2019: Should Berkshire disclose its stock portfolio's annual performance?

CAROL LOOMIS: This question is from Brian Neal (PH), who writes from the Mayo Clinic Education Site.

“Berkshire owns approximately 200 billion in publicly traded stocks. I appreciate the disclosure of Berkshire’s holdings, but I am disappointed by the lack of specific performance information.

“Since investing in publicly owned stocks is so much a part of Berkshire’s business, why do you not tell us every year how our portfolio performed?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, obviously it could be calculated fairly easily, and it’s about 40 percent of Berkshire’s value. But 60 percent is the businesses. And if you look at the top ten stocks I would guess, you know, you’re down to where beyond those ten stocks you’re talking about less than — probably less than 10 percent of Berkshire’s value.

So, I — again — we’re not in the business of explaining why we own a stock. We’re not looking for people to compete to buy it. We have a portfolio of companies where I would say that, of that 200 billion or so, at least 150 billion of them are buying in their stock and increasing our interest every year.

And why in the world should we want to tell a whole bunch of people to go out and buy those stocks so that we end up paying — or the company on our behalf — ends up paying more money for them?

I mean, people get very happy when their stocks go up. But if we’re going to own whatever, whether it’s Bank of America, whether it’s Apple, whether it’s any of the big holdings, we will do considerably better in the next ten years if their stocks do terribly during certain periods and that they buy lots of stock in.

It’s just exactly like buying it ourselves, except we’re using their — they’re using our money. But it’s so elementary.

And why in the world would we want to go out and tell the world that these stocks should go up so that maybe they can sell or something when it costs us money? And we’re not going to be able to move in and out of the stocks to our advantage.

So, our holdings are filed quarterly — our domestic holdings, as it was pointed out earlier — filed quarterly.

But we would rather not tell the world what we own, any more than we’d like to tell them what our strategy is at NetJets or what we’re going to do with Lubrizol and what we’re working on in the way of better advances in additives or whatever it may be, or where we plan to build a new store for the Furniture Mart or something.

That’s proprietary information. And we have to disclose a certain amount, but we’re certainly not going to be touting the stocks to other people.

In terms of calculating our performance, you can take the top ten or 12 stocks, and anybody could make the calculation. I mean, at the end of the year the Wall Street Journal runs — all the papers run something — where it says a year-to-date performance or something of the sort. So that’s a simple calculation. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: I’ve got nothing to add to that.