For Luiz Barsi, being rich was not an objective, but a consequence of his determination to “never be poor again”. At 84 years old, this Brazilian is one of the wealthiest in the country thanks to exceptional success in Bag.
Known as “he Warren Buffett Brazilian” Due to his influence in the Sao Paulo stock market, Barsi created from nothing a wealth of 4,000 million reais (about US$ 800 million), according to an estimate by Forbes magazine, with a method that he teaches as his legacy.
However, he continues to work daily out of “vice” and because “the wheel cannot stop”, he said to this man with glasses and white hair, in a room of his offices in the center of the largest Brazilian metropolis.
“If the wheel stops, I go back to being who I was,” said the billionaire, one of the largest individual investors in the most important stock market in Latin America.
Born in Sao Paulo, he was the only child of a couple of descendants of European immigrants.
He lost his father when he was one year old and struggled with his mother to survive, living in a collective residence in the working-class neighborhood of Bras.
Later, “Going back there was a constant reminder that I desperately needed to improve my life,” Barsi says in his autobiography published in 2022.
He sold candy at the movies, shined shoes and was a cadet for a company without neglecting his studies, until he trained in Law and Economics and Accounting.
The Lord of Dividends
Dressed in a striped polo shirt, pants and black hat, his image does not reflect the wealth he began to amass since stocks were bought and sold loudly in the late 1960s.
Barsi maintained that a good investor must “control your ego” and shows an austere lifestyle.
He began more than five decades ago to search “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 would later have another daughter in a second marriage).
Currently, he earns around one million reais a day (about US$200,000) in dividends distributed by the companies in which he is a shareholder, according to his daughter Louise, who was present at the interview.
He achieved it with “discipline” and “Few mistakes”, in addition to time: “No one gets rich overnight”assured the investor.
Barsi is considered “a small owner” of companies such as the Klabin paper company or the Santander bank, among some of which he is a shareholder.
In those words he summarizes a philosophy that, he noted, contrasts with that of a large part of the almost five million individual investors who operate in the São Paulo Stock Exchange.
“The majority are speculators who turned the stock market into a securities casino”trying to profit in the short term, he said.
The formula that Barsi teaches through an educational platform (“Actions guarantee the future”)co-founded by Louise, consists of forming a portfolio with a large number of shares of companies acquired at low prices in “perennial” sectors, such as energy, banks or pulp.
And the main thing: these must guarantee a monthly profit in dividends, explains Barsi, who despises options such as fixed income, whose return he considers scarce, or cryptocurrencies, which he defined as a “fancy”.
“King” vs “emperor”
The method allowed him to generally emerge successfully from the ups and downs of the Brazilian economy since 1970. “My success was trusting the market and not governments,” he claimed.
He even rejected invitations to participate in politics.: “I like money, not charges”Barsi stressed.
He criticized the rulers, including the far-right ex-madatario Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), viewed with sympathy by the market, although he considers it “less worse” than the current president, the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“This government is left-wing, so it does not invest in the generation of wealth (…), but instead distributes what it does not have or generate, seizing wealth that is easy to appropriate”he indicated.
A project to tax ‘super-rich’ funds and offshore companies advances in Congress, while the taxation of dividends is analyzed.
“Lula became more emperor than president,” Barsi stated. In Brazill “there are already too many taxes” and with more, “The little we have (of investments) is gone”he sentenced.
Source: AFP
Source: Gestion
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