Archives of “Howard Graham Buffett” tag

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Mystery bidder offers $3,456,789 for lunch with Warren Buffett (Rs 22 crore 81 lakh 48 Thousands )

  
Analysis, Education
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The cost of the average restaurant meal has risen 2.7 per cent in the past year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, but if that looks steep against an economy wide inflation rate of 1.1 per cent, it is nothing compared to the rising cost of lunching with Warren Buffett.

An anonymous bidder has paid $3,456,789 for a lunch date with the investment guru and founder of Berkshire Hathaway, some 47 per cent more than the winner of the charity auction last year.

Mr Buffett will meet the winning bidder and up to seven friends for an intimate meal, in what has become an annual tradition that has netted more than $23m in total for the San Francisco charity, Glide.

Mr Buffett’s late wife Susan used to be a volunteer at Glide, which offers meals, medical testing and other services to homeless and low-income people in the San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Volunteers and supporters sang and cheered as the five-day auction moved into its final minutes on Friday night, and a late bid swelled the proceeds from $2.8m, where bidding had hovered for most of the day, to a final total that matched the all-time record from 2012. (more…)

How Does Buffett Make So Much Money? Not How You Think!

  
Analysis, Education
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Excerpt:

Berkshire Hathaway has realized a Sharpe ratio of 0.76, higher than any other stock or mutual fund with a history of more than 30 years, and Berkshire has a significant alpha to traditional risk factors. However, we find that the alpha becomes insignificant when controlling for exposures to Betting-Against-Beta and Quality-Minus-Junk factors. Further, we estimate that Buffett’s leverage is about 1.6-to-1 on average. Buffett’s returns appear to be neither luck nor magic, but, rather, reward for the use of leverage combined with a focus on cheap, safe, quality stocks. Decomposing Berkshires’ portfolio into ownership in publicly traded stocks versus wholly-owned private companies, we find that the former performs the best, suggesting that Buffett’s returns are more due to stock selection than to his effect on management. These results have broad implications for market efficiency and the implementability of academic factors.

Buffett’s record is remarkable in many ways, but just how spectacular has the performance of Berkshire Hathaway been compared to other stocks or mutual funds? Looking at all U.S. stocks from 1926 to 2011 that have been traded for more than 30 years, we find that Berkshire Hathaway has the highest Sharpe ratio among all. Similarly, Buffett has a higher Sharpe ratio than all U.S. mutual funds that have been around for more than 30 years.

We document how Buffett’s performance is outstanding as the best among all stocks and mutual funds that have existed for at least 30 years. Nevertheless, his Sharpe ratio of 0.76 might be lower than many investors imagine. While optimistic asset managers often claim to be able to achieve Sharpe ratios above 1 or 2, long-term investors might do well by setting a realistic performance goal and bracing themselves for the tough periods that even Buffett has experienced.

In essence, we find that the secret to Buffett’s success is his preference for cheap, safe, high-quality stocks combined with his consistent use of leverage to magnify returns while surviving the inevitable large absolute and relative drawdowns this entails. Indeed, we find that stocks with the characteristics favored by Buffett have done well in general, that Buffett applies about 1.6-to-1 leverage financed partly using insurance float with a low financing rate, and that leveraging safe stocks can largely explain Buffett’s performance.

 
Source: Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller and Lasse H. Pedersen, “Buffett’s Alpha.”

Index Investing Unmasked: 96% Of Stocks Are Garbage

  
Analysis, Education
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Warren Buffett released his annual letter over the weekend, in which he praised Jack Bogle as his “hero” for promoting index investing. The irony is that investors would have been better off buying Berkshire shares. Over the last 10 years, Berkshire stock is up 139% while the S&P 500 is up 71%. The real question is why Buffett just doesn’t tout his own stock rather than promote index investing. He tries to explain himself:

 “Charlie and I prefer to see Berkshire shares sell in a fairly narrow range around intrinsic value, neither wishing them to sell at an unwarranted high price – it’s no fun having owners who are disappointed with their purchases – nor one too low.”

