Are You A Better Investor Than Warren Buffett?

Stuart R. Gallant, MD, PhD

A year and half ago, I wrote a short post pointing out that Berkshire Hathaway and the S&P 500 Index now have approximately the same return, year after year.  The illustration I used at the time was:

The figure shows that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were killing it in the 1960s and 1970s—the Berkshire Hathaway founders regularly exceeded the S&P 500 by a wide margin.  By the 1990s, the rest of the world had caught up with Berkshire Hathaway.  And, in the 2000s, Berkshire sometimes bests the S&P 500, sometimes not.

Return on investment is a negotiation between the investor and the company or institution receiving the investment.  If the investor is not satisfied with the proposed return, they can take their money elsewhere, but how do they know when to pull their funds?  What are some benchmarks for healthy growth?  This week’s post will compare the returns from different classes of investments.

Disclaimer:  This post is not intended as investment advice.  Readers should review their investment decisions with a professional prior to making any change to their portfolio.

Thinking About Returns

Individual equity investments rise and fall, but in the long-term diversified stock indices only rise.  Two common stock indices are the S&P 500 index which tracks the 500 largest companies listed on exchanges in the United States and the Nasdaq Composite index which tracks the stocks listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

The figure above shows the value of these two indices from January 2002, after the Dot-Com bubble burst in the year 2000, to the current date.  That period includes the Subprime Crisis of 2007 to 2010, as well as the Covid run up of internet stocks and the downturn of 2022.  Fitting a simple interest rate model with annual compounding to the data produces the following approximate rates of growth:

Inflation was 2.6% per annum averaged over that time period.  So, the inflation free growth of the two indices were 3.3% and 6.3%.  By including the periods of slow growth following 2000 and 2007, as well as selecting the data points in January, after any annual profit taking, these rates are relatively conservative.

Since a goal of creating these numbers is to make predictions about how the future might be, we might take a different view.  Perhaps, we believe that the future will look more like 2014 to 2024, rather than 2002 to 2013.  Here are curve fits to the more recent time period:

More optimistic rates of growth result:

That is a pretty large swing, and that is the challenge of forecasting returns—deciding what data set is relevant while creating the model.

Other Classes of Investments

So far, we have talked exclusively about stocks.  What about other classes of investments?

If you plan a purchase in the near future—a house or some land—then bonds can be a good short-term investment.  At the current moment, US Treasury bonds have an inverted yield curve (5.8% for 3 months, 4.39% for a year, and 3.67% for 5 years).  In general, stocks should do better than bonds over the long term—as can be seen by comparing Treasury bond yields with the stock market returns listed above.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are a bit like mutual funds.  They are managed investments in certain sectors of the real estate market.  The returns from REITs have been impressive in the past.  Here is a comparison of the REIT American Tower Corporation (AMT) versus the Nasdaq Composite index:

Recently, REITs have taken a hit, as the entire country changes how it lives and how it does business.  Many companies have reduced their main office footprint and increased remote work.

The key challenge to real estate investments (other than as your own personal dwelling) is that real estate appreciates more slowly than stocks.  Between 1991 and 2013, average home prices rose by a factor of 4.3 (as reported in the Home Price Index published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)).  That sounds impressive, until you realize that the S&P 500 index rose 17.7x over the same period.  According to data reported by the United States Federal Reserve (fred.stlouisfed.org), between the beginning of 2005 and the end to 2023, commercial real estate prices in the US rose by 2.1x.  Over the same period, the S&P 500 index rose 4.1x.

Clearly, there are some winners in the real estate market.  Some developers specialize in spotting distressed real estate on the edge of growing cities, renovating the buildings and flipping them for impressive profits.  However, these kinds of projects require careful and continuous management by the investment manager and by the investors.  The challenge is to locate the rose among the thorns.

Cryptocurrencies have attracted a lot of attention recently.  Brokers such as Fidelity have made investing in cryptocurrencies much easier.  Here is a graph of Bitcoin value since 2014 and the Nasdaq Composite index; the Nasdaq Composite disappears against the x-axis because the swing in Bitcoin is so great:

Of course, caveats apply—cryptocurrencies can be difficult to trade, and on some level they are Ponzi schemes (since they create no new value—gains by one group of investors must be offset by losses by another group of investors).  As long as you are playing with a small amount of capital, and not your life savings, the risk seems small—like going to Las Vegas.

Comparison to Other Investors

One of the opportunities offered by the Internet is to benchmark our returns versus those of professional investors.  At the top of this post, we discussed the fact that Berkshire Hathaway has been tracking the S&P 500 lately.  How about other investors?

Recently, public disclosure laws have allowed us to see into the investments of our legislators, such as Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Ted Cruz.  Representative Pelosi’s husband is a businessman who owns a real estate and venture capital firm.  During his time at Harvard Law School, Senator Cruz was a Fellow in Law and Economics, and his wife held a position at the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co.  So presumably, the Pelosi and Cruz family investment decisions are informed by a high degree of governmental and business expertise.  Their data has been reported through the ETFs NANC and KRUZ [1] since March 2023; here is a comparison versus the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 indices:

The Cruzes are experiencing returns that are below the S&P 500.  99% of their holdings are in stocks with a fairly even split between sectors (22% in tech, 16% in industrials, 15% in financial services, 10% in energy, 10% in healthcare, etc.).  The Pelosis are tracking the Nasdaq Composite.  91% of their holdings are in stocks with a strong preference for technology (45% in tech, 12% in consumer cyclical, 11% in communications, 9% in financial services, 8% in healthcare, etc.)—their composition is quite similar to Nasdaq.  So, the Pelosis are probably feeling pretty good about themselves, and the Cruzes are kicking themselves a little.

