STREET DOGS

From Warren Buffett at the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: I’d like you to imagine that at that time (March 1942) you’d invested $10,000 … in an index fund … that $10,000 would now be worth $51m.

And you wouldn’t have had to do anything, you wouldn’t have to understand accounting, you wouldn’t have to look at your quotations every day … all you had to do was to figure out that America was going to do well over time and if America did well American business would do well. You didn’t have to pick out winning stocks.

You didn’t have to pick out a winning time or anything of that sort.

You basically just had to make one investment decision in your life. And that wasn’t the only time. I mean I could go back and pick other times that would work out to even greater gains.

[Whereas] let’s say you had taken that S10,000 and you’d listened to the prophets of doom and gloom around you (you’ll get that constantly throughout your life) and instead you used it to buy gold; for your $10,000 you would have been able to buy about 300oz of gold.

And while the businesses were reinvesting in more plants and [while] new inventions came along you’re looking in your safe deposit box and you’d have your 300oz of gold. And you could look at it and you could fondle it and you could do whatever you wanted to do with it.

But it didn’t produce anything. It was never going to produce anything. And it would now be worth approximately $400,000.

In other words, for every dollar you’d have made in American business you’d have made less than a penny by buying in a store of value which people tell you to run to every time you get scared by headlines or something.