巴菲特百问百答

来源：1998年10月15日佛罗里达大学商学院演讲标签：#投资原则导读：1998 年，长期资本管理公司（LTCM）轰然倒塌，曾聚集 16 位华尔街最顶尖的智囊——包括两位诺贝尔经济学奖得主，却依旧没有躲过破产的命运。当时巴菲特也参与了救援竞标，他回忆这段经历时，既惊叹“聪明人为何会做蠢事”，也严肃提醒我们：如果你为了不重要的收益去赌掉真正重要的东西，那就是毫无意义的冒险。此外，巴菲特还借此机会，真诚地劝年轻人：不要为了“简历好看”而委屈了自己的热爱与初心。Question: You were rumored to be one of the rescue buyers of Long Term Capital, what was the play there, what did you see?提问：据说您曾是长期资本管理公司（LTCM）救援计划中的潜在买家之一，当时您是怎么考虑的？又看到了什么机会？Warren Buffett: The Fortune Magazine that has Rupert Murdoch on the cover. It tells the whole story of our involvement; it is kind of an interesting story. I got the really serious call about LTCM on a Friday afternoon that things were getting serious. I know those people most of them pretty well—most of them at Salomon when I was there. And the place was imploding and the FED was sending people up that weekend. Between that Friday and the following Wed. when the NY Fed, in effect, orchestrated a rescue effort but without any Federal money involved. I was quite active but I was having a terrible time reaching anybody.沃伦·巴菲特：关于这件事，《财富》杂志曾有一期封面是默多克的报道，讲得很全面。这其实是一段挺有意思的经历。那是一个周五下午，我接到了一个非常严肃的电话，说 LTCM 的情况已经非常糟糕。我认识他们中的大多数人，很多是我在所罗门兄弟时的老同事。公司眼看着要崩盘，美联储紧急派人介入。从那天到下周三，纽约联储主导了一个救援行动，但没有动用任何联邦资金。我当时很积极参与，但几乎很难联系上关键人物。We put in a bid on Wednesday morning. I talked to Bill McDonough at the NY Fed. We made a bid for 250 million for the net assets but we would have put in 3 and 3/4 billion on top of that. $3 billion from Berkshire, $700 mil. from AIG and $300 million. from Goldman Sachs. And we submitted that but we put a very short time limit on that because when you are bidding on 100 billion worth of securities that are moving around, you don't want to leave a fixed price bid out there for very long.我们在周三上午提交了报价。我联系了纽约联储的比尔·麦克多诺，我们愿意出 2.5 亿美元购买净资产，并追加 37.5 亿美元的资金注入：伯克希尔出资 30 亿，AIG 出 7 亿，高盛出 3 亿。但我们给出的有效期非常短，因为我们竞标的是价值高达千亿美元、价格波动剧烈的证券，你不可能长时间挂出一个固定报价，那样风险太大。In the end the bankers made the deal, but it was an interesting period. The whole LTCM is really fascinating because if you take Larry Hillenbrand, Eric Rosenfeld, John Meriwether and the two Nobel prize winners. If you take the 16 of them, they have about as high an IQ as any 16 people working together in one business in the country, including Microsoft. An incredible amount of intellect in one room. Now you combine that with the fact that those people had extensive experience in the field they were operating in. These were not a bunch of guys who had made their money selling men’s clothing and all of a sudden went into the securities business. They had in aggregate, the 16, had 300 or 400 years of experience doing exactly what they were doing and then you throw in the third factor that most of them had most of their very substantial net worth’s in the businesses. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of their own money up (at risk), super high intellect and working in a field that they knew. Essentially they went broke. That to me is absolutely fascinating.最终是由银行家完成了这笔交易。但整个 LTCM 事件确实耐人寻味。你看看那群核心人物——希伦布兰德、罗森菲尔德、梅里韦瑟，还有两位诺贝尔奖得主，加在一起一共 16 人。他们的智力水平，在美国任何一家企业里都算顶尖，哪怕是微软都未必强多少。那是一屋子的高智商、强背景的专家。不仅如此，他们在自己的专业领域也极其资深，总共积累了三四百年的从业经验。更重要的是，他们把自己大部分的财富也投了进去——数亿美元的真金白银。可结果，他们还是破产了。这让我觉得，这事儿太有意思了。If I ever write a book it will be called, Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. My partner says it should be autobiographical. But this might be an interesting illustration. They are perfectly decent guys. I respect them and they helped me out when I had problems at Salomon. They are not bad people at all.