Sunday, March 30, 2008

Buffettology

As clearly as I can remember, it was the 28th of January, 2008. I was sitting at the far edge of the living room riding the i-Gallop while watching CNBC. My eldest uncle joined in the living room as I started enjoying myself. He lied on the sofa and flipped through the morning papers.

“Eh Thad, your not working today?”

“Yea, fed up adi ler. Eat energy you know.”

“Huhuhu…” (that’s how he laughs)

“So you like stocks?”

“Yea. Why you asked? You wanna teach me ar?”

“Do you know Warren Buffett?”

“Yea." (Duh~He holds the title for the second riches man for 13 years)

“Learn from him.”

“How?”

We chatted for quite some time, and he asked me a lot of questions regarding shares, currency index, the economy and etc. He asked questions like when should I buy this and when should I sell it.

I filtered everything and narrowed down to these two examples that I feel that it’s quite interesting in a sense.

Example 1

“Do you know TNS?”

“Yea(double duh).”

“Let’s say, TNS’s value is around RM7-8 right?”

Nodding my head, I have no idea.

“Let’s say 1 day, their company had a down turn and the price dropped drastically down to a few cents, would you still buy the company?”

“Depends.”

“It’s facing bankruptcy, make up your mind.”

“Yes!” I answered, with a background of Kiyosaki’s knowledge – buy low sell high.

“Why?”

“Cuz the government will surely do some intervention. They won’t let what they owned go bankrupt right?”

“Yea, but why.”

I was stuck, I dunno how to respond.

“We can’t live without electric?” that popped out from no where.

“This happened in LA once, where Warren invested a large chunk of money into a semi-bankrupt electric company.” “Then the company came back to life just before it faces its bankruptcy and stabilized its economic value due to the mass investment from the goverment. That’s where Warren swapped a chunk of money for chunkier chunk of money. When asked, Warren responded with a simple answer – a city cannot live without electricity.”

I’ll update the second example on the next post. This post is way too long.

"If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians." – Warren Buffet.

No comments: