Subject: When Owning Berkshire Makes You Feel Dumb
I PROMISE my final rant :)! But to those who may be more recent partners/investors..a few thoughts about owning this business and how you may feel now and WHY…

A few times over the past 30 years — maybe three in total — I’ve felt really dumb owning Berkshire Hathaway. It seemed like everyone else was winning except me.

Looking back, those moments all occurred, not coincidentally, during “momentum markets” — periods when markets weren’t necessarily euphoric, but when the investor mix shifted heavily toward the short-term. In other words, a stock that went up yesterday, last week, and last month had a good chance of rising again this morning. And usually, it did.

The toughest stretch for me was around 1999. The consensus at the time — partly right, but wildly overstated — was that “everything’s different now.” The thinking went like this: Buffett and Graham’s approach to valuing businesses was obsolete because we were entering a connected, online world. Value wasn’t about earnings or balance sheets anymore — it was about clicks, page views, and “eyeballs.”

Sound familiar?

The internet then is the AI of today. In both cases, yes — it is the future. But just as few believed that Cisco’s valuation could possibly be justified by future profits back then, few today believe Nvidia’s current valuation implies anything realistic. Even Sam Altman — who arguably has the best view of AI — has said outright: there’s an AI bubble. And no one even argues with him!

Markets right now are dominated by short-term players. The explosion of new triple-levered ETFs tells you everything you need to know — that’s one-day investing. It’s the same psychology as 1999: “Nvidia went up yesterday, so I’ll own it for the next three hours.”

I’ll admit — in 1999, I actually started to question myself. It felt like everyone was getting rich except me. Maybe WE were the ones who didn’t get it. Maybe P/Es, trailing revenues, and balance sheets really were outdated. I remember calling two of the smartest people I knew — friends I hadn’t talked to in years — and each of us said the same thing:

“Yeah, I’m missing this rally too. You feel dumb too? You know what… I don’t think we’re all wrong. I think the investment world is crazy.”

That call helped me stay the course. And I’m glad it did. Because what I’ve learned since is simple:

When owning Berkshire makes you feel dumb, the next one, two, or three years usually turn out to be very very rewarding.

The real danger for Berkshire shareholders isn’t that someone “knows something we don’t.” It’s assuming the lack of stock movement must mean trouble inside the business. It doesn’t. The “problem” is simply that the stock is flat — and in a short-term market, that’s reason enough for traders to ignore it.

Don’t be fooled. Read Morgan Housel’s sage advice: Understand the game YOU’RE playing — and that it’s not being played today. The highly odds-favored long game is played by fewer players—now.

This current game — the one dominated by momentum, leverage, and narrative — always ends the same way: badly, and often abruptly. And when it does, it usually ends in rotation — from hype and excess back into real value.

That’s when patience finally pays. We were rewarded very nicely after that period in the late ‘90s when in the early 2000s the bubbie burst & recession hit. And we made a lot of money. And it’ll happen again.