different from the other guy is deeply engrained in our DNA

Similarly, Nintendo-ness means delighting customers through creation of new experiences because

if you’re always following a mission statement, your customers are going to get bored with you

This way of thinking goes back to Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo for 50 years, according to Iwata:

He couldn’t stand making the same kind of toy the other guy was making, so whatever you showed him, you knew he was going to ask, ‘How is this different from what everybody else is doing?’

For some reason, Nintendo observers and critics don’t get this– why isn’t the company doing what everyone else is doing? Why are they making a console with a TV remote instead of HD graphics (the Wii)?

To Nintendo, the risk is in not trying these things and trying to do what everyone else does. Iwata sums it up nicely:

Creators only improve themselves by taking risks

Of course, not all risks are worth taking. Iwata as a representative of Nintendo’s strategic mind makes it clear that the company is keenly aware of its strategic and financial risks:

The things Nintendo does should be limited to the areas where we can display our greatest strengths. It’s because we’re good at throwing things away that we can fight these large battles using so few people. We can’t afford to diversify. We have overwhelmingly more ideas than we have people to implement them

For example, Nintendo considers the manufacturing of game consoles to be outside its purview, a “fabless” company.

Then there’s the reason for the huge amount of cash on the balance sheet:

The game platform business runs on momentum. When you fail, you can take serious damage. The risks are very high. And in that domain, Nintendo is making products that are totally unprecedented. Nobody can guarantee they won’t fail. One big failure and boom– you’re out two hundred, three hundred billion yen. In a business where a single flop can bankrupt you, you don’t want to be set up like that… To be completely honest, I don’t think that even now we have enough [savings]… That’s why IBM, or NEC, or any number of other companies are willing to go along with us. We’d never be able to do what we do without being cash-rich

That being said, Iwata has not been shy about his policy toward dividends and acquisitions. He has stated that assuming Nintendo’s savings continue to accumulate, passing 1.5T or 2T yen, a large merger or acquisition may become a possibility. Otherwise, excess capital will be distributed as dividends.

The next level

Nintendo’s philosophy is to avoid competition. It sees the hardware arms race as an irrelevant dead-end. The key is to create new ways to interact with game consoles and software that keeps game players on their toes and brings smiles to their faces. According to Iwata,

We’d like to avoid having players think they’ve gotten a game completely figured out

Thus, for Nintendo the next level logically is integration of  User-Generated Content into their software environments, which would have inexhaustible longevity. First they sought to increase the gaming population, now they’re looking at how to increase the game-creating population.

The company’s true enemy is boredom. Whatever surprise you create today becomes your enemy tomorrow.

In the end, Iwata says,

Our goal is always to make our customers glad. We’re a manufacturer of smiles

This is what the company calls “amusement fundamentalism” and it’s what sets them apart from their perceived competition, especially comparisons or criticisms aimed at the company in terms of how it stacks up against a company like Apple. To Iwata, this just doesn’t make sense:

We’re an amusement company and Apple’s a tech company

Notes – The Snowball, By Alice Schroeder: Part IV, Chap. 34-42

The following are reading notes for The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder (buy on Amazon.com). This post covers Part IV: Susie Sings, Chap. 34-42

Buffett unwinds, but does not relax

In 1970, Buffett decided to unwind his partnerships, partly because he seemed to have plenty of his own capital to manage at this point and no longer needed the headaches that came with fiduciary leverage, partly because the labyrinthine holdings of the partnership were becoming a regulatory compliance headache and partly, no doubt, because of Buffett’s ill mood toward future return potential offered by the market at that point in time.

In his 1969 letter Buffett made another of his unusual market forecasts which, as infrequently as they’ve appeared over the course of his career, nonetheless seem to mark intermediate tops and frothy market conditions. In it, Buffett said,

I now believe there is little choice for the average investor between professionally managed money in stocks and passive investment in bonds

As his partners were left with the choice of holding onto their stock or selling, Buffett, the most sophisticated of the partners, left them with one clue as to what he recommended, announcing that he intended to continue buying the stock of Berkshire Hathaway and others which had become his investment holding vehicles.

The “implacable acquirer”

Buffett’s four main holdings at this time were Berkshire Hathaway, Blue Chip Stamps, National Indemnity (an insurance company) and Diversified Retail Holdings. But it was through these companies that Buffett would eventually come to own and control many others, using the earnings of each to buy even more of the next. The key in each situation was that the holdings were either capable of generating investable float, or else they were generating excellent free cash flows that could be redirected away from the core business into ownership of others.

