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Comment by ZoeZoeBee | Hacker News Reader

Berkshire Hathaway was down 12% last year, has under-performed the S&P 500 for five years running, bought Apple North of $100, and are heavily invested in the railroads via Burlington Northern which has seen freight revenue dropping for over a year. Which part of this is not true?

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> Berkshire Hathaway was down 12% last year

It's easy to cherry pick dates to suit your argument.

  12 months leading to end of 2015: down 12%
  24 months leading to end of 2015: up 11%
  36 months leading to end of 2015: up 40%
  
  ~5.5 months between end of 2015 and today: up 8%

Was your statement true? Yes. Misleading? Even more so.

Your other statements... well maybe you're 100% right and not even misleading on those, but after choosing such a bad statement for your lede I'm not going to bother looking them up.

Edit: Actually I was curious enough to look into one more of your "facts". According to Business Insider, S&P 500 doesn't even come close to beating B.H. But maybe you have better data than them. http://static2.uk.businessinsider.com/image/54f4d8a6dd08955d...

Last year refers to 2015, Jan 1st 2015 = $151 Dec 28 end of year 2015 = $133 Not misleading at all.

>Berkshire Hathaway’s poor performance in 2015 is noticeable due to the huge underperformance relative to the market. But a closer look at the performance of the company over the past three years suggests that this is something that has been going on for some time. Berkshire Hathaway has actually significantly underperformed the market over the past five years, with a return of 61.4% vs. 71.4% for the S&P 500 Growth Index (the index tracks the performance of large-cap U.S. securities with growth characteristics). http://amigobulls.com/articles/has-berkshire-hathaway-lost-i...

Your Business Insider Chart is a chart of a price index from the day he took over Berkshire, things aren't what they used to be, it was my bad that I did not preface Growth Index, but your conclusion that the first statement was misleading is completely incorrect

Is there any stock or asset that would beat the S&P500 on an absolute basis for all time periods? No. Therefore you can play this game with every single asset class, without exception. It doesn't mean anything, and that is why your comment is misleading. Just looking at a selected time-range and finding underperformance doesn't tell you anything at all about the historic performance of an asset.

Over the last 5 years Berkshire has underperformed the S&P 500 Growth

http://amigobulls.com/articles/has-berkshire-hathaway-lost-i...

Certainly the last 5 years tells more of a trend than historic performance. My facts are correct and Berkshire has been on the decline for a while, my opinion its certainly not worthy of being downvoted

Why cherry-pick 5 years? Just look at their performance since inception. It is clearly laid out in their 13F. The company has trounced the S&P over such a long-term it is pretty incredible actually.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2015ar/2015ar.pdf

1964-2015, the S&P500 returned 11,355% and BRK returned 1,598,284%.

p.s. not downvoting you, just disagreeing.

It's not cherry picking the last 5 years its looking at the trend, rather than historical returns of a company to see the direction it is heading.

In my comment I confirm that you were correct to say that it went down 12% in the 2015 calendar year. Correct, but incredibly misleading.

But it wasn't misleading, rather it was you misreading

I didn't misread. If you look at my first reply to you I said this:

> 12 months leading to end of 2015: down 12%

Quite clearly I understood what you meant. And then I explained why the fact you picked was misleading. Not untrue, just misleading.

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