[arthurcolle]

You literally cannot know this.

It's pretty easy to construct a scenario where "oh yes he is omniscient and thereby he can easily draw returns from a bustling market" but it's even easier to construct a scenario where fraudulent activity is occurring and those same returns are being derived from expert-level fraudulent activity.

No one is accusing a buy-and-hold investor like WB of committing illicit activities. Seriously, no one. OTOH, I think it is quite reasonable to suspect that the premier quant trader of all time, with those stellar YOY returns is extracting alpha via strategies that are "dumb" and "always work", i.e. his primary edge. These strats probably exist in the grey area of financial structuring and trading activity (if not worse).

Seriously. Just look at the yearly returns time series. (Acquiring the yearly financial statements is left as an exercise to the reader).

I mean yeah I think he's awesome too. But thinking he's some kind of market savant in a post-Madoff world is really quite silly, in my opinion.