Buffett learned this “Russian doll” strategy in part from a little-known investor named Gurdon W. Wattles, whose control company, American Manufacturing, was used to take controlling stakes in numerous other companies such as Mergenthaler Linotype, Crane Co., and Electric Auto-Lite, many of which Buffett gladly road the coattails on. Buffett claimed he followed the man for ten or fifteen years and that he saw himself as simply standing on the shoulders of a giant in emulating his acquisition approach.

The beauty of this investment technique is that the cash flows are largely market-agnostic– aside from the impact of a general business recession, they would keep generating new cash to be invested to matter what the larger market was doing, which was excellent because when the market was swooning under the weight of panicky investors, Buffett had ample resources to take deep dives on any number of absurdly cheap, high quality companies he might want.

Combined with the power of compounding, his reinvestable cash flows and float would continually increase over time.

Buffett and Mungers’ sweet teeth

One of Buffett and Mungers’ most famous coups of this era was their purchase of See’s Candies. Demanding $30M for assets worth $5M, the true value of See’s was captured in its goodwill with customers, built on its uncompromising quality standards. Buffett believed this goodwill meant the company had “uncapped pricing power”– with current earnings to acquisition price generating a 9% “yield” on investment, the deal was good, but on top of that earnings were growing 12% per year organically and Buffett was convinced that prices could be steadily raised each year to increase the rate of earnings growth beyond the rate of growth in unit volumes.

If the price increases could be met and earnings growth would continue, Buffett and Munger were looking at something that would earn not $4M on a $25M acquisition price, but $6-7M plus additional growth over time. Because the business required very little ongoing maintenance or growth capex, almost all of the earnings were investable free cash flow that Buffett and Munger could use to make additional investments and acquisitions.

Extra! Extra! Buffett buys the Washington Post and becomes board member for Kay Graham

Whether it was because of his early childhood experiences as a newspaper delivery boy or because of his belief in the pseudo-monopolistic economics of newspapers, Buffett found himself drawn to the Washington Post and other media enterprises as an investment. According to the author, newspapers were the perfect investment for Buffett because they allowed him to play all the roles he so enjoyed at once: relentless collector, preacher and cop.

Prior to his engagement, the WaPo was earning $4M per year on $85M in revenues. Run by a talented but psychologically troubled Kay Graham, Buffett was the beneficiary of temporary troubles at the paper which pushed its stock price from a high of $38/share to a low of $16. Buffett bought in big blocks whenever they were available and aimed all along at taking a seat on the board.

In the meantime, he was investing in other newspaper and media companies, breaking his no-IPO rule and buying stock in Affiliated Publications (publisher of the Boston Globe) at a negotiated discount, as well as Booth Newspapers, Scripps Howard and Harte-Hanks Communications.

By 1973 he had accumulated 5% of the shares of WaPo and he wrote a letter to Kay Graham announcing his ownership and advising her that he planned to increase it substantially, telling her that

Writing a check separates conviction from conversation

But Buffett faced challenges from other board members who were protective of Graham, untrustworthy of Buffett and bent on protecting their own turf, such as the great Lazard banker Andre Meyer. Despite controlling the voting stock A shares, even Graham herself became paranoid and defensive at one point and Buffett, to calm her nerves, agreed not to purchase anymore stock without her permission even though he’d already spent almost $10.7M to acquire 12% of the company.

He also made a play for the Buffalo Evening News, one of two newspapers in the Buffalo market. But this investment quickly became complicated as the BEN suffered not only numerous anti-competitive lawsuits from the other local paper, but massive labor disruptions as well. Buffett’s investment quickly turned into a loser whose cash-consumption multiplied rapidly with each passing year, creating a real moment of truth for Buffett and Munger who had, until this time, constructed a nearly flawless investment record.

In Buffett’s mind, the critical element in the equation was customer habit,

You’re gauging the likelihood of people changing their habits… the question is, at what point does it become more of a habit for them to buy the other paper?

Ultimately, their insight on customer habit was correct and their saving grace. Despite losing tens of millions initially on their investment of $35.5M, after surviving the labor disputes and the eventual bankruptcy of the local rival, Buffett’s Buffalo Evening News earned $19M pretax in 1983, more than all the previous losses combined.

