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At Barron's

Value Investor Chris Davis on Berkshire Hathaway and Stockpicking

At Barron's

At Barron's

Business

4.717 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Chris Davis, chairman and portfolio manager of Davis Fund and director at Berkshire Hathaway, discusses the Warren Buffett-led conglomerate's "stewardship culture," Berkshire's former vice chairman Charlie Munger, and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello everyone and welcome to Ed Barrens.

0:07.0

I'm Andy Surwer and welcome to our guest, Chris Davis, Chairman and Portfolio Manager of Davis Advisors.

0:13.0

Chris, great to see you.

0:14.0

Andy, I'm so glad to be here.

0:16.0

So Davis is known for being a value-oriented fund group.

0:23.7

How else would you describe the company?

0:26.1

Well, these categorizations sort of emerged really in the late 80s, early 90s,

0:32.7

with the so-called the Morning Star style boxes.

0:35.4

And it's been something we've sort of bridled against ever since

0:39.1

because it creates this distinction between growth and value.

0:43.8

And of course, the mathematics of it is that growth is a component of value.

0:49.0

A company that grows profitably is more valuable than one that doesn't grow.

0:55.0

And it's funny because in the world of bonds, there's no distinction if you buy a bond with a low coupon or a bond with a high coupon.

1:04.0

The idea is that the price adjust so that your yield to maturity, all things being equal, is the same.

1:10.0

Nobody says, I'm a growth bond investor or I'm a value bond investor because I focus a lot

1:15.8

on the current coupon versus the discounted present value.

1:19.7

So this is a distinction we bridle against.

1:22.2

I think if I'm forced to wear a label, I prefer the label of value because it makes clear that we have a price

1:29.5

discipline at the heart of what we do and that buying things that we think are undervalued is the

1:35.9

core part of what we do. But when we get into the world of deep value investors, they sort of say,

1:42.2

well, how on earth could you have bought Amazon if you were a value investor?

1:47.7

And of course, we didn't use a different version of discounted present value for valuing Amazon versus valuing Wells Fargo.

...

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