In the 2008 shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, a shareholder asked Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger –
“If you could not talk with management, could not read the annual report, and did not know the stock price of the company, but were only allowed to look at its financial statements, what metric would you look at to help you determine whether you should buy the company?”
They replied –
Buffett: Well, what we’re doing in investment – and what everybody does – is we’re laying out money now to get more money back later on.
Now, let’s leave the market aspect of the asset out of it. When you buy a farm, you really aren’t thinking about what the market on it is going to be tomorrow, next week, or next month. You’re thinking about how many bushels of beans or corn per acre you can get, and what the price is likely to be. You’re looking to the asset itself.
It was sometime during late 1999 through early 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, the legendary George Soros and his hedge-fund team were working on how to prepare for the inevitable sell-off in technology stocks.