2. The cost of the lost opportunity. Buffett compared an investment opportunity against the next best alternative, the “lost opportunity.” In his business decisions, he demonstrated a tendency to frame his choices as either/or decisions rather than yes/no decisions. Thus, an important standard of comparison in testing the attractiveness of an acquisition was the potential rate of return from investing in the common stocks of other companies. Buffett held that there was no fundamental difference between buying a business outright, and buying a few shares of that business in the equity market. Thus, for him, the comparison of an investment against other returns available in the market was an important benchmark of performance.
3. Value creation: time is money. Buffett assessed intrinsic value as the present value of future expected performance:
[All other methods fall short in determining whether] an investor is indeed buying something for what it is worth and is therefore truly operating on the principle of obtaining value for his investments.… Irrespective of whether a business grows or doesn’t, displays volatility or smoothness in earnings, or carries a high price or low in relation to its current earnings and book value, the investment shown by the discounted-flows-of-cash calculation to be the cheapest is the one that the investor should purchase.