Buffett is doing something every skilled salesman does: managing expectations. Buffett’s own performance is compared against the S&P 500, and what better way to win that game than by putting a floor under the Berkshire price with the promise of share buybacks and then putting a ceiling on the stock by promoting index investing? The real secret is Buffett is talking his book by not talking it: Rather than tell investors to buy Berkshire at any price, he tells people to invest passively through an index, which leads to the very market inefficiencies that he profits from.

The great appeal of index investing is its low fees, but like buying a cheap pair of shoes that falls apart after 6 months, investors will find that index investing is the most expensive thing they ever did. Vanguard promotes its rock bottom expense ratios, but what is not published is market impact costs that are incurred when the fund rebalances. Since these rebalances are often announced ahead of time, they are extremely vulnerable to front running. Christophe Bernard, PhD Senior Scientist at Winton Capital Management, estimates that front running costs index investors 0.20% per year. That’s 4 times the official expense ratio of Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF.

In his latest research, finance professor Hendrik Bessembinder discovered that 58% of stocks don’t even outperform a Treasury bill. This study was based on 26,000 stocks from 1926 to 2015. Just 4% of stocks accounted for all of the $31.8 trillion in gains during this period. That means 96% of stocks were complete garbage. Even worse, shares of unprofitable companies outperform their profitable counterparts, which is why you have a marketplace that is dominated by Twitters and Teslas.

Index investing means buying a box of garbage stocks sprinkled with a few hope and glamour stocks whose price gains are solely a result of underperforming fund managers grasping for quarterly bonuses and retail investors juicing up their portfolios in a doomed attempt to catch up on their retirement targets.

While mom and pop buy a Vanguard index with their $500,000 and get front run all day by proprietary traders, the capitalist televangelist Warren Buffett will continue to actively trade billions while preaching the miracle of buy and hold investing.

Warren Buffett Talks Markets, Healthcare, IBM, And Self-Driving Cars: The Key Quotes From Berkshire's "Pilgrimage"

  
Analysis, Education
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With the 52nd Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting – dubbed the “Woodstock for Capitalists” which is “unique in corporate America, a celebration of the billionaire’s image and success” – now in the history books, all that’s left are the quotes and avuncular aphorisms.

While Buffett and Munger covered a wide variety of topics, some headlines made a particular splash, such as Buffett’s statement that markets have a “casino characteristic” and that people “still succumb to speculative impulses”, while ignoring that a far more narrow subset of people will also get bailed out by the government when the speculative impulses lead to massive losses. Speaking of hypocrisy, Buffett also slammed Wells Fargo, of which he is the biggest shareholder, for failing to stop its employees from engaging in the bank’s scandalous cross-selling practices, saying you cannot “incentivize bad behavior”, even as it was Buffett’s support of current management and board that was key to ensuring the re-election of the entire board last month.

None of this had an impact on the thousands of shareholders and “value investors” who conducted their latest annual “pilgirmage” to see and hear the 86-year-old Oracle of Omaha.

 Hundreds of shareholders lined up early outside downtown Omaha’s CenturyLink Center for the meeting. Several said they got there nearly five hours before doors opened around 6:45 a.m.

 “Every year it seems I have to come earlier,” said Chris Tesari, a retired businessman from Pacific Palisades, California who said he arrived at 3:20 a.m. for his 21st meeting. “It’s a pilgrimage.”

While a full breakdown of the day’s main events can be found in the following link, for those pressed for time here is a summary of the key quotes and highlights, courtesy of Reuters:

ON OBAMACARE REPEAL

  • “Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness.
  • “Our health costs have gone up (incredibly) and will go up a lot more … that is a problem this society is having trouble with and is going to have more trouble with. It almost transcends (political party).
  • “If you talk about the world competitiveness of American industry, (health costs are) the biggest single variable where we keep getting more and more out of whack with the rest of the world.
  • “(The Obamacare repeal) is a huge tax cut for guys like me … either the deficit goes up or they get the taxes from someone else.”

ON BERKSHIRE’S DURABILITY

  • “I can’t think of anything that can harm Berkshire in a material, permanent way except weapons of mass destruction.
  • “If that ever happens, there’ll be more to worry about than the price of Berkshire.”

CHARLIE MUNGER ON PUERTO RICO (more…)

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