The idea that Buffet (& his ptr Munger) bring anything good to the table is a fricken joke. You'd be better off hiring a dart-throwing gorilla. Don't believe me? For all their bluster and homespun common sense, they've routinely been bested by the SP500. And not by a little!
That's right; you'd have done way better just purchasing an index fund. So should these guys shut the f-ck up, retire and get out of the news? Are you having trouble answering this? Too complicated for you?
Some of my favorites quotes:
Buffet: “What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things," Like investing with you? Right?
"At age 92 and 99, Messrs. Buffett and Munger remain as sharp as ever", said Chris Bloomstran, president of Semper Augustus Investments Group. Chris...you're an idiot. Sorry, I meant a razor sharp idiot.
Need more data? Check out the link:
Warren Buffett Retains Sense of Optimism at Berkshire’s Annual Meeting
The acclaimed investor and his lieutenants express skepticism about AI, tout U.S. superiority
By Akane Otani, WSJ
Updated May 6, 2023 2:18 pm ET
OMAHA, Neb.—It has been a tumultuous year since Warren Buffett last took the stage to talk to his company’s shareholders.
Markets swooned. Tensions between the U.S. and China rose to new heights. And three U.S. banks toppled in quick succession, raising fears about the potential for wider fallout in the financial system.
Through it all, Mr. Buffett retained his sense of optimism.
Sure, society has changed significantly since he bought his first stock at age 11 in 1942. But the basic rules of investing have stayed the same, he said.
“What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things,” he said at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting Saturday. “In the 58 years we’ve been running Berkshire, I’d say there has been a great increase in the number of people doing dumb things.”
Mr. Buffett, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire, addressed a crowd of thousands who gathered in an arena to hear him and his lieutenants speak. The famed investor has used his company’s annual meeting as an opportunity to muse on everything from share buybacks to activist investors to corporate taxes, as well as more philosophical topics, like the meaning of a good life.
The country isn’t perfect, he said. It faces huge challenges, including a government that appears to have become increasingly tribalistic, he added. But if he had a chance to start life all over and pick when and where he’d be born, he would without a doubt pick the U.S. today, he said.
“The world is overwhelmingly short-term focused,” Mr. Buffett said. “I’d love to be born today and go out with not too much money and hopefully turn it into a lot of money.”
Mr. Buffett and his right-hand-man, Charlie Munger, also addressed the rise of artificial intelligence. Programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are able to generate humanlike responses to questions, have become increasingly popular—as well as controversial—in recent months.
Artificial intelligence will no doubt disrupt many industries in the years to come, Mr. Munger said. But he expressed skepticism of what he called the hype surrounding the field.
“I think old fashioned intelligence works pretty well,” said the Berkshire vice chairman.
At age 92 and 99, Messrs. Buffett and Munger remain as sharp as ever, said Chris Bloomstran, president of Semper Augustus Investments Group, at a conference on value investing held by Gabelli Funds on Friday. The two men, plus Berkshire lieutenants Ajit Jain and Greg Abel, are slated to answer roughly 60 questions from the public over the course of several hours Saturday.
It doesn’t matter if they wind up answering one question or 20, Mr. Bloomstran said. “We just take each of these years that we still get as a victory, because it’s been one of the greatest pleasures” in life to get to come to Omaha every year and hear them speak, he added.
The tone was less celebratory outside the convention center early Saturday, where pilots for Berkshire-owned NetJets, dressed in uniform, held up signs in protest of company executives, who they say have failed to meaningfully address conditions leading to a shortage of workers.
Shareholders present for the meeting mostly strode past, seeming to have other things on their mind. This year, like in previous years, many lined up well before sunrise in the hopes of being able to secure the best seats inside the convention center. (Access to parking on site opened at 3:30 a.m.)
Hotels closest to the convention center where the meeting takes place are frequently booked out months in advance. Last year, 90% of hotel rooms in the county were filled on the Friday and Saturday nights during the weekend of Berkshire’s meeting, according to Jasmyn Goodwin, vice president of marketing and communications for Visit Omaha.
Car rentals are scarce, too. At a Hertz counter in Omaha’s airport on Thursday, one couple was stunned when they were told the last remaining cars available for the weekend would cost them about $500 a day.
To many, the voyage is worth it. Although shareholders can watch a live stream of the annual meeting online, many still choose to come to Omaha anyway to network with other shareholders, stroll through the sprawling exhibition hall that sells Berkshire subsidiaries’ goods and catch up with friends.
“I’ve been coming since 2012, and I hope I’ll continue coming when I’m Charlie’s age,” Adam Mead, author of a book on the history of Berkshire, said at the value investing conference Friday.
Berkshire kicked off Saturday’s proceedings by releasing its results for the first quarter. The company reported net income of $35.5 billion, or $24,377 a class A share equivalent. That was up from $5.58 billion, or $3,784 a class A share equivalent, a year earlier.
Operating earnings, which exclude some investment results, rose to $8.07 billion from $7.04 billion last year, boosted by big gains in Berkshire’s insurance underwriting business.
Mr. Buffett has long told the company’s shareholders that they should ignore net income and focus instead on Berkshire’s operating earnings, which he feels are a better reflection of how Berkshire is doing. Because accounting rules require the company to include unrealized gains and losses from its massive investment portfolio in its net income, that figure can rise substantially if markets jump, even if performance at Berkshire’s underlying businesses hasn’t changed much.
Berkshire reported investment gains of $34.8 billion in the first quarter, compared with losses of $1.7 billion in the year-earlier period. The S&P 500 rose 7% in the first three months of the year, thanks to investors betting on the Federal Reserve getting closer to finishing its interest-rate increases.
Meanwhile, Berkshire ended the quarter with $130.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents, up slightly from around $128.6 billion at the end of 2022. The company’s insurance business provides it billions of dollars in float—money it holds to pay insurance claims in the future that it can meanwhile put to work in investments and acquisitions.
Berkshire tapped into that cash pile to go on a buying spree in the first half of 2022, but it has slowed down its pace of stock purchases since then. For the second straight quarter, the company was a net seller of stock, unloading $13.3 billion in shares while buying $2.9 billion.
Write to Akane Otani at akane.otani@wsj.com
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