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Comment by quasimojo | Hacker News Reader

the cult of buffett has become amusing. he would be the first one to point out his own investing gaffs and blunders to his own cultists. he would be the first to tell you not to idolize him because he periodically makes bad bets. he's just an opportunist with a moderately good track record. i can't remember a single year in which he was the best performing manager. he's simply being doing pretty good for so long that he has accumulated a vast fortune.

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i can't remember a single year in which he was the best performing manager.

You actually nailed it with that statement - his performance is measured on decades, not year to year.

The funny thing about buffet is this aw-shucks wise old stock picker grandpa image he has cultivated. He's a ruthless insider with somewhat unsavory friends in the insurance business, with questionable accounting histories. The dirty secret about berkshire is that it's predominantly an insurance company.

I'm curious, whare your sources for this statement? Any books or articles in particular?

its no dirty secret, google finance makes it pretty clear "Sector: Financial > Industry: Insurance (Prop. & Casualty)". It's possible there's questionable accounting in the history, but 30+ years into it, I'm surprised nothing major's come up seeing how large and public a target he and berkshire are and how many other accounting cheats have been netted.

It kinda has come up a few times if you care to google. The thing is, I don't think much ILLEGAL has gone on. Just ... questionable. Nothing strictly wrong with that, but it sort of flies in the face of all the nauseating buffet fawning.

Tax avoidance is almost the bread and butter of international property and casualty. They help multi-nationals repatriate earnings in low tax countries. Nothing ILLEGAL about that... just something the sycophants probably don't realize.

The dirty secret about berkshire is that it's predominantly an insurance company.

Hardly a secret - it's the first line of business listed in the first sentence in every year's annual report (see http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2007ar/2007ar.pdf for example):

"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is a holding company owning subsidiaries that engage in a number of diverse business activities including property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, utilities and energy, finance, manufacturing, services and retailing. "

his performance is measured on decades

who cares? who owns a single equity for decades? some fictional granny investor in pasadena? look at your own trading history...i bet you never held a single equity more than four years. note that i am distinguishing index funds and etfs here. berkA is a single equity

The period that you measure someone's market performance is independent of how long they actually hold a single equity. Do you measure a day trader's performance over a single day?

Either way - it's a moot point - (Just like the investment funds you excluded) BRK doesn't need to turn over an equity to increase their value, whatever the time period. They could never sell anything and still give increased returns to their investors.

Citation that people don't hold equities for more than four years?

I have held equities for more than four years. Most of my portfolio, actually. Daytrading and churning positions are for people with more time to devote to the market than I care to. But maybe I am fictional, as my grandmother gave me one of her BRKb shares in 2002 (which I still own).

moderately good track record: http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chd...

*This is already after the point where he's been consistently very good & already has had several generations of cult following.

i can't remember a single year in which he was the best performing manager

That would be precisely the wrong metric to look at to see how a good long-term investor is: the absolute best performer in a given year is very likely to be the guy who threw darts at just the right stocks on the wall.

bullshit bullshit. average "long term" investor is in and out of single stocks in two years or less. you're at the far end of the bell curve for people who hold for four years. the myth of the "long term" investor is just that. the reality is most people hold equities for less than a year.

and "long term" is not a definitively superior investment strategy. look at the dow chart for the 20th century, you can see at least two ten-year stretches of zero gains. guess what, we're in another one now. buy-and-hold only makes sense in secular bull markets, like 1982-2000.

I meant "long term" in the sense of investors who consistently make a profit in the long term, not those who happen to hold particular equities for a long period of time.

I'm sorry, but this is just lunacy. Warren Buffett will go down as the greatest investor of all-time. Unlike many of the hedge fund managers out there who like to talk a big game based on 1, 2, or 3 year returns, Buffett has been beating the market for over 50 years. While you are right that he is the first to admit when he makes a mistake, his record is obvious, mistakes and all: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/personalfinance/persona...

For the rest of us, please take his advice and invest in an index fund. And don't try to time the market. As long as you are investing for at least 10 years, trying to pick the bottom is a loser's game.

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