[dominotw]

> In some sense, it's not his fault. Berkshire has grown so large that it has significant scale problems.

I hear this often that berkshire isn't what it used to be because of 'scale'. What does this even mean. At what point does it become too big. Is there a general logic that after X billion $$, investment firms become inefficient?

[from]

If you have one billion dollars and find a $100 million opportunity, you have an ROI of 10%. If you have one hundred billion dollars and find a $100 million opportunity, you have an ROI of 0.1%. He needs to search for very large opportunities to attain a good return because he has so much capital. This is why some funds return money to investors if they get too big--it's very difficult to generate returns with that much money.

[dominotw]

> If you have one hundred billion dollars and find a $100 million opportunity

Why would they always be finding one opportunity. Can't they find 100 $100 million opportunities. Why doesn't "finding opportunists" model scale ?

[jsweojtj]

I can't seem to read this in any other way than you are asking something like "why is it harder to find one hundred $100 million opportunities than one?"

Finding one such opportunity is hard, finding two is harder because you have to find the first and then do more work to find the second. This pattern continues indefinitely for as many opportunities as you'd like to find.

[dominotw]

> you have to find the first and then do more work to find the second.

Isn't this typical scaling problem though? I wasn't imagining they go one by one. I guess your Implication here is that because there only one warren buffet. I guess that makes sense if Berkshire is ultimately one man Buffet show that can only scale as much as that one man can perform. That probably explains the recent under performance, age catches up to everyone.

[bobthepanda]

Everyone else is in the same boat as well. Low interest rates have made it harder and harder to hit high rates of return. Softbank ended burning a fair amount of money from its $100B Vision Fund, and a good chunk of that was the oil wealth of the Saudis.

[rsj_hn]

Because the market is finite in size, so nothing can outperform the market forever. It's the same thing as a company not being able to grow faster than the economy forever.

[dominotw]

>Because the market is finite in size

How though? How can the market stay a same size while berkshire size went from 1 billion to 100 billion. Where is 100 fold investment coming in if the market stays at a constant size. That doesn't compute. Why wouldn't the market also expand at like the investments.

[rsj_hn]

I didn't say the same size, I said finite size.

If the market grows at a rate of 6% and your company is growing at 8%, then your company will eventually slow down to 6% or else the market will speed up to 8%, but in neither situation will you "outperform" the market forever.

In the case of Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway has about $800 billion in assets under management. If the market size is 50 Trillion, and let's say that 10% of that consists of reliably undervalued companies then the size of the market for companies that Berkshire can buy is 5 Trillion. This market will grow at 6%, if you think Berkshire can have 8% returns, then it will own half of all undervalued companies in 63 years, 2/3 of all undervalued companies in 78 years, and all undervalued companies in 100 years. But of course Buffet can't find 100% of all undervalued companies and there are other people also trying to find them.

And of course each individual company that Buffet buys will itself stop making above average returns as it itself grows, and therefore every year, the returns on the companies in Buffet's own portfolio will go closer to the market average even as new undervalued companies are harder to find. Thus the overall return of Buffet's fund will be dragged down to the market return much sooner than the theoretical limits I outlined above.

[dominotw]

> I didn't say the same size, I said finite size.

Not sure how you are defining "market". How is it finite size? What is the number after which it stops growing?

> If the market grows at a rate of 6% and your company is growing at 8%

Total market valuation of Dow has grown at faster pace than Berkshire portfolio size. your 6% , 8% example doesn't hold at all. Not sure where you got your your "market size" numbers from. Did you do an actual analysis of market size growth or are you just pulling these theories out of thin air.