PARADOX: Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK)

Posted on May 11, 2025 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Vitaliy Katsenelson CFA

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I am back from what has become over the past two decades an annual pilgrimage to Omaha. 

What’s fascinating about this trip is that it has everything and nothing to do with Warren Buffett. The main event that draws everyone to Omaha – the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) annual meeting – is actually the least important part. I could have watched the shareholder meeting livestreamed on YouTube from the comfort of my living room couch.

The emergence of the Berkshire phenomenon reminds me of China’s manufacturing evolution. China initially attracted capital because of its cheap labor. But over time, China took this capital and plowed it into infrastructure. Factories were built next to each other, each specializing in certain areas. A specialized ecosystem emerged. 

Today, Chinese labor is no longer cheap. It’s been replaced by automation, and now China is a powerhouse for manufacturing anything and everything.

The transformation that the BRK weekend has undergone followed a similar progression. Initially, the only way to absorb Buffett and Munger’s wisdom was to come to Omaha, as the event was not streamed. But then something interesting happened. The BRK weekend attracted people who shared the same value system, and friendships were formed. A variety of smaller events began to be scheduled throughout the same weekend across Omaha, and an equally specialized ecosystem emerged.

The shareholder meeting began to be streamed about ten years ago, but that has had no impact on attendance. This is one reason why I think Buffett is at peace with the idea of no longer presiding at the meeting – people will still come to Omaha the weekend before Mother’s Day.
The BRK weekend now features dozens of excellent events. 

I spoke at several, including an investing panel at Creighton University, alongside the wonderful Bob Robotti, a die-hard value investor who runs Robotti & Co. I’ve known Bob for years – at 72, he exhibits the same enthusiasm for stocks as someone decades younger – and this panel was an excellent example of what the BRK Omaha ecosystem has produced.

Bob and I have very different approaches to value investing. He loves cyclical businesses, while I generally shun them. Bob mentioned that he’d buy a very cheap business run by a mediocre manager, while I would not touch it with a ten-foot pole. 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with either approach; indeed, there is an important lesson in it. Your investment philosophy and process have to fit your personality and your EQ. In my case, I get nervous (and thus irrational) when I own companies run by imbeciles who don’t have either skin or soul in the game. But the great thing about the BRK weekend is that I learn from Bob every time I spend time with him. He’s a thoughtful and genuinely kind human being. 

From the outside, the BRK weekend may seem like a place where people simply want to learn how to get and stay rich. But this gathering transcends value investing and capitalism and genuinely celebrates human values. People (like me) bring their kids to this event. And just like at the main event, at the Q&A breakfast I hosted for my readers, many questions centered on life rather than investing.

My first Omaha reader meetup fit around a small restaurant table. This year, to my surprise, 450 people packed into a venue with standing-room only. I answered questions on every imaginable topic for just over two hours, and by the end I was exhausted. 

This gave me even greater admiration for Buffett, who is four decades my senior, yet still fielded questions for four solid hours. I was delighted to hear Warren give a similar answer to one I had given the day before when asked what advice he’d give to graduating students: 
“Don’t worry too much about starting salaries and be very careful who you work for because you will take on the habits of the people around you.” 

(Incidentally, we are going to host our next Q&A Breakfast on May 1, 2026. You can sign up for it here. It’s free, but I suggest you sign up early, as it fills up fast.)

I also participated (as I have for over a decade) in an investing panel at YPO (Young President Organization) in the beautiful Holland Performance Art Center with Tom Gaynor, CEO of Markel (often described as a baby Berkshire Hathaway) and Lawrence Cunningham. Lawrence authored perhaps the most important book about Buffett, The Essays of Warren Buffett, masterfully editing Warren’s annual letters into a cohesive volume. This year’s panel was one of those occasions where I found myself listening intently to my fellow panelists instead of speaking more.

Lawrence has met Greg Abel – Buffett’s designated successor – and feels optimistic about him. He’s probably right – this was one of Buffett’s most crucial decisions, which he did not make lightly. Yet I can’t imagine sitting for four hours listening to Greg Abel. I am sure he is a brilliant CEO, but he’s neither Buffett nor Munger – few individuals possess so much worldly wisdom and communicate it with such clarity and humor.

