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>"Good article and the principle is sound, but the postscript is that Buffett wound up losing Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders $1 billion by betting against th
by xiaoma 17y ago
>"Good article and the principle is sound, but the postscript is that Buffett wound up losing Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders $1 billion by betting against the dollar."
That's incredibly unfair. Buffet has absolutely crushed the market. The S&P500 is down 22% over the past decade, the Nasdaq is down 50% and Buffet is up 150%. Check over the past two decades and the S&P has approximately doubled, the Nasdaq has slightly less than quadrupled what it was and Berkshire Hathaway is worth fifteen times its 1990 value.
People who bought Berkshire right after this piece was published beat 99.9% of the market and every single widely followed pundit I know of.
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Logarithmic&chdeh=1&chdet=1266236606437&chddm=998614&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=INDEXSP:.INX;INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC&cmptdms=0;0&q=NYSE:BRK.A&ntsp=0 http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
- dreyfiz 17y agoIt's unfair to point out that Buffett made a bad trade that lost a billion dollars? Regardless of his status as the foremost investor of probably _all time_, he was empirically wrong on this one, and the article was about him talking down the dollar, so it's not unfair to point out that he lost a billion dollars putting his money where his mouth was.
- xiaoma 17y agoIt's unfair to leap on a single mistake and say it was the postscript of his essay. He also bought Petro China as part of his strategy to deal with a weakening dollar around the same time and by when he was selling it 2007, it had earned several billion. It is also worth pointing out that the essay dealt with China specifically, and that the RMB has appreciated against the dollar in the time since (and will more as the government relaxes its peg).
- dreyfiz 17y agoIn fact, Buffett is the first to admit his mistakes and apologize to Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders, each and every year he seems to apologize for one monumental fuckup after another.