Things get sticky with the SEC

In the mid-1970s, Buffett and Munger found themselves in a compromising position with the SEC. Supposedly tipped off by angry competitors and customers of Blue Chip Stamps, the SEC began a cursory investigation of claims about insider dealings between Buffett, Munger and Wesco Financial which eventually turned into a full-blown investigation of every single part of their combined business operations.

The details are complicated and irrelevant at this point, but at the time it was Buffett and Munger’s first real hair-raising legal experience and despite their good intentions and attempts at sweet-talking and playing innocent, they found the SEC investigators to be fairly ruthless in their inquiries and accusations.

The net result was Buffett and Munger’s decision to clean up their ownership structure and simplify it by merge more of their companies into the umbrella holding company of Berkshire Hathaway.

But one can’t help but wonder about the timing– just as Buffett was making his move on the Washington Post and beginning to enter the world of the Washington power elite, had someone decided to give Buffett a scare, to show him just how delicate his “conservative” investment empire really was, and to compel his obedience to the power elite agenda going forward?

More Buffett investments

Here is a running list of Buffett investments over the period of 1970-1983:

• Berkshire Hathaway
• Blue Chip Stamps
• Diversified Retail Holdings
• National Indemnity
• Cornhusker Casualty
• National Fire & Marine
• The Washington Post
• See’s Candies
• Scripps Howard
• Harte-Hanks Communications
• Affiliated Publications
• Booth Newspapers
• San Jose Water Works
• Source Capital
• Wesco Financial
• National Presto
• Vornado Realty Trust
• Interpublic
• J. Walter Thompson
• Oglivy & Mather
• Studebaker-Worthington
• Handy & Harman
• Multimedia, Inc.
• Coldwell Banker
• Pinkerton’s, Inc.
• Detroit International Bridge
• Buffalo Evening News
• The Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of Rockford
• GEICO
• Munsingwear
• Data Documents (a private investment)

A collapsing personal life

With regards to Buffett’s personal life, Part IV is so far the saddest of all. It is in this stage of Buffett’s life and investment career that he really begins to lose touch with his children and his spouse, Susie. Though married in name, the couple are de facto separated and living their own independent lives, with Buffett traveling constantly and spending a lot of time “elephant bumping” with Kay Graham in Washington and Susie leaving her now empty nest in Omaha to take up her own apartment in racy San Francisco.

Buffett’s children are distant from him, physically and emotionally and the life choices and dysfunction of each seem to demonstrate quite clearly what an absentee father he was. Sadly, Susie turns to an affair (or two) in her search for companionship and even Buffett eventually caves and shacks up with his caretaker, Astrid Menks, a friend of Susie’s in Omaha.

Buffett expresses deep regret about this part of his life, realizing too late to salvage the situation what damage his indifference had caused.

If there’s a lesson here, it is that life always requires balance for it to be happy and worthwhile. What good is knowing you’re the world’s greatest (and soon to be wealthiest) investor, if it comes at the cost of agonizing sadness when your marriage falls apart and your children no longer seem to know much of you?

Other important investment ideas

In no particular order, below are a few more quotes on important investment ideas, as shared by Buffett and other investors, in Part IV.

Buffett on uncertainty:

The future is never clear, you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values

Buffett on reputation:

Over a lifetime, you’ll get a reputation for either bluffing or not bluffing. And therefore, I want it to be understood that I don’t do it [bluff]

Tom Murphy on the value of stock as a currency:

Warren never gave his stock away; neither did I if I could possibly avoid it. You don’t get rich that way. [Commentary by Alice Schroeder] Giving stock in exchange for TV Guide was saying, in a literal sense, that they thought it would earn more in the future than whatever share of Berkshire Buffett swapped for it. Paying with stock showed a sort of contempt for your own business versus whatever it was that you were buying– that is, unless you were paying with stock that had gotten wildly overpriced

Buffett’s advice to Graham on acquisitions, channeled through Alice Schroeder:

It was always a mistake to pay too much for something you wanted. Impatience was the enemy… [there was] immense value in buying their company’s own stock when it was cheap to reduce the shares outstanding

Bill Ruane on the investment business:

In this business you have the innovators, the imitators, and the swarming incompetents

Buffett on Wattles and coattailing:

There’s nothing wrong with standing on other people’s shoulders

The Quality Of Wall St Analysts Is Pretty Low ($NTDOY, #WallSt)

You get what you pay for, I guess? (IGN.com):

[Wedbush Securities analyst Michael] Pachter was extremely skeptical about the chances of Wii U. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I think that essentially this is a solution in search of a problem. I mean, somebody had an idea – ‘let’s make the controller a tablet’ – and there aren’t many games that are going to take advantage of that.

