Warren Buffett's 9 rules for running a business

Warren Buffett is legendary as an investor, but he's also an incredibly successful businessperson, too—a fact that sometimes gets lost in the millions of words that have been written about his advice on how to buy a stock.

That advice can be summarized with a just a few words. Appearing on the CNBC-produced syndicated program "On the Money" last month,Buffett said, "If you own your stocks as an investment—just like you'd own an apartment, house or a farm—look at them as a business."

Using that viewpoint, you shouldn't buy a stock simply because you think it will go up in price sometime soon. Instead, you should buy a piece of a business that you think will generate profits for a long time to come.

That long-term perspective is also at the core of the business advice that Buffett has provided over the years.

Here are some examples from his annual letters to Berkshire Hathawayshareholders.

1. Keep calm in the face of volatility. Buffett writes that earnings gyrations "don't bother us in the least." After all, "Charlie and I would much rather earn a lumpy 15 percent over time than a smooth 12 percent."

2. Keep good company. Berkshire has never split its Class A shares. As a result, one share currently costs almost $214,000. That discouraged people from rapidly moving into and out of the stock, and that's exactly the way Buffett likes it. He wants shareholders who share his long-term view. All the way back in 1979, he wrote, "In large part, companies obtain the shareholder constituency that they seek and deserve. If they focus their thinking and communications on short-term results or short-term stock market consequences, they will, in large part, attract shareholders who focus on the same factors."

3. Keep your focus. In that same letter, Buffett warns that even a great company can see its "value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander." The result: a "sidetracked" leadership that "neglects its wonderful base business while purchasing other businesses that are so-so or worse." In this area, Buffett argues that "inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior." In 1982, a year that saw a number of corporate deals, Buffett thought that in many of them, "managerial intellect wilted in competition with managerial adrenaline. The thrill of the chase blinded the pursuers to the consequences of the catch."

4. Keep costs low. In his 1996 letter, Buffett wrote that being a "low-cost operator" is directly responsible for the success of Berkshire's GEICO auto insurance subsidiary. "Low costs permit low prices, and low prices attract and retain good policyholders." And when those customers recommend GEICO to their friends, the company gets an "enormous savings in acquisition expenses, and that makes our costs still lower."

5. Keep employee incentives simple. Buffett doesn't like what he calls "lottery ticket" arrangements, such as stock options, in which the ultimate value could range from "zero to huge" and is "totally out of the control of the person whose behavior we would like to affect." Instead, goals should be "tailored to the economics" of the business, simple and measurable, and "directly related to the daily activities of plan participants."

6. Keep out of trouble. Buffett tries to "reverse engineer" the future at Berkshire. "If we can't tolerate a possible consequence, remote though it may be, we steer clear of planting its seeds." (Buffett notes that his partner Charlie Munger often says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.")

7. Keep your undervalued stock to yourself. Buffett is especially critical of a company using its stock to make a purchase when that stock isn't being fully valued by the market. "Under such circumstances, a marvelous business purchased at a fair sales price becomes a terrible buy. For gold valued as gold cannot be purchased intelligently through the utilitization of gold—or even silver—valued as lead."

8. Keep it small. In 2006, Buffett wrote that he's skeptical "about the ability of big entities of any type to function well." In his opinion, "size seems to make many organizations slow-thinking, resistant to change and smug." That's one reason Berkshire's corporate headquarters still has only a handful of employees, with almost all the managing work left to its unit's managers. "It is a real pleasure to work with managers who enjoy coming to work each morning and, once there, instinctively and unerringly think like owners."

9. Keep your reputation. In Buffett's mind, perhaps the most important piece of advice for businesses, and for everyone else, is to maintain a sterling reputation for honesty by never doing something you wouldn't want to see reported on the front page of your local newspaper. After taking control of Salomon in the wake of a major 1991 scandal at the financial firm, he famously told a Congressional panel that he had a simple message for employees: "Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm and I will be ruthless."

As he put it in one of his most-often quoted sayings: "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

Wisdom of Warren Buffett to be shared especially with regards to 2015

Warren Buffett is such an investing powerhouse, it’s hard to list his credentials without making him sound like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World:

• He made his first stock purchase when he was 11 and 99 percent of his $63 billion fortune after his 50th birthday.
• He was the lone insurance policy for Pepsi’s Billion Dollar Sweepstakes.
• People stand in line to get a photo with his wallet.

The Oracle of Omaha is one of the most influential businessmen in the world — and, arguably, the most frugal, a billionaire that once complained “most toys are just a pain in the neck.”

