If he had acquired a portfolio company for $18 billion or purchased $18 billion in the stock of a public company, we would call it significant, said James Shanahan, Edward Jones analyst, who estimated the buybacks through Oct. at $18.4 billion and maintains a positive outlook on Berkshire shares. Few better places for Berkshire to allocate its capital than to investing in itself with share buybacks, says Lawrence Cunningham, author of several books about
Warren Buffett and Berkshire, and a professor at George Washington University. Price was right. Disclosure was clear. Pure investment rationality.
Even if Buffett is making the right call on the buybacks, the size of it being bigger than any M&A acquisition since 2016 s deal for Precision Castparts highlights a reason Berkshire has struggled to keep up with the broader market in recent years: investors don t see Buffett being able to make the bold bets that made his name and so many Berkshire shareholders fortunes.
What Warren Buffett s losing battle against S&P 500 says about this market CNBC 1/8/2021 Eric Rosenbaum
With $140-billion-plus in cash, analysts described 2020 as another year in which the lack of a transformative deal from Warren Buffett weighed on investor sentiment.
Buffett s biggest buy: at least $18 billion in buybacks of Berkshire Hathaway shares.
The 2019-2020 two-year performance gap between Buffet and the S&P 500 index was among the widest by which he has ever trailed, at 37%.
If the market takes a turn for the worse, Berkshire could be inexpensive. Almost half of Berkshire s roughly $500 billion market cap is currently represented by balance sheet cash and its Apple stake, and his last big losing streak against the index was followed by a surge.