Only a Market Crash Can Stop Warren Buffett From Winning This $1 Million Bet https://www.wsj.com/articles/only-a...tt-from-winning-this-1-million-bet-1487851203
yes, he is an old man who dumps fair value stocks that go up like WMT and buy overbought stocks like Apple. Brillant. CM
No offense, I think AAPL looks much more promising and innovative in the long run than WMT. So W.Buffett did the right thing.
Warren Buffett’s $5 Billion Bank of America Bonanza: Thank You, President Trump https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren...-bonanza-thank-you-president-trump-1487950050
Warren Buffett Scorches the Hedge Funds http://fortune.com/2017/02/25/warren-buffett-scorches-the-hedge-funds/
In Buffett's annual letter to shareholders, Berkshire Hathaway reports $27.5 billion gain in net worth http://www.omaha.com/money/in-buffe...cle_6a7164fa-fb63-11e6-b872-eff7da9fd51b.html
Fun of funds 26 February 2017ByJeffrey Goldfarb Email It is fitting that a man so full of discrepancies as Warren Buffett could be winning a bet and losing it at the same time. The Berkshire Hathaway boss reserves a big section of his latest annual letter to shareholders to sing the praises of index funds, including a shout-out to Vanguard founder and fellow octogenarian Jack Bogle. Helping to prove his point, Buffett, in the missive released on Saturday, also takes an early victory lap for a soon-to-conclude wager with an investment pro that hedge funds would fail to keep pace with the S&P 500 over a decade. The Oracle of Omaha deserves praise for using his star power to point average Joes and portfolio managers big and small toward low-fee funds filled with big groups of stocks, even though he himself has spent more than 50 years carefully selecting individual names and building more than $70 billion of net worth in the process. Buffett reckons the financial elite, in its daft and usually fruitless quest for alpha over the last 10 years, has squandered $100 billion. A more scientific2008 studyput the cost of searching for superior returns at some $100 billion annually. One hedge fund manager accepted Buffett’s market challenge. Ted Seides, of Protégé Partners, chose five funds collectively invested in 100 different hedge funds to pit against an S&P 500 Index fund. After nine years, the compound annual return for the index fund is 7.1 percent against an average of 2.2 percent for the fund-of-funds, with more than half their gains chewed up by manager fees in Buffett’s estimation. Buffett prefers to measure his own success using Berkshire Hathaway’s book value per share. Over the same span as the wager, it has more than doubled to about $172,000 against an 85 percent increase for the S&P 500 Index used. Over the last five years, however, Berkshire’s performance falls short of the broad total-return stock index. The bigger Berkshire has gotten, the more Buffett and his small crew have struggled to beat the market. From 1965 to 2008, the percentage gain in Berkshire’s book value per share lagged that of the S&P 500 Index, with dividends, in only six years. It also has trailed in six of the last eight, including 2016. It will never be easy to bet against Buffett, but the odds have certainly improved.
Book value per share good way to evaluate long term holdings. Hard to believe any 5 funds up only 2.2 in the last 9 years. Berkshire already bought all the stock they could and now are practically the index, but they also own many non listed companies outright, so theoretically more diversified. It's hard to beat that index. It's hard to beat it with outright gambling on huge positions, it's hard to beat when you are well diversified. Otherwise it was a good bet since usually 85% of all managed funds under perform SPY.