Interview ancienne de Burton Malkiel (Securibourse)

par jmp , Boulogne/Mer, lundi 28 juillet 2008, 17:07 (il y a 5959 jours) @ Graham

auteur de "A random walk down Wall Street" et son avis sur Buffet:

COLVIN: Wait a minute, you say you can't beat stocks. What about Warren Buffett>

MALKIEL: Okay, what about Warren Buffett> Let's talk about Warren Buffett. There is no question about the fact that when my book first came out, if instead of buying an index fund you bought Berkshire Hathaway, you would have done twice as well. So let me first of all admit Warren Buffett has had a superb, a superb record. But how did he get that record> It's actually, I think, very interesting.

At one point I had the pleasure of having a two-hour conversation with Katharine Graham, the head of the, the former head of The Washington Post. And I asked her about her experience with Warren Buffett, because that (The Washington Post)was one of his great successful investments. And she told me she was just scared to death when he first bought 10 percent of the company. She thought she was going to get kicked out. When she realized that Buffett really did buy it as an investment, she said to him, "Warren, please come and help me. We are going under. I know something about editorial work. I don't know how to run a paper. Come on my board and help me run this business." And she credits Warren Buffett for turning the Washington Post around and making it a successful investment.

It wasn't that he read Graham and Dodd and bought a value stock. He is a wonderful businessman. He has done that with the Washington Post, GEICO. He buys companies. He sets them up. He does a terrific job with it. Even his mistakes, (such as) Salomon Brothers, that got into trouble with a government bond rigging problem, he became chairman of the board and CEO of Salomon Brothers. So he is, there's no question he is a marvelous businessman. He knows how to run companies. He buys companies, not stocks, but I think his success was not through stock picking.

Now, having said that also, I'm absolutely convinced there will be another Warren Buffett over the next 30 years. And the problem that I have with that strategy is that you don't know who it is and I don't know who it is, and there's no way we can know that in advance. And so it's like looking for the needle in the haystack, and I still think the sensible strategy is to buy the haystack.

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jean-marie