No. of Recommendations: 13
Also Todd and Ted buy tech stocks. The BRK culture isn't allergic to it.
Maybe not now, but even the Apple purchase took a long time to execute. They had several hurdles to get past (nothing wrong with that) that included very Berkshire things like “major consumer brand”, “moat”, “predictable earnings far into the future”, “big enough cap so shares could be both purchased or divested without causing fluctuation”,and several other things which I forget at the moment (couple of articles I read a few months ago).
And then it had to go through the exercise again. And then again. Quarter after quarter. Perhaps year after year. By that time a lot of appreciation had, uh, appreciated - although there was still gas in the tank, to be sure.
I would submit that most of the (so called) Magnificent 7 could have passed the test (Facebook? Google? Microsoft? Amazon?) and could have sucked up a ton of those stacks of Benjamins people are (still) complaining about. The only ones of those 7 I would have put in the “speculative” category are Tesla and Nvidia, which ironically did the best (stock wise) during that period when they would have failed the “predictable” hurdle.
Although I found a few faults in the article, mostly I agree with the premise: there have been 3 periods: Buffett 1.0 (cigar butts), Buffett 2.0 (consumer goods, moat, etc), and Buffett 3.0 (missing tech.) It will be interesting to see what happens without Warren’s heavy hand on the tiller over the next decade. I suspect things will be at least a little different.
