I heartily endorse this analysis. I would recommend actually the original paper rather than the review of that paper cited by gwern.
At no point that I could find in this paper did they find that they needed to appeal to luck or random outlier quality to explain Buffett’s performance. Indeed, except that it is decades after the fact, it seemed fairly simple for them to explain Buffett’s performance quantitatively from picking stocks that the author’s say systematically outperform the market, sticking with his method of picking stocks in good and bad times for his portfolio or the market as a whole, and in using a moderate amount of leverage, they estimate about 1.6.
Not rocket science, not snake oil, and not a long sequence of lucky coin-flips.
I heartily endorse this analysis. I would recommend actually the original paper rather than the review of that paper cited by gwern.
At no point that I could find in this paper did they find that they needed to appeal to luck or random outlier quality to explain Buffett’s performance. Indeed, except that it is decades after the fact, it seemed fairly simple for them to explain Buffett’s performance quantitatively from picking stocks that the author’s say systematically outperform the market, sticking with his method of picking stocks in good and bad times for his portfolio or the market as a whole, and in using a moderate amount of leverage, they estimate about 1.6.
Not rocket science, not snake oil, and not a long sequence of lucky coin-flips.