No. of Recommendations: 19
Seems to me there is at least one remaining question: Who will do the stock picking? The equity portfolio is a substantial part of Berkshire's total value. Who will run it on a day-to-day basis after Mr. Buffett's exit?
Berkshire is too big these days to be impacted meaningfully by conventional stock-picking managers. Where something will make a meaningful impact, a la Apple, it is best approached as an enterprise capital allocation decision to take a substantial business position rather than a conventional portfolio management one.
There is no reason why Abel as CEO can view the stock portfolio as a set of stakes in businesses administered by a person or group of managers ( delegated to Tedd, Tod or anyone else). The CEO can then allocate capital, set hurdle rates and assess performance based on returns produced from this business segment over a period that makes sense ( 5 years at least).
This has been the way Berkshire has run its stock portfolio recently. 75% or so of the portfolio is concentrated in the top 4 or 5 positions and this has been the case for most of the prior decade.
Having had a few of these concerns over the years, I feel more comfortable with the model for the future than I did 5 years ago. Continuing to view stocks through the lens of business ownership is core to the Berkshire approach and I am happy to see it continuing as it is the core job of the CEO.
As an interesting aside, I was at the 2019 AGM in Omaha where Berkshire was trading at around 1.4x BV and most people I talked to expected at best a 8-9% return going forward as it seemed "fairly to richly valued". As it turns out, the stock actually doubled in the next 5 years despite all sorts of Covid related action. it never felt like it though !
