Buffett, Growth, Value And You

“Warren Buffett closes in on Cathie Wood as tech stocks tumble.”

- Dhirendra Kumar

The message that the headline (see the sub-title above) in ‘The Financial Times’ was trying to convey was clear. There is someone called Cathie Wood – presumably an investor or possibly a fund manager – and Warren Buffett had fallen behind her by some measure of investing returns, and now Buffett had caught up with her. The headline also implies that there is some kind of a competition where Buffett did badly but has now almost defeated the previous champion, somewhat like the underdog athlete in the closing stages of a sports-themed movie. Now, in the final scene, the old man will step up to the podium and receive a gold medal from the editors of the newspaper. As Buffett fans, I guess we should be happy that ‘The Financial Times’ is trying so hard to engage and entertain us.

Cathie Wood, by the way, is the fund manager of an ETF named Ark Invest’s Innovation, which is generally known by its stock market ticker ARKK. Don’t ask why the fund manager is important at all in an ETF because that’s a whole separate story. Disregard for the moment the identity crisis here – Berkshire and ARKK are not the same sorts of creatures at all. ARKK is an ETF but as ETFs tend to be nowadays, a passive fund that is actually sort of actively managed. Berkshire is a holding company that can be considered an investment vehicle because of the way Buffett and Munger run it.

I then came upon a different headline, this one in Bloomberg, which is no less a reputed commentator on money matters than ‘The Financial Times’:

“Wood, Buffett Post Similar 2-Year Gain With Divergent Strategies.”