Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting on May 4 in Omaha, Neb., was Warren Buffett's first since Charlie Munger passed away last November.Value investors worship Warren Buffett. But his amazing investment success stems as much from his astute understanding of consumer behavior as it does from his ability to ferret out financial bargains.arren Buffett is something of a national treasure. Since 1965, his Berkshire Hathaway has delivered a 19.
Below are some edited highlights from the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in Omaha with special attention to how behavioral psychology weighs heavily on some of his largest holdings like Apple, which now represents 43.3% of Berkshire’s $336.9 billion stock portfolio. Maybe I’ve used this example before, but if you talk to most people, if they have an iPhone and they have a second car, the second car cost them $30,000 or $35,000, and they were told that they could never have the iPhone again, or they could never have the second car again, they will give up the second car. Now, people don’t think about their purchases that way, but I think about their behavior, and so we just decide without knowing.
CNBC’s Becky Quick noted that Berkshire’s recent quarterly report showed that it had sold 115 million shares of Apple. Quick then conveyed this question from a 27-year-old Malaysian shareholder: “Last year you mentioned Coca-Cola and American Express being Berkshire’s two long-duration partial ownership positions, and you spent some time talking about the virtues of both these wonderful businesses.
I would say with present fiscal policies that something has to give, and I think that higher taxes are quite likely. If the government wants to take a greater share of your income, or mine or Berkshire’s, they can do it, and they may decide someday that they don’t want the fiscal deficit to be this large—because that has some important consequences, and they may not want to decrease spending a lot—and they may decide they’ll take a larger percentage of what we earn and we’ll pay it.
China’s stock market has been in contraction. Over the past three years, the FTSE China 50 Index has returned -36%. Buffett was asked about his appetite for investing in companies based in China and Hong Kong, and he affirmed his belief that U.S. companies provide plenty of international exposure.: Our primary investments will always be in the United States. American Express does business around the world, and no company does business around the world like Coca-Cola.