Berkshire Hathaway 2014 Annual Report [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Berkshire Hathaway 2014 Annual Report [pdf]

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138 pointsdluan87 comments

Interesting:

Shortly after we purchased Gen Re, it was beset by problems that caused some commentators --- and me as well, briefly --- to believe I'd made a huge mistake. That day is now long gone. General Re is now a gem.

And, regarding Clayton Homes (their mobile-home manufacturer which also offers mortages both to Clayton homeowners and owners of other manufactured homes):

Many of our buyers how low incomes and mediocre FICO scores.. our blue-collar borrowers have often proved to be much better credit risks than their higher-income brethren.

This is interesting as it is apparently true, by the numbers, and also a slap at investment bankers.

I also love that the person who manages the annual shareholder meetings, "Woodstock for Capitalists", is a 30 year old that was hired 6 years ago.

Also, does anyone have color on went wrong with Tesco? Buffett writes that he lost faith in the management team, which seems like an unusually direct condemnation given all the other way he had to explain their exit from that position.

> This is interesting as it is apparently true, by the numbers, and also a slap at investment bankers.

Usually the "higher-income brethren" are not succumbing to the ethical and moralistic brainwashing regarding defaults, and bankruptcies. For them "bankruptcy" != "I am a lazy, bad, and irresponsible person" it is just a risk calculation in an excel spreadsheet.

> succumbing to the ethical and moralistic brainwashing

Ugh. "brainwashing"? A bankruptcy for a low- or middle income earner would be much more disruptive than it would be to a high-income earner. Your opinion (or how I am reading it) is elitist at the very least.

No, he's saying that high-income people appear to be worse credit risks because they're educated and know that they don't have to "go down with the ship" of untenable debt loads, while low-income people tend to do exactly that; in other words, he's saying it's not a good thing (for the homeowners) that Clayton's low-income home borrowers are better credit risks, but rather a "tell" that Clayton is exploiting those low-income people.

Another possibility is that a higher income means you don't really need credit if you start over, so this is just rational self interest on both sides.

But that's just another hypothesis. I don't think the truth can be found with armchair reasoning; it requires data.

Credit score is independent of income level. The score we use in our insurance risk modeling doesn't care about the amount of money you earn. There is a lot of actuarial papers just demonstrating this. Credit score is often though of something reflecting wealth. It is not the case. It is a score that reflects the likelyness of you defaulting on future obligations.

What parent is saying is that if you have a high income level, it's not the end of the world to pay cash for everything, so you can live with a bad credit score.

You might have to buy a beater while you save for a nice car, but if your income is low the equivalent option is taking the bus.

> A bankruptcy for a low- or middle income earner would be much more disruptive than it would be to a high-income earner

It would be. But I am saying even if even they wouldn't, the higher income earner will have less moral and ethical qualms about walking away.

In other words they would do the math and seeing that their million dollar home is under water, they would throw the keys at the bank and walk away.

While perhaps someone raised and believing in hard work, paying your debts, being fair and responsible, would actually feel like they are letting the bank down or they are violating some core ethical principles, and might lose sleep over it.

I have anecdotal evidence of this from the recent housing bust. One friend who's worth several million walked away from a $700k mortgage when he realized how upside down it was. Another friend who's worth less than $100k stuck with a $300k loan and even doubled down, sunk in her entire life savings to refinance and reduce the ballooning payments. Despite my pleading her reasoning was a moralistic attitude of "I gave my word". The friend that walked away recently bought a new house and is doing better than ever financially while my other friend will be feeling the pain for years.

That makes sense. But "succumbing to the ethical and moralistic brainwashing" makes it sound like you think it's ethically and morally justified to walk away from a loan.

I imagine that he/she is looking at it from the perspective of the high-income person. In that case, defaulting is no more evil than losing money in the stock market or having one's business perform badly this quarter. Sure, the financial impact may be painful, but all parties involved should have been aware of the risks of making the loan.

All of which, while certainly true, still makes them a worse credit risk than the numbers say.

> Also, does anyone have color on went wrong with Tesco?