如果我哪天写书，我会叫它《聪明人为何做蠢事》。我合伙人还打趣说，这应该是我写的自传。但 LTCM 这件事就是个典型案例。他们是好人，正直、有能力。我尊重他们，也感激他们当年在我遇到所罗门兄弟危机时帮过我一把，他们一点都不坏。But to make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and what they did need. That is just plain foolish; it doesn’t matter what your IQ is. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t care if the odds you succeed are 99 to 1 or 1000 to 1 that you succeed. If you hand me a gun with a million chambers with one bullet in a chamber and put it up to your temple and I am paid to pull the trigger, it doesn’t matter how much I would be paid. I would not pull the trigger. You can name any sum you want, but it doesn’t do anything for me on the upside and I think the downside is fairly clear. Yet people do it financially very much without thinking.问题在于，为了赚一些本不属于自己的、也并不缺少的钱，他们却拿自己真正拥有且至关重要的资产去冒险。这种做法，说白了就是愚蠢。无论你有多聪明，风险判断错了，结局一样糟糕。如果你为了不重要的收益，去赌掉重要的东西，那就是毫无意义的冒险。就算成功概率是 99 比 1 或更高，也不值得。如果有人给我一把左轮手枪，有一百万个弹膛但只装了一颗子弹，然后给我多少钱让我扣扳机，我都不会动手。你可以开出天价，但那种下注没有任何正面意义，而代价却一目了然。可现实中，很多人在财务上就是这么干的。There was a lousy book with a great title written by Walter Gutman—You Only Have to Get Rich Once. Now that seems pretty fundamental. If you have $100 million at the beginning of the year and you will make 10% if you are unleveraged and 20% if you are leveraged 99 times out of a 100, what difference if at the end of the year, you have $110 million or $120 million? It makes no difference. If you die at the end of the year, the guy who makes up the story may make a typo, he may have said 110 even though you had a 120. You have gained nothing at all. It makes absolutely no difference. It makes no difference to your family or anybody else.沃尔特·古特曼写过一本书，内容一般但书名特别棒，叫《你只需要致富一次》。这个道理其实很朴素。如果你年初有 1 亿美元，不加杠杆能赚 10%，加了杠杆有 99% 的可能赚 20%。那么你年底是 1.1 亿还是 1.2 亿，区别其实没那么大。如果你年底突然去世了，连写讣告的人都可能搞错你的资产数。你忙活了一年，结果可能连多赚的那点都没人记得。这对你、对家人、对世界，都没实质意义。The downside, especially if you are managing other people’s money, is not only losing all your money, but it is disgrace, humiliation and facing friends whose money you have lost. Yet 16 guys with very high IQs entered into that game. I think it is madness. It is produced by an over reliance to some extent on things. Those guys would tell me back at Salomon; a six Sigma event wouldn’t touch us. But they were wrong. History does not tell you of future things happening. They had a great reliance on mathematics. They thought that the Beta of the stock told you something about the risk of the stock. It doesn’t tell you a damn thing about the risk of the stock in my view.更糟的是，如果你还在帮别人管钱，风险不仅是赔光自己的钱，还要承受名誉扫地、抬不起头的羞辱，更要面对那些因你而损失惨重的朋友。可那 16 个聪明人，还是一头扎进了这个局。我认为那是一种“聪明人的疯狂”。他们太迷信系统和模型了。当年他们在所罗门就告诉我：“六西格玛级别的极端事件根本不会发生在我们身上。”但他们错了。历史无法预测未来。他们对数学过于依赖，认为股票的 β 值能衡量风险。但在我看来，β 根本不能告诉你任何关于风险的实质。Sigma’s do not tell you about the risk of going broke in my view and maybe now in their view too. But I don’t like to use them as an example. The same thing in a different way could happen to any of us, where we really have a blind spot about something that is crucial, because we know a whole lot of something else. It is like Henry Kaufman said, “The ones who are going broke in this situation are of two types, the ones who know nothing and the ones who know everything.” It is sad in a way.