[CharlieMunger]

There's a community on Reddit that studies Berkshire's purchases (investments made by Buffett/Weschler/Combs) and tries to follow, purchasing only below what Berkshire paid:

https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/

For example, in 2020 and early 2021 Berkshire paid $59 for Verizon, buying $9 billion worth (a huge Buffett/Weschler telecom investment). Verizon now trades at about $54, so this community is buying.

[mritchie712]

Wouldn’t this bias towards the “losers”?

[CharlieMunger]

Short-term stock price changes are noise.

Berkshire's investments are based on a deep understanding of the business and are intended to produce good long-term results. Factors like economic moat, trends in consumption, conservative valuation, etc.

For example, Berkshire purchased Apple (AAPL) between 2016 and 2018, at an average price of $35 per share (P/E ratio of 12 or 13), and it was years before that paid off. The Redditors buy during those years, before the payoff.

[swarnie]

At this point why are you not just buying BRK-B?

[CharlieMunger]

We do that, too. For example, one of those Redditors owns 22,612 BRK.B shares and has been buying since late 2002.

Berkshire spent $25 billion in 2020 (all of its operating earnings) on buybacks at an average price of $205 per BRK.B share. That buying continued at almost the same pace in 2021 and the average price paid is $220 per BRK.B share.

We can't buy at that buyback price today, but many of us would gladly pay, say, $250 per share for BRK.B.

[mrjivraj]

Cool - didn't know about that!

But, yes Shameless Cloning Can Lead to Financial Success :)

I actually wrote about it here: https://playingfordoubles.substack.com/p/shameless-cloning-c...

[smoldesu]

It's a little hard to take you seriously when you seem to dedicate the first 4 paragraphs to dunking on Microsoft. Windows is no more of a Mac clone than MacOS is a Xerox PARC clone. Word is just a rich text editor, same as Excel is database software and Bing is a search engine. Call it whatever you like, but people all-too-soon forget that the root of all software development is "I wonder if I could do this better?"

[nl]

Username checks out.