[...]

He went onto say about Nintendo’s strategy in general: “I don’t think they suck – I just think that they really believe that, ‘If we’re still novel, everything we do will work’. This isn’t going to work.

“Hardcore gamers will buy them; hardcore Nintendo fanboys will buy it. They could put out a piece of cardboard and say that it’ll play Mario and they’ll buy it.”

Not the honest, intelligent considerations of someone who has actually made a good-faith effort to understand Nintendo’s competitive strategy in their industry. This is the kind of thinking that is being used to guide billions of dollars in investments in mutual funds.

Nintendo may have tough competition in its industry but I’m glad I don’t!

*UPDATE*

It gets better! More from the same analyst at the same conference (Gamezone.com):

“[The Wii was] gimmicky,” he added. For the record, I agree with him here. I never got into the whole movement-based gaming sensation. But I also recognize that it sold incredibly well and that it was a huge success. But why did it sell so well?

“It worked, they got lucky,” he said, adding: “I don’t think they’re getting lucky with Wii U.”

Ignorant and superstitious! A fortuitous combination for those in competition with such a person.

Notes – The Snowball, By Alice Schroeder: Part III, Chap. 20-33

The following are reading notes for The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder (buy on Amazon.com). This post covers Part III: The Racetrack, Chap. 20-33

Racing On

The third part of The Snowball opens with Warren Buffett on the verge of starting his infamous partnerships, the precursor to his Berkshire Hathaway holding company conglomerate. On the way, he took a few short detours and learned lessons all over the place, some of them completely unrelated to the art of investing. For example, witnessing the implosion of his father’s political career and campaign, Warren realized:

• allies are essential
• commitments are so sacred that by nature they should be rare
• grandstanding rarely gets anything done

And from his father-in-law, Doc Thompson, the young Buffett learned

always surround yourself with women. They’re more loyal and they work harder

Meanwhile, Buffett’s young wife and mother-to-be, Susie Thompson, was learning just how deep the rabbit hole went when it came to Warren’s insecurities:

Leila [Buffett's emotionally unbalanced mother] convinced both Warren and Doris that deep down they were worthless… [Buffett] was riddled with self-doubt. He had never felt loved, and she saw that he did not feel lovable

The depth of Buffett’s personal insecurities not only explain a lot about his later behavior and public persona, but they also provide a couple of startling questions to ponder, namely:

• how did a person with such fundamental self-confidence issues nevertheless summon the self-confidence necessary to trust his own investment thinking?
• being as insecure as he appeared to be, how much better of an investor might Warren Buffett have been had he not been carrying around such a handicap?

Who is Charlie Munger?

In Part III, we begin to get a more detailed picture of Buffett’s soon-to-be-infamous partner, Charlie Munger, as well as the subtle but fundamental ways in which his own thinking about investing and business analysis came to influence and then dominate Buffett’s own style. A mathematics major at the University of Michigan at age 17, following the incident at Pearl Harbor, the young Munger enlisted in the military and found himself as an Army meteorologist in Nome, Alaska. He took up poker where he learned to bet big when he had the odds and fold fast when he did not. He later attended Harvard Law School where he claims he graduated “without learning anything.”

After law school, he was obsessed with the idea of achieving social prominence, choosing Los Angeles as a place that was growing and full of opportunity but not so big and developed that he’d never be noticed. Munger’s life, like Buffett’s, was not without personal tragedy. His first marriage fell apart right around the time his 8-year-old son came down with a terminal illness. Munger had to watch these two pillars of his life dissolve simultaneously.

He later became obsessed with children and raised eight of them with his second wife. Munger was a compulsive reader and thinker, known to his family as a “book with legs” and was constantly found reading books on science and the achievements of great figures. Munger was interested in making money early on. When he was a young lawyer and earning about $20/hr he realized his most valuable client was himself so, in the style of the Richest Man in Babylon, Munger decided to “sell himself an hour each day”, which he used to pursue real estate and construction projects as well as other investment opportunities. Munger had

a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris– I wanted the independence

Buffett was patient with Munger. Even though Munger was his senior by several years, Munger pleadingly inquired about whether he could do what Buffett was doing in Los Angeles. Not only did Buffett tell him he could and should, he proceeded to build a relationship with him that involved hours of phone conversations everyday as the two came up with different business ideas together. As Munger described Buffett, and his fascination with him,

That is no ordinary human being

In other words, they seemed to be soulmates, a truly odd couple.

