"underperforms" here means that they only made 11% profit, or something along the lines of 30 billion USD per 3 months.
So this isn't any real-world trouble, nor did anyone actually lose money. It's simply investors feeling frowny because they were hoping for an even higher payout. Poor them :p
I don't think it's investors feeling grouchy as much as Wall St. reporters who seem unable to write in anything other than garbage language. BH management do not concern themselves with short- or medium-term performance much; eyes fixed firmly on the long term. This is utterly foreign to most finance journos.
If you read Buffet's letter to investors, you'll see him explicitly saying that some years are bound to be less than wonderful, but that over the long run, envestment in BH will do well.
No...this is how you measure performance. If you are paying an active manager like Buffet to manage money for you, you want them to do better than a dumb strategy like "just buy the whole index". That is why relative performance matters here.
This isn't supposed to inspire pity or something. It's supposed to give you information about the possible deterioration of his edge. Which isn't to say that it gives you much information about that, just, that's its point.
What you said here is the equivalent of going to a basketball game and saying that it doesn't make sense to talk about which team was better because they both scored points.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook make up something like 20% of the S&P 500, and most of its gains. Apple and Microsoft are 10% alone.
So you could make the same argument for someone who chose to invest in the whole index, vs just the top 5. Its not necessarily a good argument. It will be interesting if they are still the top 5 tech companies in 10 years. It feels like they have a bit more of a foothold than the Dell, IBM, HP of years past. Maybe cloud vendor lock in isnt worse than the platform lock ins they sold.
It’s Berkshire Hathaway’s worst year relative to the SP 500 in the last 10, not that it’s underperformed for 10 years.
(Using the metric of stock price, which is basically popularity and over the short term doesn’t necessarily correspond to any actual rationality. Ymmv, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc)
We will see BRK performance compared to the S&P with the potential upcoming meltdown of the market due to Coronavirus global slowdown. Futures for Monday looking god-awful. The next 9 months in the market are going to be very interesting (fed decisions, election, lasting effects of virus).
Buffett is notoriously conservative. The current bull market has gone very long. When the pendulum switches back the other way, people will be writing about the genius of Warren Buffett once again.
Buffett's first rule of money: "Don't lose money."
And so does the Bridgewater to the best of my knowledge. This could mean those guys are hedging too much against the next bubble burst and expect it to come rather sooner then later.
So this isn't any real-world trouble, nor did anyone actually lose money. It's simply investors feeling frowny because they were hoping for an even higher payout. Poor them :p