Berkshire – now just mediocre?

I was interested in Berkshire Hathaway’s performance over the last decade. On Ycharts, I see that BRK’s BV per share has increased from 40926 to 110130 over a decade – a ratio of 2.69. It’s share price is up only 68.15% over the period, but I wanted to judge by book value. During that period, the S&P500 rose 49.78%.

That means that BRK outperformed the index at a rate of about 6% pa (= (2.69/1.50)^0.1). Good, but I bet many value investors could perform as well. I suspect even a passive value-weighted index could match that.

 

Turning to Bruce Berkowitz’s Fairholme Fund, it rose 94.52% over a decade. That’s an annual outperformance of 2.7%. Come on Bruce, surely you can do better than that.