The Munger Effect

Charlie Munger entered Buffett’s life and investment world at a critical juncture in Buffett’s development as a capital allocator.

Until 1958, his straightforward route was to buy a stock and wait for the cigar butt to light. Then he usually sold the stock, sometimes with regret, to buy another he wanted more, his ambitions limited by his partnerships’ capital

But as his total AUM approached $1M with his partnerships and personal money, Buffett had a new scale that let him branch out into new styles of investing. His investments began to become concentrated, elaborate and time-consuming, such as the Sanborn Maps episode. Munger himself started his own partnership in 1962 with his poker buddy Jack Wheeler  who was a trader on the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange and $300,000 in capital he had accumulated through real estate investments. He eventually gave up his law practice at age 41 and decided to pursue investing full-time. He also used Wheeler’s membership on the exchange to lever up (at a ratio of 95/100) when he felt sure about his investments, something Buffett was not willing to do early on.

Munger’s early investment style involved net-nets, arbitrage and even the acquisition of small businesses. But his real interest lay in buying “great businesses”, which he identified by:

• strength of management
• durability of brand
• cost to compete/replicate the firm
• did not require continual investment
• created more cash than it consumed

To find these businesses, Munger asked everyone he met, “What is the greatest business you’ve ever heard of?”

As the market for net-nets dried up in the mid-60s and Buffett’s capital swelled, he found more and more he had to look at the kinds of great businesses that Charlie Munger favored, changing his focus from statistical cheapness (quantitative investing) to competitive advantage (qualitative investing).

With his capital ballooning, Buffett began looking at the acquisition of entire businesses as a more attractive option. In 1966, this twinkle in Buffett’s eye became Diversified Retailing Company, Inc., an 80/10/10-ownership holding company owned by Buffett, Munger and Sandy Gottesman, whose first acquistion was a $12M Baltimore department store called Hochschild-Kohn, financed 50% with bank borrowings, a “second-class department store” at a “third-class price”. However, the store had no competitive advantage, as the partners soon learned, and was continually caught up in a game of “standing tiptoe at a parade” as every innovation by a competitor had to be quickly imitated (at additional capital expense) lest customers shop elsewhere. It was here that Buffett and Munger learned that the essential skill of retailing was merchandising, not finance, and that retailing, like restaurants, is

a wearing marathon in which, every mile, fresh, aggressive competition could leap in and race ahead of you

Having learned their lesson, their next foray into Associated Cotton Shops, “a set of third-class stores for a fourth-class price” 80 in number led by Benjamin Rosner, a “true merchandiser” found them with a retail operation generating $44M in sales and approximately $2M/yr in earnings. Buffett made a deal to buy the stores for $6M, a sale which was ultimately made by Rosner in part to screw over his female business partner who drove him nuts, causing him to purposefully sell the business for less than it was worth just to get back at her. Buffett and Munger also insisted that Rosner stay on the manage the company for them.

In 1967, Buffett increased his control of the Buffett Partnerships while simultaneously weeding out 32,000 shares worth of investors who preferred a 7.5% debenture to Berkshire stock, ensuring that those who remained were in for growth and the risks that came with it.

Miscellany of the markets

As Buffett’s investment strategy changed over the 1950s and 1960s and his level of sophistication rose, he picked up a number of useful techniques for gaining informational edges in the market and making successful investments:

