Baron Capital’s Billionaire CEO: ‘This Is a Great Time to Invest’

Baron Capital Chairman and CEO Ron Baron said he would buy more stocks at today’s low prices if he weren’t already invested, and noted long-term positive outcomes for the market, even after particularly unstable events and periods.

While investors couldn’t find cheap stocks a year ago, “now you can’t find things that are expensive. You can’t find anything that’s expensive. And so if I had more money to invest, I would invest it. I’m invested,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning.

“I find things everywhere. That doesn’t mean this is the bottom. It just means this is a great time to invest,” added Baron, whose firm had $57 billion in assets under management at year-end 2021.

The CEO, a billionaire on the Forbes 400 list, said he’s always invested by choosing companies led by people he likes and trusts, and focusing on the long term.

“My grandfather, he started up as a construction worker, then he was a peddler and then he owned a candy store. He didn’t sell the candy store when things weren’t going well, he just figured out, I’ll put more pink balls in there,” Baron said.

“So it’s just being long term about everything, and the people who’ve done the best that I’ve watched have just invested for the long term in businesses and that takes you through the inflation,” he said.

The U.S. stock market has come through tough times before, including the 1960s, which were marked by the Cuban missile crisis and multiple political assassinations, Baron noted. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit roughly 800 in 1982, and “it’s now 32,000,” he added.

Early in his career as a stockbroker in the inflationary 1970s, Baron said he invested in companies whose stocks declined even as the businesses grew in value.

“In the 1970s, the ideas that I’m selling, they’re making money, because the companies that we’re investing in, they kept growing through it all,” he said, citing Disney, McDonald’s, Federal Express, Nike, Mattel, Hyatt and Tropicana.

This experience, however, turned him to a long-term investing philosophy.

“I wouldn’t have been able to make a living if I was just being a long-term investor in the 1970s. I needed commissions. And so I would get people to buy one stock and then they would double or triple and then they would sell it to buy my next idea. So sell Nike to buy Hyatt,” Baron told CNBC outside his firm’s annual investment conference in New York.

“And what would happen is I looked back after 10 years, 15 years, and I said, ‘Man, I’m a disaster; look at all these companies I recommended selling and look what happened. I could have been rich.’ … They’re up 30 times, 20 times, 50 times. So that’s what happened. That’s how we became a long-term investor.”