Investment guru Warren Buffett is heading for hisworst year relative to the rest of the US stockmarket since 2009, with shares in his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway down 11.5 per centwith two more trading days to go.
The underperformance comes in Mr Buffett’s golden anniversary year at the helm, when he toldinvestors for the first time that they should judge his record on Berkshire’s share price, ratherthan just the book value of the company — his preferred yardstick for decades.
Mr Buffett urged them to make that judgment based on the long term, rather than on a singleyear, reflecting investor Benjamin Graham’s view that the stock market may be a “weighingmachine” in the long run, but in the short term it is a “voting machine”.
But in 2015, the market has voted negatively on Berkshire’s prospects for weathering thedecline in commodities prices, according to Jim Shanahan, analyst at Edward Jones.
Although Berkshire has no oil and gas subsidiaries, its railway business transports oil, coal andagricultural products, and its manufacturing arm sells products to the shrinking oil industry. “They are impacted by the weak resources sector and commodity prices in general,” said MrShanahan.
Berkshire has also been hit by big declines in two of its largest stock market investments:American Express, down 25 per cent this year, and IBM, down 13 per cent.
But net earnings rose 18 per cent to $18.6bn in the first nine months of the year, and bookvalue was up 3.3 per cent.
但伯克希爾今年前9個月凈利潤增長18%,至186億美元,賬面價值增長3.3%。
The fall in Berkshire shares comes against a 3 per cent return from the S&P 500, includingdividends. It is only the 11th negative year since Mr Buffett took control in 1965, and theworst underperformance relative to the S&P 500 since 2009.