What's the right margin of safety?

Buffett & Munger2007-05-05videoOpen original ↗

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SpeakersWarren1
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WarrenHow do you judge the right margin of safety to use when investing in various common stocks? We favor the businesses where we really think we know the answer. And therefore, if a business gets to the point where we think the industry in which it operates, the competitive position or anything, is so chancy. that we can't really come up with a figure. We don't really try to compensate for that sort of thing by having some extra large margin of safety. We really try to go on to something that we understand better. So if we buy something like Seas Candy as a business or Coca-Cola as a stock, we don't think we need a huge margin of safety because we don't think we're going to be wrong about our assumptions in any material way. What we really want to do is buy a business that's a great business, which means a business is going to earn a high return on capital employed for a very long period of time and where we think the management will treat us right. We don't have to mark those down a lot when we find those factors. We'd love to find them when they're selling at 40 cents on the dollar, but we will buy those at much closer to a dollar on the dollar. We don't like to pay a dollar on the dollar, but we'll pay something close. And if we really get to something, you know, when we see a great business, it's like if you see somebody walk in the door and you don't know whether they weigh 300 pounds or 325 pounds, you still know they're fat, right? And so if we see something where we know it's fat financially, we don't worry about being precise and if we can come in in that particular example of the equivalent of 270 pounds will feel good.