英文早读第207篇，选自巴菲特年度信，友才翻译。

In contrast to this cautious view about near term return from operations, we are optimistic about prospects for long term return from major equity investments held by our insurance companies. We make no attempt to predict how security markets will behave; successfully forecasting short term stock price movements is something we think neither we nor anyone else can do. In the longer run, however, we feel that many of our major equity holdings are going to be worth considerably more money than we paid, and that investment gains will add significantly to the operating returns of the insurance group.
相比于关于短期运营回报的谨慎观点，我们关于从由我们保险公司持有的主要实体投资的长期回报预期是乐观的。我们不会尝试预测股市如何发展，我们认为我们或者任何其他人都不能成功预测短期估价波动。然而长期来看，我们觉得大部分我们的主要实体持股都会比我们支付的资金价值更高，并且投资收益将会显著增加保险集团的运营回报。

Sources of Earnings
利润来源

To give you a better picture of just where Berkshire’s earnings are produced, we show below a table which requires a little explanation. Berkshire owns close to 58% of Blue Chip which, in addition to 100% ownership of several businesses, owns 80% of Wesco Financial Corporation. Thus, Berkshire’s equity in Wesco’s earnings is about 46%. In aggregate, businesses that we control have about 7,000 full‐time employees and generate revenues of over 500 million.
为了给你更好的关于伯克希尔利润如何产生的概况，我们如下呈现了一个需要稍微解释的表格。伯克希尔持有蓝芯票据公司接近58%的股份，包括对一些业务100%的持股，对威斯克财务公司80%的持股。因此，伯克希尔公司在威斯克的利润大概占据46%。总的来说，我们控制的业务大约雇佣7000名全职员工并产生超过5亿美金收入。

The table shows the overall earnings of each major operating category on a pre‐tax basis (several of the businesses have low tax rates because of significant amounts of tax‐exempt interest and dividend income), as well as the share of those earnings belonging to Berkshire both on a pre‐tax and after‐tax basis. Significant capital gains or losses attributable to any of the businesses are not shown in the operating earnings figure, but are aggregated on the “Realized Securities Gain” line at the bottom of the table. Because of various accounting and tax intricacies, the figures in the table should not be treated as holy writ, but rather viewed as close approximations of the 1977 and 1978 earnings contributions of our constituent businesses.
该表格展示了各主要运营类别在税前基础上的总体收益情况（由于存在大量免税利息和股息收入，部分业务的税率较低），同时还列出了这些收益在税前和税后归属于伯克希尔的份额。各业务的重大资本利得或损失未体现在运营收益数据中，而是汇总在表格底部“已实现证券收益”一栏。鉴于各种会计和税务方面的复杂因素，表格中的数据不应被视为绝对准确，而应看作是对1977年和1978年我们旗下各业务收益贡献的近似值。

18.cautious：小心的；谨慎的
19.intricacy：错综复杂
20.writ：文书
21.constituent：成分；构成要素