我始终认为，统计模型无法预见破产的风险，可能现在他们也终于意识到了。我不愿拿他们当反面教材，因为类似的事情，换个场景也可能发生在我们任何人身上。我们可能因为在某一领域懂得太多，反而对关键问题产生盲点。就像经济学家亨利·考夫曼说的：“在这种危机中破产的人，往往只有两种：一种是什么都不知道的，另一种是自以为无所不知的。”听起来令人唏嘘，但也真实得可怕。I urge you. We basically never borrow money. I never borrowed money even when I had $10,000 basically, what difference did it make. I was having fun as I went along it didn’t matter whether I had $10,000 or $100,000 or $1,000,000 unless I had a medical emergency come along.我想借这个机会劝劝你们，我们几乎从不借钱。我年轻时身上只有 1 万美元，也从没动过借钱的念头。那时我照样生活得很开心，不管我有 1 万、10 万还是 100 万，只要不是碰上突发医疗问题，日子过得都挺舒服。I was going to do the same things when I had a little bit of money as when I had a lot of money. If you think of the difference between me and you, we wear the same clothes basically (SunTrust gives me mine), we eat similar food—we all go to McDonald’s or better yet, Dairy Queen, and we live in a house that is warm in winter and cool in summer. We watch the Nebraska (football) game on big screen TV. You see it the same way I see it. We do everything the same—our lives are not that different. The only thing we do is we travel differently. What can I do that you can’t do?事实上，不管我钱多钱少，我做的事情其实没太大变化。你以为我现在的生活和你有很大不同吗？我们穿差不多的衣服（我这身还是 SunTrust 送的），吃的也一样，不外乎麦当劳、冰雪皇后。我们都住冬暖夏凉的房子，看同样的大屏电视、同样的橄榄球比赛。我能享受的生活，你一样也可以。我们最大区别，大概就是出行方式不一样，仅此而已。I get to work in a job that I love, but I have always worked at a job that I loved. I loved it just as much when I thought it was a big deal to make $1,000. I urge you to work in jobs that you love. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. I was with a fellow at Harvard the other day who was taking me over to talk. He was 28 and he was telling me all that he had done in life, which was terrific. And then I said, “What will you do next?” “Well,” he said, “Maybe after I get my MBA I will go to work for a consulting firm because it will look good on my resume.” I said, “Look, you are 28 and you have been doing all these things, you have a resume 10 times than anybody I have ever seen. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?”我之所以幸福，不是因为我有多少钱，而是因为我一直做着我热爱的工作。哪怕刚开始觉得赚到 1000 美元就已经很了不起，我也一样投入。我要真诚地建议你们，不要为了所谓的简历好看而将就着做一份你根本不喜欢的工作。那样做没有意义。前几天我在哈佛，一个 28 岁的小伙子陪我去讲座。他跟我讲述自己做过的很多事，履历很惊人。我问他接下来想做什么，他说想去咨询公司，因为“对简历有帮助”。我笑着说：“你 28 岁，履历比我见过的任何人都漂亮 10 倍。再这么下去，就像把性生活攒到老年再开始享受一样——太荒唐了。”There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. When I first got out of Columbia Business School, I wanted to go to work for Graham immediately for nothing. He thought I was over-priced. But I kept pestering him. I sold securities for three years and I kept writing him and finally I went to work for him for a couple of years. It was a great experience. But I always worked in a job that I loved doing. You really should take a job that if you were independently wealthy that would be the job you would take. You will learn something, you will be excited about, and you will jump out of bed. You can’t miss. You may try something else later on, but you will get way more out of it and I don’t care what the starting salary is.人生总有一天，你该认真面对“你到底想做什么”这个问题。找一份你热爱的工作，那样你每天都会迫不及待地跳下床去开始新的一天。当年我从哥伦比亚商学院毕业时，第一件事就是想给格雷厄姆打工，哪怕没工资都行。他嫌我“太贵了”，我就三年不断给他写信，边卖证券边坚持，最终他收下了我。我收获的不只是一次职业机会，而是一段影响一生的经历。我一直只做自己热爱的工作。你应该去找那种——就算你已经财务自由了，依然愿意做的事。这样的工作，会让你有成长，有激情，每天早上都想赶紧投入进去。哪怕将来你换方向，你也会从中收获远超过薪水的成长与快乐。所以，别管起薪高不高，只问你是否真心热爱它。When you get out of here take a job you love, not a job you think will look good on your resume. You ought to find something you like.毕业之后，请不要选那种看起来体面、对简历有帮助的工作，而是选你打心底喜欢的。找到那个你愿意为之兴奋、投入、愿意“跳下床去干”的方向。If you think you will be happier getting 2x instead of 1x, you are probably making a mistake. You will get in trouble if you think making 10x or 20x will make you happier because then you will borrow money when you shouldn’t or cut corners on things. It just doesn’t make sense and you won’t like it when you look back.如果你觉得收入翻倍就会更幸福，那很可能是一种错觉。如果你认为赚 10 倍、20 倍才叫成功，那你很容易走偏，会去借不该借的钱，干不该干的事。到头来你会发现，那些让你“看上去更好”的决定，其实并没有让你活得更好。更别说，当你回望人生时，你未必会喜欢这样的自己。

来源：2025年巴菲特股东大会标签：#人生建议导读：“你会朝着与你交往的人的方向前进。”这是巴菲特送给年轻投资者的第一句忠告。他讲投资，却总是从人生讲起。他相信：人生是复利的，不只靠金钱积累，更靠人品、人脉与志趣相投的同行者。Question: As a young person interested in investing like myself, I would love to hear your insights, Mr. Buffett. What were some pivotal lessons you learned early in your career? And what advice do you have for young investors who are looking to develop their investment philosophy? Thank you. 提问：作为一位对投资充满兴趣的年轻人，我很想听听您的见解。巴菲特先生，您在职业生涯早期学到了哪些关键的经验教训？又会给我们这些正在建立投资理念的年轻人什么建议？谢谢您！Warren Buffett: Those are good questions. Who you associate with is just enormously important. Don’t expect that you’ll make every decision right on that, but you are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends. 沃伦·巴菲特：问题问得非常好。你选择与谁同行，对人生走向有着极其深远的影响。你不可能每次都选对人，但你的人生轨迹，终将随着你共事的人、你敬佩的人、以及你结交的朋友而发展变化。I mentioned a few fellows that have died in the last couple years. All of those people were people that, if we were working together on something one-ten-thousandth the size of Berkshire, they’d be the kind of people you’d choose. They’re people that make you want to be better than you are. You want to hang out with people that are better than you are and that you feel are better than you are because you’re going to go in the direction of the people you associate with. 我曾提到一些过去几年去世的老朋友。就算我们当年做的项目只是伯克希尔的万分之一，我也依然会选择他们作为合作伙伴。因为他们是那种能让你想要变得更好的人。你应该主动靠近那些比你更优秀的人，因为你终将走向与他们相似的方向。That’s something you learn later in life – it’s hard to really appreciate how important some of those factors are until you get much older. But when you’ve got people around you like Tom Murphy and Sandy Gottesman and Walter Scott, you’re just going to live a better life than if you just go out and look at somebody that’s making a lot of money and decide you’re going to try and copy them. 这个道理，往往要到人生后期才会真正理解。你年轻时，可能更容易被财富与表象吸引；但当你身边有像汤姆·墨菲、桑迪·戈特斯曼、沃尔特·斯科特这样的人，你就会明白，真正值得追随的，是那些品格优秀、智慧深沉的人，而不是光鲜亮丽的赚钱机器。I would try to be associated with smart people too where I could learn a lot from them, and I would try to look for something that I would do if I didn’t need the money. What you’re really looking for in life is something where you’ve got a job that you’d hold if you didn’t need the money, and I’ve had that for a very long time. 我一直努力让自己靠近那些聪明、正直的人，从他们身上不断学习。同时，我也会寻找那种即使没有收入，也愿意坚持一生去做的事情。这就是我所理解的理想职业。我很幸运，从年轻时就找到了它。All the fellows I named had it, and they also always did more than their share and never sought more than their share of the credit. They behaved the way you’d like anybody you work with to behave. When you find them, you treasure them, and when you don’t find them, you still keep doing whatever enables you to eat. But you don’t give up on looking around, and you will find people who do wonderful things for you.我刚才提到的这些人，也都拥有这样的事业。他们从不斤斤计较，从不争功诿过，总是默默多做一点。