No. of Recommendations: 25
Why would anyone suggest they are no longer interested in elephants? They are. And that's what the cash is for, at around the same scale (relative to the size of the firm) as always.
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It’s not that they are no longer interested; Warren says (words to the effect) there are no large acquisitions available anymore of the size that would move the needle.
Well, sure, but if you take out "moves the needle" then no, it's not something that he said, so it's not relevant. There are still large investment possibilities available, and investing in those takes money. Good solid investments which aren't explosively successful (a) are really good, provided there are extremely few losers among them and (b) even boring big investments need the dry powder.
The simple average one year return among S&P 500 firms in my database is 16.69%.
29.5% of those stocks had negative returns, ranging from -.19% down to -50.67%.
Now, imagine you could simply skip investing in a randomly selected 20 of the many losers, and invested equally in all the other 480 companies for the same one year period.
I tried this, and the average one year return rose to 22.1%, an increase of 5.4%.
Admittedly that's only one run, but it shows the general idea: merely avoiding a few losers, but having no particular skill at all at picking (or being able to buy) winners, will generally give rise to markedly superior results. This is a very much underappreciated advantage to Berkshire's capital allocation skills.
Jim
