Another possible contributing factor: Famous firms like BH are able to use their notoriety to access reliable and valuable information (e.g. “is the management

Another possible contributing factor: Famous firms like BH are able to use their notoriety to access reliable and valuable information (e.g. “is the management team any good?”). I’m sure a lot of people would love to wow Buffett with their astute insights into great values in their industry. (In the same way that a famous VC might be inundated with emails about the next hot thing.) You’d still have to work through a lot of chaff to find patterns. At least you’d have the raw material to find patterns, though. The initial Tiny deal that was discussed relied heavily on the investor’s personal knowledge of the firm’s operators. This is similar in that it is an information asymmetry story. A counterexample to this is the relatively early National Indemnity deal cited by the author in the opening of the piece. If Tiny is, indeed, recognizing outsized returns then that would also count against the importance of this factor.