• coat-tail riding – Buffett became a notorious borrower of good ideas and was not too proud to keep an eye on people who demonstrated deal-making intelligence in the past, such as Ben Graham and Jay Pritzker, assuming they’d continue to make good judgments in the future
• detective-work/sleuthing – Buffett was the only person digging through the Moody’s Manuals at their company headquarters, or going to the shareholder meetings of small companies, or even meeting with executives of small companies to get an idea of who was running these companies
• no self-imposed market cap restrictions – Buffett looked at EVERY company he came across, no matter how small, looking for opportunities others weren’t focused on; he was particularly fond of the “Pink Sheets” publications
• consulting lists of registered shareholders – Buffett would buy blocks of companies he was interested in by hunting down individual shareholders and convincing them to unload the shares to him
• collecting scarce things – Buffett’s National American Fire Insurance investment taught him “the value of gathering as much as possible of something scarce”, both undervalued stocks and information related to said stocks
• proxy-investing – Buffett would often have his friends buy stocks he was interested in to hide his identity as the main buyer accumulating a position
• benefit from sentiment – when the market hit a fever pitch in the 1960s, Buffett went into fundraising overdrive and raised as much capital as he could while people were eager to invest
• use psychology to your advantage – as Buffett’s success unfolded, he forced would-be partners to ask him to allow them to invest with him, which put him psychologically in control
• preservation of capital – Buffett would willingly forgo the chance of profit to avoid too much risk, viewing it as a “holy imperative”; his partner Munger believed unless you were already wealthy you could afford to take risk if the odds were right
• haystack of gold – a concept imparted to him by friend Herb Wolf, the idea was if you’re looking for a gold needle in a haystack of gold it is not better to find the gold needle; obscurity was not virtue
• expense control – Buffett only took on overhead as needed, and in ways that could be easily turned back off or were free to begin with; he made extensive use of “soft-dollars” in his brokerage commissions to buy research from his favorite sleuth brokers
• profile visibility – when he was buying small companies early in his career, Buffett valued secrecy and anonymity, but as he began to target bigger companies he saw the value of a public profile and cultivated a relationship with Carol Loomis, a financial markets journalist

Buffett’s partnerships

Buffett had a total of 9 official partnerships that later became the infamous Berkshire Hathaway. However, he also set up an early partnership with his father, Howard, called Buffett & Buffett, which

formalized the way they had occassionally bought stocks together. Howard contributed some capital, and Warren’s contribution was a token amount of money, but mostly ideas and labor

Why was Buffett interested in managing money? Two reasons. One, Buffett had a strong aversion to working for others and he understood that

The overseer of capital was not an employee

Two, Buffett was obsessed with becoming a millionaire. Managing money for others and collecting a fee on profits generated would allow him to grow his own capital faster than if he were earning a return on just the money that was actually his. In other words, agreeing to manage money for others was a way to leverage his own investment returns.

Buffett started with 7 official partnerships, which were essentially all mini-hedge funds under his exclusive control, and which he viewed as “compounding machines”, meaning once the money went in it should not come out, which is why he managed most of his own wealth separately (as he would be living off his trading gains). And Buffett was so obsessed with compounding he decided to rent rather than own his own home, to free more capital for compounding.

The seven initial partnerships and several follow-on partnerships were as follows:

1. May 1, 1956, Buffett Associates Ltd., starting capital of $105,100, seven partners: Doc Thompson, Doris Buffett, Truman Wood, Chuck Peterson, Elizabeth Peterson, Dan Monen and Warren Buffett; Buffett charged 50% performance fee on returns over 4% (4% returns being guaranteed as a minimum by Buffett); added $8,000 in capital in 1960 from Buffett’s aunt and uncle
2. September 1, 1956, Buffett Fund, Ltd., starting capital of $120,000, partnered with Homer Dodge, a former Graham-Newman investor
3. Late 1956, B-C, Ltd., starting capital of $55,000, partnered with John Cleary, Howard Buffett’s secretary in Congress
4. June 1957, Underwood, starting capital of $85,000, partnered with Elizabeth Peterson; 1960, another $51,000 from connections of Chuck Peterson’s
5. August 5, 1957, Dacee, starting capital of $100,000, partnered with the Davis Family
6. May 5, 1958, Mo-Buff, starting capital of $70,000, partnered with Dan Monen (who had withdrawn his capital from partnership #1 to do a special investment with Buffett on National American), later joined by the Sarnats and Estey Graham with another $25,000 in capital
7. February 1959, Glenoff, starting capital of $50,000, partnered with Casper Offutt, Jr., John Offutt and William Glenn
8. August 15, 1960, Emdee, starting capital of $110,000, partnered with  11 local doctors
9. 1960, Ann Investments, starting capital of ??, partnered with a prominent member of a local Omaha family
10. 1960, Buffett-TD, starting capital of $250,000, partnered with Mattie Topp and two daughters plus son-in-law (MT owned the fanciest dress shop in town)
11. May 16, 1961, Buffett-Holland, starting capital of ??, partnered with Dick and Mary Holland, friends he had met through his lawyer Dan Monen
12. May 1, 1962, Buffett dissolves all partnerships into Buffett Partnership, Ltd. (BPL), beginning the year with $7.2M in net assets

His total starting capital across all of his partnerships was $580,000 and he

never deviated from the principles of Ben Graham. Everything he bought was extraordinarily cheap, cigar butts all, soggy stogies containing one free puff