This brings me to the point of this note: the dramatic (yet not unexpected) announcement that Buffett is stepping down as CEO of BRK at the end of the year.

Before I comment on this, let me tell you a story. Imagine you have been watching a soap opera for 17 years. You arrive dutifully every year to watch every episode in person. And then you miss the last five minutes of the explosive finale before it goes off the air. This is what happened to me when Buffett announced his retirement as CEO.

A few minutes before noon, while Buffett was answering a question I’d heard before and appeared to be winding down, I suggested we slip out early for lunch to avoid the crowds. When we came back, I discovered that the meeting had gone on until 1 pm, and just before it ended, Buffett announced that he would step down at the end of the year. Seventeen years of watching Warren speak and I missed the most dramatic moment of all, followed by a five-minute standing ovation.

I think Buffett has engineered his exit brilliantly. He will still remain chairman, and even before the announcement he was not managing BRK’s day-to-day operations. As a collection of hundreds of companies that often have absolutely nothing in common with each other, BRK is already highly decentralized. Buffett’s main contribution has been capital allocation.

Giving up the CEO title while he’s still alive means Buffett has brought in his replacement in an orderly way and created a smooth transition. But I have a feeling that on January 1, 2026, when Greg Abel officially becomes CEO, nothing will really change, and Warren will continue doing what he’s been doing for as long as he can. If Buffett is able – he’ll be 95 – he’ll still drive to the office and stop by McDonald’s for a breakfast sandwich (there’s a lot of wisdom in finding pleasure in little things). His son Howard Buffett will become chairman after Warren, with his only job being to preserve the culture.
I’ve been asked what I think of BRK stock. We bought the stock during the pandemic. It has done better than I expected, in part because of the strong performance of Apple, which was BRK’s largest holding. But BRK today is an unexciting investment at its current price. In all honesty, it is a conglomerate with some good and some merely okay businesses.

As a consumer, I get a (small) glimpse into how BRK businesses are being run by visiting Dairy Queen. BRK owns DQ, and I love their soft-serve ice cream (though I only eat it when I travel). My favorite part of research!

DQ has (or maybe had) a strong brand and operates on a capital-light model as a franchisor. But most stores I have visited looked like they have been neglected and need fresh paint. To be sure, I understand the limitations of this “analysis,” and DQ overall amounts to a rounding error on BRK’s financials. But little things often reveal much about big things.

BRK’s big businesses, from what I can glean through their financials, are not particularly well managed – GEICO and BNSF (railroad) have definitely been undermanaged lately. BNSF is not nearly as efficient as its competitors that embraced precision railroading, and until recently GEICO was losing market share to Progressive. 

BRK’s reinsurance business, a significant source of BRK’s profitability, is run by the extraordinary Ajit Jain. Ajit is in his 70s and unfortunately it seems he is not in great health. Is his replacement going to shoot the lights out, like he did? We don’t know. But Ajit is probably more important to BRK today than Buffett.

BRK is not going to melt into oblivion after Buffett is gone, but its best days are behind it. As Buffett has acknowledged, just its size alone makes it very difficult for BRK to grow. Truth be told, even if Buffett were thirty years younger and continued to run BRK, I am not sure the results would be much different than what I think the future holds with Abel at the helm. 

Buffett and Charlie Munger had a tremendous impact on me as an investor and human being. I am incredibly thankful to both. I hope Warren is there next year, but, in either case, I will be.

As value investors say, “next year in Omaha”.

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OMAHA: Breakfast Meeting 2024

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

By Vitaliy Kensenelson CFA

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Breakfast in Omaha Meeting 2024 – Session One
While I was in Omaha attending the BRK annual meeting, I hosted Q&A sessions for my readers. Due to high reader interest, what started out as a simple breakfast get-together turned into two breakfast sessions and an afternoon session. We had so much interest that we were still unable to accommodate all of our readers – we had 200 folks on the waiting list.

