Warren Buffett Can’t Bequeath Abel Patient Investors
Game on: Cutouts of Berkshire CEO Greg Abel, Warren Buffett and See’s Candies co-founder Mary See.
Photographer: Dan Brouillette/Bloomberg
Patience may be the greatest virtue, but few professional investors have the privilege of practicing it. In real life, money managers live in constant fear that their investors will flee — and their jobs will be toast — if they fail to keep up with their benchmarks for several quarters or, heaven forbid, years. The only living exception is Warren Buffett. And Greg Abel, Buffett’s successor as Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s new chief executive officer, is already having to come to terms with that reality.
At his first annual meeting as CEO, Abel preached the gospel of investing discipline against a backdrop of the worst stretch of underperformance for Berkshire’s stock in a quarter century. The shares have lost 10.8% in the past 12 months, a 40.4 percentage point underperformance to the S&P 500 Index — the worst since March 2000.