Has Warren Buffett Lost His Touch?
The Oracle of Omaha has been underperforming the S&P 500 by 17% in 2020
You’ve probably heard all of the arguments before:
“Warren Buffett is washed up.”
“He’s past his prime.”
“He manages too much money to find good deals anymore.”
And with Berkshire Hathaway underperforming the S&P 500 by 17% halfway into 2020, I understand the sentiment. However, this isn’t the first time that people have questioned Warren Buffett’s competence as an investor.
In December 1999, during the height of the dot-com bubble, Barron’s released an article titled, “What’s Wrong, Warren?” that questioned whether Buffett (then 69) had become an old man who was out of touch with the shiny new internet economy, in contrast to VCs who were more than exuberant and pumped nearly 40% of their investments into internet startups before the dawn of Y2K. And it wasn’t just the professionals who wanted in: Between the mid-to-late-’90s amateur investors day-traded their way to becoming overnight millionaires via rampant speculation on explosive tech stocks.
If you had purchased Berkshire stock on December 27, 2002 you would have underperformed the S&P 500 by 2%…