I was exhausted, but I really enjoyed answering questions and meeting readers. The upside of this is that we have three video recordings.

Over the next three weeks, I will share the videos from each session. For those who prefer to read, I will also include a lightly edited full transcript.

For those who don’t have the time to read 15 pages or watch an hour-long video, I’ll include my favorite excerpts from each session.

COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Thank You

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On Value Investor Guy Spier

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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What I Learned from Value Investor Guy Spier 

By Vitaliy N. Katsenelson CFA

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A few months ago I was asked by the CFA Institute to give talks to CFA societies in London (October 27), Zurich (October 29) and Frankfurt (November 3). I enjoy giving occasional talks (but only a few a year, otherwise they become a chore). I also love Europe — history, old buildings and cultures, museums, sometimes a mild adventure. But this offer was much more interesting — I was asked to give a joint presentation with Guy Spier.

About  Guy

Guy Spier is a tremendous value investor who happens to be a good friend whose company I truly enjoy. He is the most cosmopolitan person I know. He was born in South Africa, spent his childhood in Iran and Israel, received his bachelor’s degree from Oxford and MBA from Harvard, lived in New York and in 2008 got sick of the New York hedge fund rat race and moved with his family to Zurich. His wife, Lory, is Mexican, so in addition to being fluent in languages of all the above-mentioned countries, he romances in Spanish.

Last year Guy published a book, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment. It is not a traditional investing book. In fact, I’ll say that differently: This is the most untraditional book on investing you’re likely to run into. It is a self-effacing memoir of Guy’s transformation from a Gordon Gekko wannabe who believes that his Ivy League education entitles him to Wall Street riches to a committed follower of Warren Buffett and his sidekick, Charlie Munger.

It must have taken a lot of guts and self-confidence (overcoming a lot of self-doubt) to write this book. To be honest, I am not sure I could have written it. It is one thing to strive for intellectual honesty; it is another to unearth and expose one’s own greed, arrogance and envy. Many of us are trying to hide such character traits in plain sight, never mind telling the world about them in a popular book.

After all, Guy is not writing about a fictional character; he is writing about himself. The humility he displays is what makes the book so effective — you can clearly follow the deliberate transformation of a cockroach (the Wall Street version of a caterpillar) into a butterfly.

This memoir is able to achieve something that many other investments books don’t (including my own): It reveals the real, practical, behavioral side of investing, not the way you read about it in behavioral finance textbooks but the raw emotions every investor experiences.

There are a lot of lessons we can learn from Guy. The first one — and, for me, the most important one — is that environment matters.

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value

[Eye for Value]

Enter Dan Ariely PhD

Dan Ariely PhD, the well-known behavioral economist, was interviewed on Bloomberg Television and asked, What can one do to lose weight? He said, Start with the environment around you. If you come to work and there is a box of doughnuts on your desk, losing weight is going to be difficult. Also, look in your fridge: All the stuff that is probably not good for your diet is staring you in the face, whereas the fruits and vegetables that are essential to healthy eating are buried in the hard-to-access bottom drawers.

The same applies to investing: We may not notice it, but the environment around us impacts our ability to make good decisions. Guy writes, “We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment — to work with, and even socialize with, the right people.”

I have found that checking the prices of stocks I own throughout the day shrinks my time horizon, impacts my mood and wastes my brain cells as I try to interpret data that have very little information. I am getting better; I am already down checking prices only once a day. My goal is to do it just once every few days.

Guy is ahead of me: He checks them once a week. Recently, I put in price alerts for stocks my firm owns or follows. If a stock price changes more than 10 percent or crosses a certain important (buy or sell) point, I’ll get an e-mail alert.

Guy finds that he isn’t effective when he gets to the office because of external distractions. In his Zurich office he has a quiet room that he calls the library. It doesn’t have phones or computers, and this is where he reads, thinks and naps. Here in Denver, I have a lawn chair (bought at Costco for $50) that I take outside to sit on, put on headphones, and listen to music and read. My friend Chris goes to Starbucks or the local library in the morning for four hours before he goes to his office, and that’s where he does his reading. The key is to figure out what works for you and try not to fight your external environment.

