Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966–2012: A Fortune Magazine Book

So why, the last paragraph of the box sensibly asked, does a man so gloomy about stocks own so much of them? “Partly it’s habit,” Buffett answered. “Partly, it’s that stocks mean business, and owning businesses is much more interesting than owning gold or farmland. Besides, stocks are probably still the best of all the poor alternatives in an era of inflation—at least they are if you buy in at appropriate prices.

Buffett prefers to buy stocks that he will want to hold indefinitely. These days, his notion of an ideal opportunity is to buy into a business for $1 million when it is really worth $2 million and will be worth $4 million in five years. Such situations, he acknowledges, are not easy to find. “We don’t have a lot of good ideas,” he says, “and therefore we don’t do a lot of things.”

And so when Noyce left Fairchild in 1968 to form Intel,