One of Buffett's claimed keys to success is being able to evaluate management talent^. Since he can't manage all of these business himself, it's important for him to have talented managers running each show. He has specifically built Berkshire to be attractive to this kind of person. E.g., when he makes an acquisition, the old management is left in place and continues to run the business, making it a great way for someone who has built a business from scratch to cash out and yet be sure their baby won't be dismantled, unlike a normal M&A that tends to fire all of upper management and gut half the staff.

So when he says he's lost faith in management, that is quite a serious condemnation. My guess (with no data backing it up) is when Tesco ran into trouble, they tried to feed him a load of crap about it, and he knew it.

^If you have not heard the story of Mrs. Blumkin of Nebraska Furniture Mart, it is well worth it: http://www.focusinvestor.com/Blumkin.pdf

Sure. What's the last position BH exited with an observation about losing faith in the management team? I've been reading these letters for years and the Tesco thing sticks out to me.

Well, he's often said the only reasons he will sell is if a business's competitive advantage disappears, he's lost faith in management, or he needs the cash.

Johnson & Johnson would be one recent (2012) example where I think neither the first nor the third conditions applied (though he only said they'd "obviously messed up in a lot of ways in the last few years" in an interview, and didn't discuss it in the shareholder's letter at all).

Tesco has had accounting issues:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/29/serious-frau...

Tesco also has a hard time competing with Aldi and Lidl:

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1317297/why-tesco-cant...

Tesco had a major accounting scandal: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/29/serious-frau...

Is that it? Gen Re did too, didn't they?

It's difficult to convey how big a deal Tesco's issues have been in the UK–it's had very extensive media coverage, a parliamentary inquiry looks likely, and there are investigations ongoing by the Serious Fraud Office and several regulatory bodies. This has created a distinct lack of goodwill in the general public.

Regardless of the accounting issues, they've had other issues too. There's the perception they're losing their customer base: they're ceding the low end of the market to certain supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, Asda) and the higher end to others (Waitrose, Sainsbury's, M&S), leaving nothing in the middle. So that's a problem for them, and one they'd need effective management to handle.

All of this is potentially salvageable, but it is very uncertain, so I'm not surprised people might not want to invest.

The final thing to remember is that their stores look like shit. There's a tumbler about one near me being the worst Tescos on Earth, a truly frightening point. The way to play this investment is sell while they are about to spend loads of cash for a few years sorting out their stores and then just as this investment picks up you buy back in. Tescos still has lots of potential to be the default UK supermarket again.

There's a Tesco Express near me which is small but was okay until they redesigned it last year and did what I term a WHSmiths: put in shelves almost to the ceiling, thinned the aisles, packed in as much content as possible. It obviously allows more product but makes the shopping experience terrible when there are more than a few people in the store. I avoid it unless there's something on heavy discount that worth's picking up.

Yes, and a nasty derivatives position [0] if memory serves. Buffett also had to get involved after Solomon Brothers [1] had some regulatory improprieties.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/2003/05/09/cx_aw_0509derivatives.html

[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/warren-buffett-and-th...

> went wrong with Tesco?

They blew £1.5 bn trying to expand into China, and £1.8 bn trying to expand into the usa.

also in the UK people are getting poorer and turning from fairly low-end Tesco to discount retailers like Aldi/Lidel.

well there's also slightly upmarket food stores like Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Peckhams, Co-operative which seem to be spreading

Lidl/Aldi just seems like a new business model which we didn't really have before

All the world's economies artificially prop up the market and, surprise, General Re is now a gem and the king still has no clothes on.

Gen Re was purchased decades ago and so the 2008 interventions were not related to makin it a gem. (I am sure that they helped polish the bank balance since but even so ...)

>Many of our buyers how low incomes and mediocre FICO scores.. our blue-collar borrowers have often proved to be much better credit risks than their higher-income brethren.

During economic downturns, people with higher salaries are cut first.

Need a definition for ambition?

With the acquisition of Van Tuyl, Berkshire now owns 9 1⁄2 companies that would be listed on the Fortune 500 were they independent (Heinz is the 1⁄2). That leaves 490 1⁄2 fish in the sea. Our lines are out.

There you go.

It has all of the trappings of a successful slogan: definitional, pithy, & ambitious-sounding enough to make everyone ignore the bad math.

