The Real Reason You Will Never Invest As Well As Warren Buffett
Buffett says $24 billion gain wasn’t good enough
In his highly anticipated annual shareholder letter, published Friday, famed investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. went straight to the bad news.
Despite Berkshire BRK.A +0.10% BRK.B -0.11% achieving a $24.1 billion net gain for shareholders and the conglomerate’s book-value rising 14.4% in 2012, he deemed it a “subpar” performance.
“For the ninth time in 48 years, Berkshire’s percentage increase in book value was less than the S&P’s percentage gain (a calculation that includes dividends as well as price appreciation),” wrote Buffett, who for decades has measured Berkshire’s overall performance in terms of book value.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index SPX +0.23% rose 16% last year, including dividends.
Buffett went on to say another disappointment was his inability to complete a major acquisition, something that’s eluded him in recent years. “I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he wrote.
I wonder : how much is good enough?
That is why we are never going to invest as him : he is already a slave of his own greed and money
I wonder : how much is good enough?
Yeap : one of the things that does not have limits - greed 
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Sorry, but you'll never be able to replicate the investment strategy that has made Warren Buffett a billionaire.
To be clear, we're not suggesting that the principles of long-term, value investing are worthless.
But a recent study concludes that Buffett's win-streak is about much more than savvy stock-picking.
According to AQR Capital Management's Andrea Frazzini and David Kabiller and NYU's Lasse Pedersen, Buffett's returns are driven by a combination of investing in low-beta stocks and employing low-cost leverage.
In other words, he bets on stocks with low, yet stable returns, and he amplifies those returns by betting with cheap borrowed money.
That second part is key because not everyone has access to the type of cheap financing one can get when one is a billionaire backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation betting on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stocks.
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