IN 24 YEARS (SINCE 1974)BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY UP MORE THAN DELL. I just didn't go back far enough in time. Remember 1974: the Arabs had just quadrupled the price of oil,newspaper headlines proclaimed "stagflation" interest rates were the highest since the civil war. The first money market/asset management funds had just been invented people kept their money in t-bills and the greatest bear market since the Great Depression was underway. Berkshire Hathaway was at $40 a share--not $400 folks--but YES $40!!! Two weeks ago it was $80,000. Is that not a gain of over 20,000% ?
Also Consider : if you had invested $10,000 in Warrren Buffet as early as 1956 in his limited partnership before it became Berkshire you would've had $125 million by 1995 and 250 million plus today, asssuming in 1969 you took your origninal investment (then worth $160,000)and bought 3,900 shares of BRKA then at $41 per share. What is the percent gain to go from 10 grand to 250 mil? I can't do it in my head. (Source for these stats is Roger Lowenstein's "Buffet:The Making of An American Capitalist.")
None of this is to disparage Dell In fact I hope Dell does just as well in the next 20 years!!! Berkshire and Dell are my two major holdings. (I have just a little spare change in Yahoo.)
Michael Dell and Warren Buffet
one could invest one's money in much worse ways.
some of you Dellheads should consider the Berkhire Class B shares. Don't you think Buffet looks at his pal Bill Gates and Michael Dell and some of the other tech stock moguls (he professes not to understand hi tech stuff, not finding it predictable enough to give him a margin of safety) don't you think he looks at them and gets jealous and just a little pissed off.
Buffet at 67 has said he wants to do something great, not just a good idea but a great one. He's ready to hit a really big home run before he dies, you wait and see. Berkshire Class B is also great for diversifcation: you become a proxy owner of Coke, American Express, Gillette. etc.
cheers
jhg |