Another lesson I have learned is that misery loves company. I was talking to Guy about his book, and he told me that people who love the book appreciate the fact that he is so honest about the emotions that consume him when he is struggling in the stock market. As investors, we often put on a brave face, but if we aren’t emotionally honest, our opinion of ourselves, our self-worth, may fluctuate with the performance of our portfolio.

Personally, I can really relate to this. When I read Guy’s book the first time (I’ve read it twice), I was going through a tough time with my portfolio. I found this book extremely therapeutic. In fact, I recommended it to a friend of mine who was going through a similar rough patch.

Another lesson:

Surround yourself with the right people. Friendships matter. I’ve been blatantly plagiarizing Guy on this for years. Guy created a conference called VALUEx Zurich, a gathering of like-minded people who get together and share investment ideas. I attended the very first one in 2010, and since then I have hosted a very similar event, VALUEx Vail, every year in June.

Guy has a latticework group of eight investors that meets every quarter and discusses the stock market, the investment process and personal issues. I’ve copied that, too. Four of us got together in Atlanta in October. We visited a few companies and debated stocks, industry trends, diets, women . . . okay, you get the point. That was our first latticework event, but I hope we’ll meet a few times a year.

Attending Guy’s conference in Zurich and organizing VALUEx Vail have resulted in enduring friendships. These conferences allowed me to create a large network of like-minded investors I talk to regularly. Every member of my latticework group I met at VALUEx Vail.

(A short side note: One of the most important things we can do as parents of teenage kids is to make sure they have good friends. That’s paramount. We as parents lose influence on our kids when they become teenagers. Their friends have a disproportionately larger impact on their choices than we do. We can influence the environment around our kids by helping them select friends.)

And then there are thank-you cards. Over the years Guy has written tens of thousands of them. He is indiscriminate about them — at one point he wrote to every employee at a boutique hotel he stayed in. All right, maybe he took it too far that time. But, writing a thank-you card to value investor Mohnish Pabrai changed his life. He attended Pabrai Investment Funds’ annual meeting in Chicago. After the meeting he sent Pabrai a thank-you note. A few months later Pabrai came to New York and invited Guy to dinner. This was the start of the Spier-Pabrai bromance. Thank-you cards work because so few people write them. They leave a lasting impression on the receiver because they say, “I like you. You are important to me.”

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stock-exchange

[Stock-Exchanges]

Mentors

The last point is, Be yourself. Having mentors is important. For many value investors, Buffett and Munger are our north stars. There are lots of things we can learn from them. But we also have to realize that we must be ourselves, because we are not them. I remember reading a long time ago that Buffett did not do spreadsheets. That impacted me for a few months — I stopped building models and creating spreadsheets. I thought, If Buffett doesn’t do it, I shouldn’t do it either. Wrong.

Buffett is a lot smarter than I am; he is able to analyze companies in his head. He is Buffett. I have found that spreadsheets work for me because they help me think. When Buffett and I look at a company philosophically, we are looking for the same things, but I need a computer to assist me, and he doesn’t.

Mohnish Pabrai owns just a handful of stocks. Guy, on the other hand, knows that he would not be able to be a rational decision maker if he had only a handful of stocks. There will be a significant overlap between Guy’s and Pabrai’s portfolios, but Guy’s will have two or three times as many stocks.

Assessment

Dear ME-P Readers, I spoke with your Editor-in-Chief Dr. Dave Marcinko a few weeks ago, and as you can tell from this ME-P essay, I am a very biased book reviewer. I am not even sure this qualifies as a book review. Despite my biases, I can safely say that The Education of a Value Investor is one of the best books I’ve read in 2015. (I promise you that it is not the only book I’ve read this year.) Before you commit your time and money to this book, watch Guy’s presentation on Talks at Google.

ABOUT

Vitaliy N. Katsenelson, CFA, is Chief Investment Officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of Active Value Investing (Wiley 2007) and The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley, 2010).  His books have been translated into eight languages.  Forbes called him – the new Benjamin Graham.

Conclusion

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