As often as he’s on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” talking about holding company Berkshire Hathaway’s per-share book value, he’s urging students to stay out of credit card debt and increase their savings.

With the year winding down, we combed through all the advice Buffett has given us in 2014, from the sublime (“Price is what you pay, value is what you get”) to the ridiculous (“A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends”).

The net result? Six things you should be doing with your money in 2015, from the master’s mouth.

Warren Buffett’s Best Advice for 2015

1. Put Your Estate in Index Funds

In his 2014 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffett revealed his estate plan, reminding readers to keep their investments safe, low-cost and long-term.

Turns out, he’s planning on leaving all of the cash for his wife in a product that’s as old, stodgy and lucrative as himself.

“My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors — whether pension funds, institutions or individuals — who employ high-fee managers.”

2. Stay Away From Bitcoin

Given Buffett’s almost wholesale aversion to tech, this one isn’t a surprise; the Oracle refuses to invest in what he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know the technology sector, IBM notwithstanding.

But Buffett’s problem with Bitcoin isn’t that it’s a tech investment — it’s that it’s not any kind of investment at all, because it doesn’t have value, as he explained in a March interview with CNBC.

“Stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically. … It’s a method of transmitting money. It’s a very effective way of transmitting money and you can do it anonymously and all that. A check is a way of transmitting money, too. Are checks worth a whole lot of money just because they can transmit money? Are money orders? You can transmit money by money orders. People do it. I hope Bitcoin becomes a better way of doing it, but you can replicate it a bunch of different ways and it will be. The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke in my view.”

3. Learn How to Read Financial Statements

Buffett gave this advice to Tre Grinner, a 17-year-old with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma who recently secured a Goldman Sachs internship with the help of the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Buffett surprised the intern with a call while he was being interviewed by CNBC in August, offering him this advice:

“Take all the accounting courses that you can find. Accounting is the language of business. … It’ll make it so much easier for years and years to come for reading financial statements, to get comfortable with it, because it is a language all of its own. Getting comfortable in a foreign language takes a little experience, a little study early on, but it pays off big later on.”

4. Focus on Saving, Not Getting Rich Quick

Ironically, Buffett dropped this tip when promoting his basically unwinnable billion dollar bracket challenge on the Dan Patrick Show.

The sweepstakes, backed by Buffett and Quicken Loans, would award $1 billion to anyone who devised a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket. (The odds of winning were about 1 in 9.2 quintillion — you were 53 billion times more likely to win the Powerball.) Still, the Oracle’s advice was solid:

“Well, I think the biggest mistake is not learning the habits of saving properly early. Because saving is a habit. And then, trying to get rich quick. It’s pretty easy to get well-to-do slowly. But it’s not easy to get rich quick.”

5. When Stock Prices Drop, Buy — Don’t Sell

It was a volatile year for the market and Buffett’s wealth; the investor lost about $2 billion in the course of several days in October when Coke and IBM took a hit after their quarterly earnings reports. Buffett kept calm, though, giving several interviews in which he explained why he was a fan of bear markets.

Granted, when you’ve got $63 billion to your name, this kind of a hit is lunch money. But, as the Oracle explained to CNBC, investors with itchy trigger fingers rarely succeed.

“I like buying it as it goes down, and the more it goes down, the more I like to buy. … If you told me that the market was going to go down 500 points next week, I would have bought those same businesses and stocks yesterday. I don’t know how to tell what the market’s going to do. I do know how to pick out reasonable businesses to own over a long period of time.”

6. Stop Pretending to Be an Expert

“If you don’t invest in things you know, you’re just gambling,” Buffett told CNBC earlier this year. It’s advice he’s rarely strayed from, and the reason why tech, gold and airlines will never get his money (or, in the case of airlines, get his money again). As he wrote in his 2014 shareholders letter:

“You don’t need to be an expert in order to achieve satisfactory investment returns. But if you aren’t, you must recognize your limitations and follow a course certain to work reasonably well. Keep things simple and don’t swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick ‘no.'

Read more: http://www.gobankingrates.com/personal-finance/6-things-warren-buffett-says-should-money-2015/#ixzz3MvFvkgL8

Lesson on Carry Trade by Mike Larson

“Carry Trades” are dominating market action. Not just here. Not just in stocks. In virtually every asset class around the world.

But now, some troubling tremors are starting to emerge – and that could change the game!

So let’s address your first question right up front: What the heck is a carry trade?

