83% of Warren Buffett's $365B Portfolio Is Invested in Just 7 Stocks

From the 2022 letter, heading "Secret Sauce":

> In August 1994 – yes, 1994 – Berkshire completed its seven-year purchase of the 400 million shares of Coca-Cola we now own. The total cost was $1.3 billion – then a very meaningful sum at Berkshire.

> The cash dividend we received from Coke in 1994 was $75 million. By 2022, the dividend had increased to $704 million. Growth occurred every year, just as certain as birthdays. All Charlie and I were required to do was cash Coke’s quarterly dividend checks. We expect that those checks are highly likely to grow.

> American Express is much the same story. Berkshire’s purchases of Amex were essentially completed in 1995 and, coincidentally, also cost $1.3 billion. Annual dividends received from this investment have grown from $41 million to $302 million. Those checks, too, seem highly likely to increase.

These are positions that have matured and paid for themselves years ago.

Buffett drinks five cokes a day and has said 25% of his body is coke. I haven't read his biography yet but I've heard that his family has never seen him drink water.

Boring has low capital expenditures. You don't need to keep pouring money in to maintain the product. They're also sticky, stable goods that people will keep buying no matter what. They're also able to grow stably year over year.

>I'm surprised they have this much in 'assets' tied to 'not sexy + boring' things like "not the best foods/drinks for you"

I can't tell if this is moral surprise or purely financial surprise. It certainly doesn't seem surprising financially, right? It seems very normal, surely. I can't speak on the nuances of how good an idea it is, but it certainly seems like a "normal" thing to bet big on. But even morally it's only even a little surprising if you have some reason to believe that Buffett is an unusually moral person (like, very very unusually).

There's not a big incentive for thoughtful investors to jump in to conversations centered around "investing = gambling", "why bother because efficient market hypothesis", etc.

It's a fun question to speculate about why that is. My guess is that most of the hacker type people who've grown wealthy (and therefore had disposable income to invest with) in the last 20 years were generally conservative people (i.e. people working at BigTech for 6+ years).

It's perhaps ironic that the source of their outsized wealth was effectively a concentrated bet against the efficient market hypothesis and passive investing strategies.

Much harder than having a healthy discussion over C++ vs Rust (which is already borderline impossible).

A lot of the people here make it seem like they are the type of engineers who make $300k-$3m/yr total comp with stocks and probably don't have to worry about money a lot. They are either super high level engineers, managers, founders who have done well. They probably "fire and forget" into some boring index funds and call it a day. I don't think the "wise" hacker is really attracted to known risk/gambling. A lot of hackers just want to ticker and probably get turned off talking about money. It's probably frowned upon, as if you brought it at a dinner table basically?