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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Berkshire has outperformed Nasdaq and SP500 from the IPO (May 9, 1996), 10y, 5y, 1y time periods and he has now $340B in cash.

All this with low risk holding lots of cash. He has not missed anything.

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His only miss was actually buying Berkshire. He estimates that he lost out on well over $200B had he never bought Berkshire.

Just because it beat indexes doesn't mean it couldn't have done better.

From 2017:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/06/warren-buffett-admits-he-mad...

"Not to diminish the accomplishments of Magnus Carlsen , but he has lost many games."

"Not to diminish the accomplishments of the world's best poker player, but he did lose many hands."

My point is that you have to put all of his wisdom and stories in the context of what he's good at and the environment he was in. He tried to apply his value investing playbook to early Google, and it looked like a bad investment. He later realized this (see my link), but that gets talked about less than value investing in its heyday. Aside: for debated reasons, value investing, which used to outperform, has been in a slump for a long time.

It's east to hear his story and think if you do the same thing, you'd be successful. If you did the same thing in 1970, you might be! And some of his wisdom is generally applicable, but reading his story as a guide for investing today isn't the right approach.

Think of the time horizon.

The current tech investing boom is just a blip just like previous tech booms (Auto industry boom, aircraft boom, personal computer boom).

He's always been an independent thinker. He stopped the low price to book value thing ages ago and went more for companies with good long term growth such as Apple. And recently he's switched a lot to cash/t-bills. We'll see if that proved a wise move but he's got a good track record of doing smart things rather than always doing the same thing.

Someone probably said something similar in the 1960s when Buffet avoided crowded Go-Go era investments in the 1960s to his benefit.

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