Truly, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

Buffett’s investments

The “racetrack” period of Buffett’s life marked Buffett’s gradual transformation from a Grahamian “cigar butt” (Net-Net) investor to the well-known “growing franchise” investor of today. As Buffett’s assets under management (AUM) grew and the general market conditions of the era changed, so, too, did Buffett’s idea of a good investment. Below is a list of some of Buffett’s investments for his partnerships, as well as his personal and peripheral portfolios:

• Greif Bros. Cooperage; originally purchased for the B&B partnership in the early 1950s
• Western Insurance; purchased for Buffett’s personal portfolio in the early 1950s, Buffett actually sold his GEICO position to raise money to invest in this company earning $29/share and selling for $3/share, “He bought as much as he could”
• Philadelphia and Reading Coal & Iron Company; controlled by Graham-Newman, Buffett has discovered it on his own and had invested $35,000 by the end of 1954; it was not worth much as a business but was throwing off a lot of excess cash; Buffett learned about the value of capital allocation with this company
• Rockwood & Co.; controlled by Jay Pritzker, the company was offering to exchange $36 of chocolate beans for shares trading at $34, a classic arbitrage opportunity; unlike Graham, Buffett didn’t arbitrage but instead bought 222 shares and held them, figuring Pritzker had a reason he was buying the stock, “inverting” the scenario; the stock ended up being worth $85/share, earning Buffett $13,000 vs. the $444 he would’ve received from the arbitrage
• Union Street Railway; a net-net he discovered through Ben Graham, had about $60/share in net current assets against a selling price of $30-35/share, Buffett ultimately made $20,000 on this investment through sleuthing and speaking to the CEO in person
• Jeddo-Highland Coal Company (mentioned as an idea Buffett investigated on a road trip)
• Kalamazoo Stove and Furnace Company (mentioned as an idea Buffett investigated on a road trip)
• National American Fire Insurance, earning $29/share, selling for around $30/share, Buffett first bought five shares for $35/share, and later realized that paying $100/share would bring out the sellers because it would make them whole (financially and psychologically) after being sold the stock years earlier
• Blue Eagle Stamps, a failed investment scheme between Buffett and Tom Knapp, they eventually spent $25,000 accumulating these “rare” stamps that weren’t worth more than their face value ultimately
• Hidden Splendor, Stanrock, Northspan, uranium plays that Buffett described as “shooting fish in a barrel”
• United States & International Securities and Selected Industries, two “cigar butt” mutual funds recommended to him by Arthur Wisenberger, a well known money manager of the era; in 1950, represented 2/3 of Buffett’s assets
• Davenport Hosiery, Meadow River Coal & Land, Westpan Hydrocarbon, Maracaibo Oil Exploration, all stocks Buffett found through the Moody’s Manuals
• Sanborn Maps, in 1958 represented 1/3 of his partnerships’ capital; the stock was trading at $45/share but had an investment portfolio worth $65/share; Buffett acquired control of the board in part through proxy leverage; ultimately he prevailed over management and had part of the investment portfolio exchanged for the 24,000 shares he controlled
• Dempster Mill Manufacturing, sold for $18/share with growing BV of $72/share, Buffett’s strategy as with many net-nets was to buy the stock as long as it was below BV and sell anytime it rose above it and if it remained cheap, keep buying it until you owned enough to control it and then liquidate at a profit; he and his proxies gained control of 11% of the stock and got Warren on the board, then bought out the controlling Dempster family, creating a position worth 21% of the partnership’s assets; the business was sliding and at one point he was months away from losing $1M on the investment, but was ultimately rescued by Harry Bottle, a new manager brought in on Charlie Munger’s recommendation; the business eventually recovered through strict working capital controls and began producing cash, which Buffett augmented by borrowing about $20/share worth of additional money and used it to purchase an investment portfolio for the company; he later sold the company for a $2M profit
• Merchants National Property, Vermont Marble, Genesee & Wyoming Railroad, all net-nets he later sold to Walter Schloss to free up capital
• British Columbia Power, selling for $19/share and being taken over by the Canadian government at $22/share, this merger arb was recommended by Munger and Munger borrowed $3M to lever up his returns on this “sure thing”
• American Express, one of Buffett’s first “great company at a good price” investments, the firm’s reputation was temporarily tarnished in the aftermath of the soybean oil scandal; Buffett did scuttlebutt research and realized the public still believed in American Express, and as trust was the value of its brand, the company still had value; Buffett eventually invested $3M in the company and it represented the largest investment in the partnership in 1964, 1/3 of the partnership by 1965 and a $13M position in 1966
• Texas Gulf Producing, a net-net Buffett put $4.6M into in 1964
• Pure Oil, a net-net Buffett put $3.5M into in 1964
• Berkshire Hathaway, the company was selling at a discount to the value of its assets ($22M BV or $19.46/share) and Buffett’s original intent was to buy it and liquidate it, which he started accumulating 2000 shares for $7.50/share; the owner, Seabury Stanton had been tendering shares with the company’s cash flow, so Buffett tried to time his transactions, buying when it was cheap and tendering when it was dear; he continued purchasing stock assuming Seabury would buy him out via tender offers, the two eventually agreed to a $11.50 tender but Seabury reneged at the last moment, changing the bid to $11 and 3/8, sending Buffett into a rage and causing him to abandon his original strategy in favor of acquiring the entire company; he eventually bought out Otis Stanton’s two thousand shares and had acquired enough to gain control with 49% of Berkshire
• Employers Reinsurance, F.W. Woolworth, First Lincoln Financial, undervalued stocks he found in Standard & Poor’s weekly reports
• Disney, which he bought after meeting Walt Disney and being impressed by his singular focus, love of work and the priceless entertainment catalog
• A portfolio of shorts to hedge against a potential market collapse in the mid 60s, totally $7M and consisting of Alcoa, Montgomery Ward, Travelers Insurance and Caterpiller Tractor
• Near the end of 1968, as the market became more and more overvalued, Buffett relented and bought some of the “blandest, most popular stocks that remained reasonably priced” such as AT&T ($18M), BF Goodrich ($9.6M), United Brands ($8.4M) and Jones & Laughlin Steel ($8.7M)
• Blue Chip Stamps, a “classic monopoly” Buffett and Munger discovered in 1968, the company was involved in a lawsuit that the pair thought would be resolved in the company’s favor, and it also possessed “float” which could be invested in more securities, Munger and his friend Guerin each purchased 20,000 shares while Buffett acquired 70,000 for the partnership, in part through share swaps with other companies that owned Blue Chip stock for their own stock; the lawsuit was eventually resolved and the $2M investment produced a $7M profit
• Illinois National Bank & Trust, a highly profitable bank that still issued its own bank notes, it was managed by Eugene Abegg, an able steward of the company whose retainer was one condition for Buffett’s investment in the company
• The Omaha Sun and other local newspapers, which Buffett figured he’d make an 8% yield on, his motivation for buying seemed to be primarily connected to his desire to be a newspaper publisher
• The Washington Monthly, a startup newsmagazine that Buffett lost at least $50,000 on, again, as a vanity project