Berkshire itself is on that list, so surely there are only 489.5 to go. :)

A company that contains all companies that do not contain themselves?

That's more learned charm than it is ambition.

I thought it was interesting that Berkshire intentionally hasn't harmonized its systems across subsidiaries. It reminded me of one of Taleb's ideas on robustness from his book Antifragile, where he argues that a system of individually managed municipalities would be more robust than an economy with a single central government because system failure would tend to only affect isolated parts of the overall population at any single point in time.

That goes hand-in-hand with how simple Berkshire's home-office system is, right? It seems like, by design, BH itself does as little as possible. It runs out of a small office suite with something like 30 people. That system can't be harmonized across companies like Geico and Gen Re, even before you realize that those companies run alongside a furniture store and a jeweler.

Classic Warren Buffett: The unconventional, but inescapable, conclusion to be drawn from the past fifty years is that it has been far safer to invest in a diversified collection of American businesses than to invest in securities – Treasuries, for example – whose values have been tied to American currency. That was also true in the preceding half-century, a period including the Great Depression and two world wars. Investors should heed this history. To one degree or another it is almost certain to be repeated during the next century.

Buffett buys boring, but practical businesses. Also, because Berkshire Hathaway owns insurance companies, their "float" can be invested. It has to be invested in low-risk investments, which is just fine with Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway has such a delightfully boring portfolio.

Is "boring" the right word? BH owns a huge chunk of DIRECTV, the whole BNSF railroad (can you imagine how complex that business is to run?), and NetJets.

I think there's a difference between "businesses Warren and Charlie feel like they can get their heads around" and "boring businesses". Also: I don't understand why they bought DIRECTV.

After I recently went through an in-depth review of the unit economics of connecting physical lines to houses in rural Washington (which it turns out is prohibitively expensive to do), I actually have started to appreciate the value of a brand known for giving service to people (without loss of generality) Comcast won't bother with. Quite a lot of America is rural, and quite a few people's joy is less than full with the customer service of their competitors.

I don't think Warren purchased DTV. It's likely purchased by one of his prodigies.

DIRECTV was indeed a purchase by Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, as Buffett wrote in the 2012 Annual Report (p. 15). They operate pretty much autonomously.

I don't see how one fifty year period means the next thirty year period will be the same (the time I need my investments to appreciate to fund my subsequent retirement). Also, as an individual I don't have time to wait-out a 5-10 year bust if I need to retire.

There have been a lot of studies, see for example the book Stocks for the Long Run showing stocks beat bonds over pretty much any 50 year period in history for any country. It's just the nature of things - stocks will have high returns because investors won't invest otherwise and paper money will lose value because governments print more of it. If you asked Buffett's investment recommendation to an individual in the US he'd probably say buy a house on a 30 year fixed mortgage. As he's pointed out in interviews the rates are very good.

I doubt anyone is surprised that stock sees higher returns than Treasury bonds. A Treasury bonds is, arguable, the world's most secure asset. Consequently, it gives you the world's lowest (USD) yield.

Bonds, in general, are loans secured by collateral, while buying stock is just buying a slice of a company. Of course the former will have a lower return, as you only lose your principal if the company defaults. Whereas when you buy stock, you have no such guarantee.

There's a lot of variability. In the U.S., since 1920, there have been periods of up to 20 years in which net stock market returns were negative. Ed Easterling's study was published in The New York Times a few years back (and I believe Easterling updates it periodically):

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...

That is, however, U.S. stock market performance. Other countries have seen much greater volatility and long-term downward trends. Japan's Nikkei average remains at one quarter of its 1990 high, and is at roughly one half its 1995 level:

http://www.intmath.com/exponential-logarithmic-functions/dow...

http://intmstat.com/exponential-logarithmic-functions/nikkei...

That's what he says and while what he says is true, clearly he left out a big part of his strategy.

I thought it was notable that Buffet referred people to Airbnb for lodgings in the Omaha area for the shareholder meeting. Not a guy particularly noted for being on top of trends (note: I am a huge WEB fan in numerous ways, though).

edit: see page 22

Haha yes his love of a good bargain overcame his self-professed technophobia in that case!

I'd guess he's just being modest with his frequent professions of technophobia though. I'd guess he knows a lot about technology businesses, but just figures that it's impossible to see their futures clearly enough for them to meet his standards.

