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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

You can always just let someone else do the research and buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway has under-performed the S&P 500 for >10 years now. And one of the main reasons why they're doing so well at all is probably because they have a sizeable holding of AAPL.

i don't think it has. also, it has less volatility.

As of late 2021, if you invested ten years back:

* https://seekingalpha.com/article/4423498-berkshire-hathaway-...

Note: price only comparison. S&P 500 funds generally give dividends (which can be re-invested). The (very) recent pull back has evened things out a bit:

> Over the past year, Berkshire is up 33%, double the gain in the S&P 500. The stock is now ahead of the S&P 500 over the past 10 years, 15.4% annualized versus 14.5% for the index, but still behind in the past five years, 13.3% annualized against 14.9% for the index.

* https://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffetts-berkshire-h...

Ten years can be a long slog to stick with a particular stock if your future retirement / financial future depends on it.

The article is all about the really long overview though. It is basically arguing that the market gaining is not a given. See the Japan example starting around 1990. That was over 30 years ago. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway 20 years back, it is clearly beating out the S&P500 by a lot.

> Ten years can be a long slog to stick with a particular stock if your future retirement / financial future depends on it.

Agreed. I hope to not be very invested in the stock market when I only have 10 years of work left. Seems too risky.

How do you define volatility? How can a market weighted index of the top 500 publicly listed US companies be more volatile than a single company? Which itself is 25%+ invested in a single other company and then the rest spread out over a handful of other companies.

Edit: also, BRK’s outsize AAPL investment is the only reason BRK is even close to keeping up with SP500 index.

Volatility is a statistical measurement. It's calculated by:

1. Find the mean of the data points

2. Calculate the difference between each data value and the mean (variance)

3. Square those variances

4. Add the squared variances together

5. Divide the sum of the squared variations by the number of data values

You are just buying Apple shares by proxy

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