Buffett’s AUM

Below is a record of the growth of Buffett’s personal wealth, partnership AUM and performance fees accrued:

• 1954, Buffett’s total personal capital stood at approximately $100,000
• 1956, Buffett was 26 years old and had $174,000 of personal capital, growing his money by more than 61% per year for six years since he entered Columbia with $9,800 in capital
• 1959, partnership returns beat the market by 6%
• 1960, partnership assets stood at $1.9M and returns beat the market by 29%, and Buffett’s reinvested partnership fees had earned him $243,494 (13% of partnership assets belonged to him)
• 1962, Buffett was a millionaire and his outside investments totalled over $500,000, which he added with the rest of his money into the BPL partnership; he had acquired more than a million dollars in six years and owned 14% of the partnership
• 1964, $5M in new capital for the partnerships, and $3M in investment earnings, Buffett’s personal net worth was $1.8M and BPL had $17.5M in capital
• 1965, ended the year with assets of $37M, including $3.5M in profit on American Express, Buffett had earned more than $2.5M in fees, bringing his total stake to $6.8M
• 1966, $6.8M in additional capital investments in the partnerships, with total capital amounting to $44M, some of which was set aside as cash for the first time in Buffett’s career
• 1967, Buffett’s personal net worth was $9M and he had generated $1.5M in fees in 1966
• 1968, the partnership was worth $105M thanks to additional capital infusions and investment returns
• 1969, Buffett’s net worth was $26M

The Desert Island Challenge

Buffett and his investor friends came up with the following challenge that is a helpful mental tool for thinking about the investment problem:

If you were stranded on a desert island for ten years, he asked, in what stock would you invest? The trick was to find a company with the strongest franchise, one least subject to the corroding forces of competition and time: Munger’s idea of a great business.