他们的行为，正是你最希望身边同事拥有的样子。当你遇到这样的人，请一定珍惜；即使一时没有遇见，也请不要放弃寻找，总有一天，你会遇到那个让你成为更好自己的引路人。I mentioned earlier going down to GEICO and knocking on the door when the door was locked. Who knows what was behind that door? But in 10 minutes, I found that I had a man that was going to be just wonderfully helpful to me. And of course, if somebody’s going to be helpful to you, you want to try to figure out ways to be helpful to them. So you get a compounding of good intentions and good behavior. Unfortunately, you can get the reverse of that in life, too. 我曾提到过，那年我去 GEICO 公司，门锁着，我还是敲门进去了。没人知道门后有什么，但十分钟后，我遇见了一个后来对我意义非凡的人。有些人，一旦遇见，就注定改变你的人生。而你也会因为他的善意，努力成为别人的贵人。这就是“善意的复利”。当然，人生也有反例，但我们不能因此丢掉信念。I was lucky in having a good environment for living that kind of life, and other people have a whole different environmental situation they have to overcome. But don’t feel guilty about your good luck if you’ve got it. If you live in the United States, with 8 billion people in the world and 330 million in the United States, you’ve already won the game to a great degree. Just keep making the most of it. 我很幸运，生在一个让我有条件追求理想生活的环境。当然，也有很多人起点不如我，需要面对更多挑战。但如果你很幸运，请不要感到内疚。这个世界有 80 亿人，美国只有 3.3 亿人，如果你出生在这里，就已经站在了人类的前 3% 位置。关键是，如何用好这份幸运。You don’t want to associate with people or enterprises that ask you to do something that you shouldn’t be doing. Different professions select for different types of people. It’s interesting to me that in the investment business, so many people get out of it after they’ve made a pile of money. You really want something that you’ll stick around for whether you need the money or not. 千万不要与那些让你违背原则、做不该做的事的人或企业为伍。每个行业吸引的气质不同，有意思的是，在投资行业，很多人一旦赚够了钱就选择离场。但真正值得投入的事业，是那种即使你不差钱，也仍愿意一辈子留在其中的地方。Greg doesn’t need the money, Ajit doesn’t need the money – not remotely – but they enjoy what they do and they’re so damn good at it. I’ve had the advantage of seeing how that works over time. 像格雷格、阿吉特，他们的财富早就“够用几辈子”了。但他们依旧每天充满热情地工作，并且做得非常出色。我亲眼见证了热爱+专业+长期主义所带来的复利奇迹。The best manager I ever knew – and there’s a lot of contention for who that would be – but actually was Tom Murphy Sr., who lived to almost 98. I’ve never seen anybody who could get the potential out of other people more than Murph. If you wanted to become a better person, you’d want to work for Tom Murphy. There are all kinds of successful people that don’t bring that to the party. I’m not saying that’s the only way to succeed, but I think it’s the most pleasant way to succeed for sure. 我这辈子遇到过最会带人的管理者，是汤姆·墨菲。他活了将近 98 岁，是我见过最能激发团队潜能的人。如果你想变得更好，那就去为像汤姆这样的人工作。很多成功人士并不具备这种影响力。不是说那样就不能成功，但能与这样的人共事，绝对是最令人愉快的成功路径。The Berkshire experience is pretty dramatic – to operate with Sandy Gottesman from 1963 until he died a couple years ago, Walter Scott for 30 years – you really can’t miss it. You’ll learn all the time, but you’ll not only learn how to be successful at business, you’ll learn how to be successful at life.在伯克希尔的这些年，是我最重要的人生体验。从 1963 年起，我和桑迪·戈特斯曼一路合作到他离世；与沃尔特·斯科特并肩作战了整整 30 年。这样的关系教会我，不只是如何在商业上成功，更重要的是，如何成为一个更好的人，过上一种你真正认可的人生。So that’s my recommendation. And for some reason, apparently you live longer too. It’s pretty amazing – these people I’m talking about, including myself. I think a happy person lives longer than somebody that’s doing things they don’t really admire that much in life. 这就是我对你的建议。再补一句——看起来，走这条路似乎还能让人长寿（笑）。我说的这些人，包括我自己，好像都印证了这一点。我相信，一个真正热爱自己所做之事的人，真的会活得更长，也更值得。