Luiz Barsi: Brazilian Warren Buffett who got out of poverty – 11/03/2023 – Market

For Luiz Barsi, being rich was not a goal, but a consequence of his determination “not to be poor again”. At 84 years old, the Brazilian is one of the richest men in the country, thanks to an exceptional performance on the Stock Exchange.

Known as “the Brazilian Warren Buffett” for his influence on the São Paulo stock market, Barsi built a net worth of R$4 billion from scratch, according to an estimate by Forbes magazine, following a method that he teaches as his legacy.

However, he continues to work every day out of “addiction” and because “the wheel cannot stop”, this man with glasses and white hair tells the AFP agency, in a room in his offices in the center of the capital of São Paulo.

“If I stop, I’ll go back to who I was,” says the billionaire, one of the largest individual investors on B3, the most important exchange in Latin America.

Born in São Paulo, he was the only child of a couple of descendants of European immigrants.

He lost his father at the age of one and had to rely on his mother to survive, living until he was 20 in a tenement in the working-class neighborhood of Brás.

“Coming back to the [cortiço do] Quintalão was a constant reminder that I desperately needed to improve my life”, says Barsi in his autobiography, published in 2022.

He sold sweets at the cinema, was a shoeshine boy and a messenger in a company, without neglecting his studies, until he graduated in law, economics and accounting.

Wearing a striped polo shirt, trousers and hat, he does not appear to be in possession of the fortune he began to accumulate since shares were bought and sold shouting at the end of the 1960s.

Barsi states that a good investor must “control his ego” and have an austere lifestyle.

More than five decades ago, he began looking for “new ways to make money, with little to invest”, while working as a company auditor, separated from his first wife and with four children to support (He had another daughter from his second marriage).

Currently, he receives around R$1 million a day in dividends paid by companies in which he is a shareholder, estimates his daughter Louise, present at the interview.

He managed to get there with “discipline” and “few mistakes”, as well as time. “Nobody gets rich overnight,” he says.

Barsi considers himself “a small owner” of companies such as Klabin, the largest producer and exporter of packaging paper in Brazil, and Santander bank, among other companies in which he is a shareholder.

With these words, he summarizes a philosophy that, he guarantees, contrasts with that of most of the almost five million individual investors who operate on the São Paulo Stock Exchange.

“The Stock Exchange is full of speculators, there are very few investors. It has become a securities casino”, trying to profit from the short-term appreciation of shares.

The recipe that Barsi teaches, through an educational platform (“Shares guarantee the future”), co-founded by his daughter Louise, consists of forming a portfolio with a large number of company shares, acquired at low prices in “perennial” sectors (such as energy , banks or cellulose).

And the main thing: these must guarantee a monthly profit in dividends, explains Barsi, who rules out options with fixed income, whose return he considers small, or cryptocurrencies, which he defines as a “fantasy”.

The method has allowed him to generally fare well through the ups and downs of the national economy since 1970. “My success was never believing in the government, and believing in the market,” he says.

He even refused invitations to enter politics. “I like the money, but not the positions,” says Barsi.

Barsi criticizes government officials, including former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL), seen with favor by the market, although he only considers him “less worse” than the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

“This government is on the left. The DNA of left-wing governments is not to invest in the generation of wealth, but in the social. The left-wing government distributes what it doesn’t have, what it doesn’t create, what it doesn’t generate, seizing wealth that are easy to take over”, he states.

A project to tax the funds of the very rich and offshore companies is advancing in Congress, while the taxation of dividends is being analyzed.

“Lula became more emperor than president”, says Barsi. In Brazil, “we already have a lot of taxes.” With more, “what little there is here [de investimentos]go away”, he warns.