The following are portfolio management highlights extracted from a gem of a Munger speech given at USC 20 years ago in 1994. It’s long, but contains insights collected over many years by one of the world’s greatest investment minds. Caustically humorous, purely Munger, it is absolutely worth 20 minutes of your day between browsing ESPN and TMZ.

Creativity

“…the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”

“The…basic approach…that Ben Graham used—much admired by Warren and me…this concept of value to a private owner…if you could take the stock price and multiply it by the number of shares and get something that was one third or less of sellout value, he would say that you’ve got a lot of edge going for you…

You had a huge margin of safety—as he put it—by having this big excess value going for you. But he was, by and large, operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about 600 years…People were so shell-shocked for a long time thereafter that Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share and so on… 

…the trouble with what I call the classic Ben Graham concept is that gradually the world wised up and those real obvious bargains disappeared. You could run your Geiger counter over the rubble and it wouldn’t click.

But such is the nature of people who have a hammer—to whom, as I mentioned, every problem looks like a nail that the Ben Graham followers responded by changing the calibration on their Geiger counters. In effect, they started defining a bargain in a different way. And they kept changing the definition so that they could keep doing what they’d always done. And it still worked pretty well. So the Ben Graham intellectual system was a very good one…

However, if we’d stayed with classic Graham the way Ben Graham did it, we would never have had the record we have. And that’s because Graham wasn’t trying to do what we did…having started out as Grahamites which, by the way, worked fine—we gradually got what I would call better insights. And we realized that some company that was selling at 2 or 3 times book value could still be a hell of a bargain because of momentums implicit in its position, sometimes combined with an unusual managerial skill plainly present in some individual or other, or some system or other.

And once we’d gotten over the hurdle of recognizing that a thing could be a bargain based on quantitative measures that would have horrified Graham, we started thinking about better businesses…Much of the first $200 or $300 million came from scrambling around with our Geiger counter. But the great bulk of the money has come from the great businesses.”

“…Berkshire Hathaway’s system is adapting to the nature of the investment problem as it really is.”

So much of life consists of identifying problems and finding creative solutions. This is also true for the investment business. Yet, our industry sometimes focuses so much on complying with the rules, chasing that institutional $ allocation, that we fail to consider the rationale and why the rules came into existence in the first place. Conventionality does not equate the best approach. 

The content and knowledge featured on PM Jar is far more useful to Readers when digested and synthesized into your own mental latticeworks. Liberal interpretations are encouraged. Great and unique ideas are usually the craziest (at first).

“…the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, ‘My God, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?’ And he said, ‘Mister, I don’t sell to fish.’

Investment managers are in the position of that fishing tackle salesman. They’re like the guy who was selling salt to the guy who already had too much salt. And as long as the guy will buy salt, why they’ll sell salt. But that isn’t what ordinarily works for the buyer of investment advice.

If you invested Berkshire Hathaway-style, it would be hard to get paid as an investment manager as well as they’re currently paid—because you’d be holding a block of Wal-Mart and a block of Coca-Cola and a block of something else. You’d just sit there. And the client would be getting rich. And, after a while, the client would think, ‘Why am I paying this guy half a percent a year on my wonderful passive holdings?’

So what makes sense for the investor is different from what makes sense for the manager. And, as usual in human affairs, what determines the behavior are incentives for the decision maker.”

“Most investment managers are in a game where the clients expect them to know a lot about a lot of things. We didn’t have any clients who could fire us at Berkshire Hathaway. So we didn’t have to be governed by any such construct.”

Clients, Volatility, Trackrecord, Benchmark

“…if you’re investing for 40 years in some pension fund, what difference does it make if the path from start to finish is a little more bumpy or a little different than everybody else’s so long as it’s all going to work out well in the end? So what if there’s a little extra volatility.

In investment management today, everybody wants not only to win, but to have a yearly outcome path that never diverges very much from a standard path except on the upside. Well, that is a very artificial, crazy construct…It’s the equivalent of what Nietzsche meant when he criticized the man who had a lame leg and was proud of it. That is really hobbling yourself. Now, investment managers would say, ‘We have to be that way. That’s how we’re measured.’ And they may be right in terms of the way the business is now constructed. But from the viewpoint of a rational consumer, the whole system’s ‘bonkers’ and draws a lot of talented people into socially useless activity.”