No. of Recommendations: 12
Calling it straight up: this is outcome bias in its purest form.
You’re judging a past risk-management decision using today’s price chart. That’s not investing — that’s hindsight bravado.
Apple had grown to over 40% of Berkshire’s entire equity portfolio.
Far be it for me to invoke “mutual funds” and “regulations” in defense of the Apple sale, but those funds have limits on position size to protect customers in the event of sudden lurches and bumps in any one particular equity position. Those regulations did not just fall from the sky, they came into being decades ago thanks to abuses and collapses of fund vehicles.
Now that doesn’t mean that Berkshire, which is emphatically *not* a “fund” (well, kind of), should play by those rules, but it does mean that “position size” and “risk” are very real attributes, and if the guy at the top thinks 40% is “too big”, I’m willing to not criticize that move - even if it turns out to have been premature.
Not a big deal. Big enough for a thread on some message board somewhere, I suppose, but not in real life.
