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。