He did forewarn disappointment with the 1999 tech boom, so he can at least spot extreme misvaluation in trendy businesses: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive... (if anyone wants to ctrl+f to the start of the relevant section, it begins with 'I thought it would be instructive')

Of the 15 largest stock investments, IBM is the only one that has lost value (page 15). Simultaneously, it looks like the largest cost based investment (next to BAC, which is unlisted in the table). Yet, he does not seem to address that position in any of his writing. I wonder what he thinks of the company.

He thinks it's good.

http://www.gurufocus.com/StockBuy.php?GuruName=Warren+Buffet...

You can see he's added more to his position as of Dec 31st.

the big IBM drop happened in October.

On page 7 in the 2011 annual report, Buffett wrote that, as a long-term shareholder, he wished for the IBM stock to languish throughout the following 5 years. The reason was that IBM was planning large share repurchases, and the lower the stock price the higher the percentage of shares retired, and the larger Berkshire's stake would be in the long run.

I used to read Berkshire's annual reports - good to see HN discussing them.

If you liked the annual report, take a look at the "Owner's Manual" as well - it is worth a read: http://berkshirehathaway.com/ownman.pdf

>BNSF is, by far, Berkshire’s most important non-insurance subsidiary and, to improve its performance, we will spend $6 billion on plant and equipment in 2015.

That's an incredible amount of capex.

Their site reminds me of the nineties http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

What is with the Geico ad at the bottom?

I actually show this website to clients sometimes to demonstrate that just getting a functional website online is more important than mastering and zeroing in on a perfect logo, perfect color scheme, perfect layout, etc. If you waste all of your time worrying about things that people have extensively varied opinions on (anything with artwork, colors, layout, etc.) you are wasting your time when you could be selling, learning your market, and getting to know your potential customers with a basic yet fully functional website.

I see the Berkshire Hathaway website as being perfectly aimed at the kind of person who goes looking for the Berkshire Hathaway website. It looks frugal and old fashioned, which is exactly the image BH wants to project to their investors.

Contrast to the websites for their consumer brands like Geico.

>Their site reminds me of the nineties

Buffett's always been very conservative about not changing things that don't need changing for example no stock splits in the 50 years, same office for years, same house since 1958, doesn't use a computer at work - emails get printed out and handed to him - the annual report cover looks like it did in '64. I guess keeping things that aren't broken the same frees you up to work on what can be improved.

The Geico ad's new but Buffett often writes about it. It's one of the earliest businesses he's been involved with which he first went to visit in 1952, aged 22. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Business_career )

Their site is great, does exactly what it needs to do.

Geico is a wholly owned subsidiary of BH

They probably have other companies too. Why just Geico and why not list other companies. It seems bit out of place and gives an impression that Geico is doing bad enough that they need to be advertised.

(a) No reasonable investor believes GEICO is doing badly.

(b) GEICO is unique among BH companies in that consumers can purchase its offering immediately upon reading about it. The nearest Dairy Queen is a 30 minute drive away from me, for instance. Look at the list of BH subsidiaries and try to imagine what they'd sell on a 24/7 1-800 number.

I can think of two good reasons:

  1. A Geico sale is worth a lot more than a fruit of the loom sale.
  2. Geico is something that almost anyone visiting the site might use. Most Berkeshire Hatheway visitors own cars and need insurance.

One of the main links is a message from Buffet recommending Geico and Borsheims Jewelry. Jewelry fits the same bill: expensive, and widely purchased.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/message.html

Notably, Borsheim's also operates the type of business where you could conceivably pick up the phone and order immediately upon reading Buffett's recommendation.

HA this site is delightful. As is this entire shareholder's letter.

My dad was always a fan of Warren Buffett, but I never knew much about him.

After reading this, I feel the same way I do about Steven Pinker. What a delightful mind. We are blessed to have people who are both humble and can think clearly.

Here's a good post that highlights some of the takeaways from the annual report: http://25iq.com/2015/02/28/a-dozen-things-taught-by-warren-b...

Gets good at page 26, the chairman discusses how Berkshire Hathaway got started, though really the whole thing is fascinating. I wonder at what point YC will begin to compete with Berkshire Hathaway.

