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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Investor2 who wrote (4496)	4/14/1999 12:25:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 15132

Finally some sanity: news.com Warren Buffett balks at Net investing By Reuters Special to CNET News.com April 14, 1999, 8:00 a.m. PT PARIS--Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said today that he has no interest in buying Internet or high-technology stocks, because he has no notion of whether the companies will be successful in the years to come. "I simply can't look at high-tech companies, Internet companies, and say with a high degree of assurance where those companies will be in 10 years," he told a news briefing here. "We have no positions in high-tech stocks and we won't have." He said there would no doubt be some large successes, but the number of failures would outnumber them, and these could include companies with very substantial market capitalizations now. Buffett said his rule was to invest only in things he thought he understood. Just as he did not understand speculation in cocoa beans, he could not fathom speculation in Internet stocks. "I'm not smart enough to be in that particular game," said Buffett, one of the world's most successful investors, who manages Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway. He acknowledged that his company's performance might have been better last year if it had invested in the booming high-tech stocks but said he was not concerned about missing out. "If I can't make money in things I understand, how can I make money in things I don't understand?" he said. Buffett was in Paris to outline the European business plan for jet leasing firm Executive Jet, which Berkshire Hathaway bought in 1998 for $725 million. He declined to elaborate on comments he made in London on Monday that Berkshire was buying a UK-based stock, repeating that that he would declare which company it was when legally required to do so. Given Berkshire Hathaway's size, now worth more than $100 billion, he said investments had to be large enough to generate enough return to have an impact on Berkshire's market value. "We really concentrate on investments where we can put at least $500 million. We own typically maybe five percent of a company; that means we have to deal with a company with a market capitalization of $10 billion or bigger," he said.