I said no more Buffett... and then, eh, it happened anyway (#972461, #974746).

When people you respect succinctly say things you agree with... whatchagonna do, eh??

Here's the Buffett playbook:

Buy safe, high-quality assets; fund them with low-cost, long-duration liabilities, many of them provided by a large, sophisticated insurance operation; use leverage but manage it carefully; and stick to your strategy for many decades, building a sterling reputation that acts as a powerful stabiliser for the business.

It's the funding, stupid.

What was fascinating here is the top-5 holdings across time:

aaaaaand, actually, the leverage is down over time, and the cash balance is always pretty large (and in recent years, extraordinarily high):

So yeah, not a genius... just hyper-focused, using cheap, safe, and convenient financing to do what you or I never could.

Hur-rah.

non-paywalled: https://archive.md/xhxM5