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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)
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Author: DTB ✶  😊 😞
Number: of 22353 
Subject: Re: Barron's ... oops. market not that overpriced
Date: 02/26/25 11:38 AM
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To rebalance you sell winners and buy losers & also-rans.

Anyway, it was easy enough to run your backtest. 50/50 S&P500 and BRK-A. Limited by BRK inception of 3/17/1980.
One portfolio never rebalanced, one annual rebalance.

Starting with $10,000, the B&H grows to $13.5 million, the annual rebalanced grows to $7 million.
CAGRs 17.4% vs. 15.7%


Clearly it is better not to reduce your exposure to a stock like Berkshire that ends up outperforming the S&P, from 1980 to 2025. The question is, is it a good idea to reduce your exposure to stocks that have gone up, overall, some of which will continue to outperform, and others which will fall back because they had become overvalued. Which of these 2 is the more important effect?

Although the maxim 'let your winners run' suggests that you should do that, and this will often work out well, over the universe of all S&P stocks, we know that the right answer is to rebalance. Why? Because the equal weight S&P has outperformed the cap weight S&P over all time periods that are sufficiently long. Not recently, mind you, but even now, if you go back X* years, the equal weight index outperforms. This means that, in general, it has been better to sell the winners and buy more of the losers, however much this might differ from our intuition.

DTB

*I will calculate what the exact number of years X is, but whatever it is the general point stands.
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This community has written 21,861 posts about Berkshire Hathaway. The article-length ones it recommended most:
BRK: Why Not XOM? · 62 recs · 2024
Second quarter comments · 60 recs · 2023
Berkshire's Profit Contributors · 58 recs · 2023
Summary of 2Q 2026 · 55 recs · 2026
3Q Summary · 53 recs · 2024
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