I don't see how they're on comparable trajectories.

Berkshire wins by using a formula that relies on them owning whole businesses with sustainable, predictable returns, ensuring that they're extremely well managed, and backstopping them with a gigantic pile of cash that they can use to roll up other smaller bolt-on companies with.

YC works almost exclusively with unproven, highly speculative new firms, with unproven management teams (many of whom will, after joining YC, hire their first employee ever), owns so little equity in each firm that they don't even get a board vote, and by design avoids further capitalizing companies they bet on.

That doesn't make YC bad; the model seems to work extremely well. It just seems like a very different model.

edit: HN->YC. Embarrassing.

Of course, I don't think it's a direct analogy. But it seems that partly what makes YC successful is also what makes BH successful.

BH also has an extra 50 years on YC, so of course the models don't match up. And I'm not Sam, so I can't speak to whether not YC's ownership or investment models will change over the next 50 years (and yes, I think there's a good chance YC will be around in 50 years). YC is focused on testing and validating its thesis across other industries, but the thesis started in one area. Very much the same with BH.

In other words, if BH's only value is that they can successfully help grow a candy company, an insurance company, and a train shipping company, and YC is able to help grow a fusion company, a hotel industry company, and a home cleaning company, then they are both doing something right. It seems they are both heavily driven by focused principles.

Another great point is that YC and BH don't have traditional competition. See pg 31 starting

"Berkshire has one further advantage that has become increasingly important over the years: We are now the home of choice for the owners and managers of many outstanding businesses."

I guess I just don't see how YC's trajectory takes them to the place where BH is. An investment fund for startups seems sort of like the opposite of a conglomerate of predictably-returning big companies.

> Of course, I don't think it's a direct analogy. But it seems that partly what makes YC successful is also what makes BH successful.

In what way? Yes, they both invest in companies, and the investments represent people trying to figure out how to make money and beat their competitors. But there are a lot of differences in the details (Buffet has a source of stable income that people trust him to reinvest; Y Combinator makes money sporadically when other investors decide to buy their companies). They're about as similar -- to me -- as football and bowling. Sure, both sports have balls, but there are a few relevant differences.

I feel like I should add http://www.econ.yale.edu/~af227/pdf/Buffett%27s%20Alpha%20-%... (alpha is supposed to measure how much better a manager does compared to the market, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_%28investment%29 ).

Compared to ordinary investors, Buffet's alpha is consistently high. He looks like a genius. But if you change the definition of alpha based on his strategy, his alpha ends up being much lower. Personally, I don't think that diminished Buffet in any way: he came up with the strategy, after all; but it does show that his investments work because he's doing something different than the competition.

And, again, Y Combinator is also doing something different than the competition (or at least, different from what the competition was doing when YC launched), but it's also doing something wildly different from Berkshire Hathaway. BH invests in a small number of mature companies, YC invests in many small and risky companies. I would be interested to see what kind of personalized alpha YC manages to get (and, even, what kind of generic alpha they have). I don't know if they publish their investment numbers, so I don't know if it would be possible to calculate.

It takes good hand-eye coordination to throw a touchdown and bowl a strike.

YC's investment thesis is that there will be many more startups in the future than there are now; at some point in a generation or so, the economy may be all startups, and every company we know of today with "sustainable, predictable returns" will have been eaten by a disrupter.

IMHO, there is reason to believe this is plausible. Injecting my own interpretations - the proportion of startups to established businesses in an economy is dependent upon a.) the pace of change and b.) the degree of interconnectedness in the economy [because when firms are tightly connected, there is a high chance that future technological developments will invalidate fundamental assumptions that existing firms' existence is based upon, while when firms are generally siloed and vertically integrated, they are unlikely to be affected by the entry of new firms into the market]. Both of these variables are increasing rapidly today. That's going to put increasing evolutionary pressure on existing old-line industries, such that we may see a mass-extinction event in the near future where a number of prominent industries all go down en-masse.

What Berkshire and YC have in common is a full appreciation for the effect of compound interest and a willingness to employ that capital by putting their fingers in an increasing number of pies.

I think you mean YC, not HN.