Another investor who may be kicking himself is Bill Gates.  He has $6.2B in Canadian National Railway (CNI).  Since January 2022, CNI is -4.3% in value—if you add the regular dividends that the railway pays, an investment made at the beginning of 2022 is about even.  In the same time period, the Nasdaq composite fell during all of 2022, but it has rebounded and is net positive 14.3% over the period.

The point is that picking individual stocks (as opposed to buying stock indices) is a high degree of difficulty activity—up there with brain surgery and rocket science.  Even well-educated, well-resourced investors get things wrong.

“F…Me, Once This Thing Gets Going in the Wrong Direction…”

Investment is not just an individual activity—it involves hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars.  You can make the right investment decision, but if the market is against you, you can still lose money.  Cathie Wood founded ARK Investment (ARKK) as an exchange traded fund (ETF) which would invest in disruptive technology—she wanted it to be a kind of large-scale venture capital company [2].  In early 2020, six years after the founding of ARK, investors started to pile on, running up the company’s value over 8 months.  But, then in November 2021, just prior to the 2022 overall decline in technology stocks, investors turned against ARK:

An investor who purchased ARKK in mid or (even worse) late 2020 may have taken a severe beating, depending on when they chose to get out.  The only way to overcome these large market forces is to purchase an investment at an attractive price and hold the investment over the long term—through whatever market noise may occur in the interim.

The Dream of Higher Returns

The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence, right?  Venture capitalists are the smartest of the smart investors with the best access to financial information.  Average investors look with envy at the folks in private equity, assuming that their returns are as fat as their promotional materials imply.  What returns are possible when the entire world is open to you as an investor?

A quick sketch of how an investor buys into a venture fund is:  1) an investor selects a firm which is raising capital and commits an investment for 10 years, 2) the venture firm collects fees—typically 2% for the first 5 years, and less in the remaining years—while the firm invests the bulk of the funds in small companies with unique abilities to grow, 3) at the end of 10 years, the investments are sold and the initial investment is returned to the investors, 4) the remaining money is split with the general partners of the venture firm getting 20% or sometimes 30% and the limited partners (i.e., the investors) receiving the remainder.  Most limited partners are retirement funds or other large institutions, but high-net-worth individuals constitute a few percent of the limited partners.

In 2011, Andrew Metrick and Ayako Yasuda made an interesting study of venture capital [3].  They had two sets of data covering the period 1989 to 2008—one set from Cambridge Associates (CA) and the other from Sand Hill Econometrics (SHE).  The CA data set was an upper bound on average venture capital returns because it was affected by survivor bias.  The SHE data set was a lower bound on average venture capital returns.  The key word is “average”—venture capital returns can vary widely depending on the luck and skill of the venture capital firm.  An investor (“limited partner”) in a venture fund has some degree of control of the skill of the firm based on research and selecting the best available firm, but the investor has little control over luck.  Not every venture firm has the opportunity to invest in Uber—only the ones that happen to get the unicorn’s pitch.

What Metrick and Yasuda found regarding average venture capital returns is tabulated below with the Nasdaq Composite for the period 1989 to 2008 included for reference:

So, it is possible to earn more than the Nasdaq Composite on a regular basis, but there are some requirements.  In venture funds, typical investments by limited partners are at least between $1M and $5M, and the money must be committed for 10 years.  Also, since returns vary widely from fund to fund, to get the average return listed in the table above, several separate investments would be required to diversify risk.

Conclusions

To summarize the main points of this post:

1. Pick people, not stocks:  Whether you are investing in an individual stock, a stock index, a mutual fund, or in a venture capital fund, you are in effect hiring people to grow your money.  If you pick the right people, your money will have the best chance of growing.
2. Over the long run, markets rise:  Even an investment in the Nasdaq Composite made at the high point just prior to the Dot-Com Bubble bursting in 2000 went back into the black by 2015.
3. People in the US have great investment options:  This was the subject of a previous post [4].  Not all countries have great stock markets, but the US is fortunate to have more than one excellent stock exchange.

[1] Alemany, J.  “Investors, worried they can’t beat lawmakers in stock market, copy them instead,” The Washington Post, June 1 (2024).

[2] ARK Invest.  “Big Ideas 2021,” research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ARK%E2%80%93Invest_BigIdeas_2021.pdf.

[3] Metrick, A. and Yasuda A.  Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation, Wiley (2011).

[4] Gallant, S. R. “Economic Development and Stock Markets (1 of 2),” DiscussingTerms, June 27 (2024), discussingterms.com/2024/06/27/economic-development-and-stock-market-growth-part-1/

Disclaimer:  DiscussingTerms^TM provides commentary on topics related to negotiation.  The content on this website does not constitute strategic, legal, or financial advice.  Consult an appropriately skilled professional, such as a corporate board member, lawyer, or investment counselor, prior to undertaking any action related to the topics discussed on DiscussingTerms.com.