From ValueWalk:
“The highest rates of return I’ve ever achieved were in the 1950?s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It’s a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.” – Warren Buffett, 1999Most Warren Buffett fans have seen that quote. I recently had a few questions and comments that I’ve been meaning to address regarding Buffett’s early strategy. In fact, my own thoughts on how Buffett really generated those 50-60% annual returns in the 50?s have changed as I’ve really researched his past holdings. In my opinion, there are two things regarding Buffett’s early investment style that most people don’t fully weight:
There is a perception out there that Warren Buffett made his huge returns in the early years by buying a bunch of cheap Graham style cigar butts and flipping them for profits. At the annual meeting a few years ago, he mentioned that the majority of his returns—even in the early years—were due to just a select few decisions. The rest were largely average results. I think he mentioned he owned over 400 securities during the time of his partnership (not at once—400 over the entire time period of 13 years).
- Warren Buffett understood the power of compounding at an early age, and cared about the quality of a business and its long term earning power, even in the early days
- Buffett’s portfolio management strategy, and specifically the level of concentration he put on the compounders
It’s hard to say exactly how he made these 50% returns in his pre-partnership years, but we do know about a few of the investments he made. From studying his early letters and the two main biographies, I believe that he made his returns largely through the higher quality businesses that could compound value (in some cases good businesses with profitable histories that were also ridiculously cheap), and not the cigar butts that everyone talks about. In fact, you can piece together a few of his early investments from reading Snowball and a few other biographies.
Some Early Buffett Investments
Buffett made 75% in 1951, mostly because of a large position in GEICO, that proceeded to double in the first 18 months he owned it. He sold it too soon (it would rise 100x over the coming decades), but he replaced it with another insurer in 1953 that was a profitable business trading at around 1 time earnings and a fraction of book value. Most are familiar with a column Warren Buffett wrote called “The Security I Like Best”, which was an excellent writeup on GEICO. Fewer people know about the next insurance stock he invested in called Western Insurance. Buffett referenced Western Insurance at a talk at Columbia in 1993, using it as an example of stocks he found by flipping through Moody’s manuals:
“I found Western Insurance in Fort Scott, Kansas. The price range in Moody’s financial manual was $12 to $20. Earnings were $16 per share.”Warren Buffett also wrote up a column on this stock, demonstrating how remarkably cheap the stock was. The interesting thing about looking at the old Moody’s manuals is that the company was profitable, and had a stable operating history with rising premium volume and consistent earnings. As a side note, this stock actually traded as a low as $1 in 1949, and appreciated up to $95 in 1955, a 95-bagger for those fortunate souls who bought the stock six years earlier!
Buffett was buying Western in 1952 and 1953, and although I’m not sure where he sold, it’s likely he at least doubled his money on this stock as well. He said he was buying between $12 and $20, and wrote his analysis write-up in early 1953 when the stock was at $40–later that year it traded to $65 and then to as high as $95 two years later.
We know how good of a company GEICO was, but Western Insurance–despite being incredibly cheap–was also a quality business. Of course, the attraction was not just that it was a good business, but it was cheap: When Warren Buffett wrote the column, it was trading at $40, and had made $24 per share of earnings the previous year in 1952, a year Buffett called a poor year for auto insurers. Buffett felt the company had “normal earning power” of $30 per share, which gave this stock a P/E of around 1.3 at that price....MUCH MORE