Think of it like banking. A bank’s goal is to raise money cheaply from depositors like us, then take that money and loan it out at a higher yield to someone else. Paying out 1 percent on a CD, and loaning it out at 5 percent to a small business is basically a way for the bank to earn “positive carry” of 4 percent.

Things are more complicated in the global markets. It’s not just banks with a seat at the table, and it’s not just CDs or business loans. It’s investors of all sizes – all trying to borrow cheap money from a wide variety of sources, and investing that money in a wide variety of higher-yielding assets.

The strategies involved can be incredibly complex. But lately, some of the biggest carry trades have been those taking advantage of cheap yen and cheap euros. That’s because the Bank of Japan and European Central Bank have been doling out free money like Halloween candy.

So as part of this common carry trade, global investors will …

    1. Borrow cheap yen and euros (and to a lesser extent, borrow in many other currencies) …

    2. Sell those currencies and convert their funds into dollars …

    3. Then buy dollar-based assets that yield more, largely because the U.S. Federal Reserve has been talking tougher than its overseas counterparts.

That process has helped drive U.S. stock prices higher and higher in recent weeks. There has also been a negative side effect on commodities. Commodities often trade as “contra-dollar assets” – meaning they fall in value when the dollar rises. With the dollar surging, it’s been a bloodbath in gold, silver, copper, crude oil and other resources markets.

So what’s the problem? Can’t we all just sit back, buy U.S. stocks, short the yen and euro, dump energy and gold, and retire as millionaires?

Maybe for a while. But eventually, the rubber band gets stretched too far. Everyone and his sister will put the same trades on, and you get to the point where assets are ridiculously mispriced. When that happens, even the smallest bit of contrary news can lead to furious counter-trend rallies.

“The Bank of Japan and European Central Bank have been doling out free money like Halloween candy.”

I’ve seen it happen before many times in my career, and my antennae have been up recently, especially in the currency markets. As much as I think Japan and Europe have major problems, and the U.S. is in better economic shape, the yen and euro have gotten wildly oversold and the dollar has gotten severely overbought.

That means you have the preconditions for a sharp adjustment in place. Then overnight, China’s Shanghai Composite Index reversed sharply and dumped more than 5 percent on record-high trading volume of $128 billion. That was the worst one-day market rout in a half decade for a market that had been rising and rising despite weak, underlying economic fundamentals.

Other frontier and far-flung emerging markets sold off in sympathy, and the Japanese yen launched a sharp rally. As a matter of fact, the yen earlier staged the biggest rally since the spring. Gold and silver have also been seeing a “stealth” rally, and so have agricultural commodities.

Maybe this is a short-term thing. Maybe it’s just a small correction, and nothing more. But it’s worth watching whether this turns into something bigger. Because carry trades are great … until the moves get so large that the markets can’t carry their own weight anymore!

So let me know your thoughts. Have you heard of carry trades before, and does the potential reversal of those trades worry you? What do you think about the yen, the euro, and the dollar? Have we gone too far too fast, leaving us open to a big correction? Or do you think those moves have further to go? Finally, do stock market sectors like energy and gold look attractive to you after the beating they’ve taken in the past several months

ROUBINI: This Mother Of All Asset Bubbles Will Burst In 2016

In February 2013, NYU professor Nouriel Roubini made the call that US markets had entered the “mother of all asset bubbles.”

Nouriel Roubini

With the rally in stocks that we’ve seen this year and a surge in high-yield debt issuance, Roubini said we’re now at the midpoint of the bubble, in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

Next year may see more gains across markets, but the bubble, bigger than the one before the 2008 recession, will pop in 2016. 

Because there is low growth, and low inflation in much of the world, there is liquidity that’s leading to asset inflation, Roubini said:

“I think that this frothiness that we have seen in financial markets is likely to continue, from equities to credit to housing, and in a couple of years, most likely, this asset inflation is going to become asset frothiness and eventually an asset and a credit bubble and eventually any bubble ends up in a bust and a crash. I would say that valuations in many markets, whether it’s government bonds or credit, or real estate, or some equity markets, are already stretched. And they’re going to become more stretched as the real economy justifies the slow exit, and all this liquidity is going to go into more asset inflation. So two years down the line, we could have this shakeout … 2016 I would say.“

His advice for investors is to be underweight US equities next year as stock valuations increase, particularly in the biotech, technology and social media sectors. Emerging markets that are heavy oil importers and will benefit from lower oil prices are attractive.