As others have pointed out, I don’t think Berkshire Hathaway and YC really compete in the same markets. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have some great words of wisdom on their approach to investing, but I am reminded of two of quotes in particular: “Our favorite holding period is forever” and “Never invest in a business you can’t understand”. Berkshire looks for long term returns by making safe, reliable investments.

This is the exact opposite of YC and other startup incubators. Their approach is to invest in newer companies with great potential, but also great risk of failure. The business models of these companies are not always clear.

From a personal level (I live in Omaha), I find it interesting to contrast Berkshire Hathaway and YC from a cultural perspective. YC is located in Silicon Valley, while Berkshire has its headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. When asked about why he stays in Omaha, Buffett said "It's very easy to think clearly here. You're undisturbed by irrelevant factors and the noise generally of business investments."

Silicon Valley’s culture is the opposite of Omaha in many respects. Companies are concerned about chasing the latest and greatest trends even if many founders don’t complete understand those trends. Startups aren’t thinking about the next 10 or 20 years, they are more concerned about their next round of funding.

The success of Berkshire Hathaway demonstrates a valuable point: Silicon Valley isn’t the center of the world. Plenty of successful companies thrive in backwoods locations like Omaha. This isn’t meant to say Omaha’s culture is superior to Silicon Valley’s, they are just different. Diversity is a good thing.

Not to pile on with the other replies, but I just wanted to point out yet another difference in the investment models. The BH approach, as I understand it, can be summarized as "Find a good thing and get a lot of it". They find what they consider to be sure things and make really big bets.

YC is just about the opposite. "Find extremely risky things that have huge upside, and invest a very small amount". Both models are great and have proven to be quite profitable. Though to me, YC seems to be much more altruistic. At least currently, they appear to be much more interested in helping people to start successful companies than they are making themselves rich(er). I don't know exactly what pg's motivations for starting yc were, but it looks like it was something along the lines of "Starting a company was a risky decision when I did it , and I want to help others to have an easier time than I did" as opposed to "Gimme gimme gimme money". As a result YCombinator and Berkshire Hathaway probably won't be in direct competition for quite some time, as they are optimizing for different results.

Altruistic? I can take ~$147 and purchase a share of BRKB, putting BH to work for me and sharing in the company's profit. How can I get a piece of that sweet YC action?

A $200B company needs to make big bets to move the needle. The limiting resource at Berkshire is Warren Buffett's time. For most people, spending a few hours on a million-dollar deal is the move of a lifetime. For Buffett, it's a few wasted hours.

What about the BH model makes you think they aren't interested in helping people? They pretty routinely buy companies that have very little other alternatives and make them MUCH more successful.

If anything their model seems less exploitative to me...

Over the last 50 years (that is, since present management took over), per-share book value has grown from $19 to $146,186, a rate of 19.4% compounded annually.

Insanity.

1,826,163% growth in stock price is quite a performance...

A measly 1,826,163% since 1964. SELL.

If I'm doing the math right, that's only about 16% annualized ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return#Geometric_averag... ). Which, for the record, is much better than I've ever done. But Buffet is being a little sneaky there: it's really a good example of compound interest over long time periods.

It's not sneaky. This is the way returns are calculated in the industry. 1.09 * 1.09 * 1.09 would be 3 years of 9% returns compounded. In the same way if the total return over 3 years is 50% you take the cube root of 1.5 to figure out what return each year would give you the same. In this 50% over 3 years example it would be around 14.5% a year.

I've certainly seen journalists give out such a simplistic number, usually phrased as "$1 invested when the company went public would be worth $XXX today." And when the numbers are presented in a chart, it shows basically the same thing (often labeled the "growth of $1" or "growth of $100"). But when the numbers show up in a table, they are annualized. That allows you to compare the different cells in the table ( http://blog.greaterthanzero.com/post/57991351347/measuring-i... ).

Sneaky? The first thing in the report is returns broken down by year

Your math is wrong - it's a 21.6% annualized gain.

Thanks. I don't know why, but I annualized for 65 years, instead of the correct 50.

Buffett claims he can achieve 50% annual growth if he had less money to invest. Berkshire as it is now is currently too big to achieve 50% growth.

Lol, shoulda locked those profits when you could!

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