DaveinHackensack

Buying Berkshire

Imagine what Berkshire would be trading at today had Buffett dumped all of his housing and financial stocks before the burst of the credit/real estate bubble. Judging from the posts on GuruFocus over the last couple of years, it seems like a fair number of individual investors got burned buying those stocks simply because they were trading for less than what Buffett paid for them.

Perhaps I'm alone in this opinion, but I think Berkshire would be better off if Buffett stopped investing in publicly traded stocks. Since he has constraints on his stock investing due to Berkshire's size, and since he himself has acknowledged that Berkshire will probably generate higher returns from its wholly owned companies going forward, why not just focus on those and special situations?

That said, I still own a few of the b-shares, and am fairly bullish on them. I think we'll see an upturn after hurricane season is over.