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“Never invest in a business you cannot understand.”

• mromanuk 8y ago
  or "never invest in a business you consider bs"
  • tabtab 8y ago
    Which ones are not BS? Something tells me a fully honest company would not survive, just like honest politicians don't survive.
• tabtab 8y ago
  Buffett is a numbers guy: he likes to see the numbers coming in and numbers going out. He follows the insurance market closely because insurance is about probabilities: numbers. Technology is more about standards, integration, trade-off balancing, and dealing with change; things that are hard to put numbers on. His firm got burned by IBM, so he's extra jittery dealing with "big tech" now. IBM created this program to better track and maximize revenue by cranking up revenue incentives for middle managers. It looked good on paper: fine-tune the reporting of and increase incentives. But their customers began to feel squeezed and milked. You can often gain short-term revenue by skimping on customer service, and eventually customers revolted, damaging IBM's cred.
  • basch 8y ago
    marketing, naming, bundling, network effects, sla's. theres a lot more to tech than tech.
• sizzzzlerz 8y ago
  Buffet used to be very averse to investing in technology companies because of that very reason. He has evidently educated himself since he is very heavy into both IBM and Apple, less so into Red Hat and Sirius. His investment into Oracle and subsequent dumping is very unique in the annals of BH since his other tenet has always been to buy something and then hold on to it. To sell such a large investment so quickly screams that he found something he was very uncomfortable with in Oracle.