bought a few billion dollars’ worth of Apple Inc. stock in 2016, when it was at around $25 per share, and then, over the course of nine years, it went up to about $200 per share.

The Apple trade was in some ways singular — “I’m somewhat embarrassed to say Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I’ve ever made,” Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders Saturday

He made his money by being right a lot, by buying stocks that would go up and then holding them as they went up. You could do that. [...] You could read a lot of 10-Ks. He bought stocks like Apple and Coke. You probably like iPhones and Coke. This stuff is easy!

Most of Berkshire Hathaway’s investments are whole companies, where Berkshire controls the company and improves operations, rather than publicly traded stocks like Apple and Coke.

Buffett gets cheap long-term leverage from insurance float, amplifying his returns with less risk than other sources of leverage

Because he is a famously good investor, his investment in a company can make the company more valuable, which increases his returns and also means that companies offer him attractive deals.

Why There Can't Be Another Buffett

Modern academic theories, and institutional allocators, are suspicious of the idea that buying and holding big stocks can add much value. Modern finance views stocks mostly as a set of correlations to the market and other factors; if you just buy some big stocks, most of what you are getting is the market return, and anyone can get the market return cheaply by buying an index fund. It’s not impressive to buy stocks that go up when the market goes up; what’s impressive is to find sources of return that are independent of the market.

When Buffett started out as a professional investor, he was in some ways working at the cutting edge of investment science: He was a disciple of Benjamin Graham, the “father of value investing,” and used rigorous fundamental analysis to invest more rationally than his competitors and make money. The science has moved on.

the folksier “buy safe, quality stocks at reasonable prices” approach can be approximated cheaply with factor exchange-traded funds. If you want to do fundamental analysis and buy good businesses cheap, these days you get into private equity,

"Warren Buffett is a financial celebrity who buys stakes in large public companies that he thinks are good, and holds them as they go up. That is terrific work if you can get it, but I don’t think anyone else can."

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