Warren's Mistakes: How America’s Greatest Business Became Just Another Failed Conglomerate That Can’t Beat the S&P 500 — And Why It Must Be Restructured

The Investing Book Every Investor Should Read; The Restructuring Book Every Berkshire Shareholder Must Read In May 2018, an eight-year-old girl named Daphne Kalir stepped to a microphone in Omaha, in front of forty thousand shareholders, and asked Warren Buffett the question no professional analyst would dare to ask out loud: why had Berkshire Hathaway abandoned investing in capital-efficient businesses like Coca-Cola, See's Candies, American Express, GEICO and instead, begun to buy entire companies, like the capital consuming giants Burlington Northern and MidAmerica Energy? Buffett laughed. He did not answer her. Eight years later, Daphne’s question still hasn’t been answered. Berkshire can't beat the S&P 500 consistently anymore, and despite previous promises to do so, won't return capital. The premium Buffett's name once guaranteed has evaporated. Berkshire Hathaway now trades at a huge discount to its peers. Over 25 years, the company has been slowly degrading from the world’s best business into just another failed conglomerate. Warren's Mistakes is the answer Daphne never got from the stage. It explains why and how Berkshire lost its discipline and then its edge in the markets. In fanatical detail, using original sources, it documents the precise framework Buffett used to build Berkshire in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It is a guidebook to restructuring Berkshire Hathaway today. The book also explains Berkshire's legendary approach to investing. This is the strategy every individual investor should be using to compound capital, exactly like Berkshire did for its first 50 years. There are only ten investable sectors in the American economy. Inside each, only one or two companies deserve a place in a Berkshire-quality portfolio. This book names all ten – drawn from the framework Buffett himself laid out in a private 1975 letter to Katharine Graham. This is the strategy Berkshire's board should adopt tomorrow. And it’s the same strategy that any individual investor can adopt right now. What you will learn in Warren’s Mistakes: — Why Progressive will keep beating GEICO and which two insurance companies belong in your portfolio. — Why Union Pacific is the only railroad worth owning and why Berkshire must divest BNSF. — The ten investable sectors that survive the test of capital-efficiency, longevity, and pricing power. — Why Berkshire is structurally broken: a property-and-casualty insurance company is, by its nature, equity-financed; a railroad and a utility holding company are, by their nature, debt-financed; the two cannot coexist on one balance sheet without one being malfunded. — How to build a portfolio that compounds the way Berkshire did: high-quality insurance funding investments into America's oldest and best industrial, consumer, and infrastructure businesses. About the author Porter Stansberry is the founder of Porter & Co., an independent investment research firm headquartered in Stevenson, Maryland. For more than thirty years he has been one of the most widely read independent financial analysts in America, with a long record of calling the major turns in stocks, commodities, currencies, and credit — from the tech boom of the late 1990s, to the 2008 financial crisis, to the shale energy revolution, to the exact bottom of the COVID panic. Porter first predicted that Berkshire Hathaway would no longer outpace the S&P 500 consistently almost ten years ago and described the exact problems that have crippled the company today. He lives in Stevenson, Maryland at Meadowdale Farm, with his family.