He'll bet on 'monkeys' over Wall Street financial advisors
Buffett also saved a few choice words for Wall Street financial advisors, who he said make money by "catching the crumbs that fall off the table of capitalism." In most cases, "monkeys" could provide better investment returns simply by throwing money at American companies, he added.
"You can have monkeys throwing darts at the page, and, you know, take away the management fees and everything, I'll bet on the monkeys [over the advisors]," he said.
Buffett pointed out how since 1941, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased from 100 to more than 30,000, and said that most people need only put their money into "an American business" and let it grow.
"It's amazing how hard people make what is a simple game," Buffett said of advisors. "But of course, if they told everybody what a simple game it was, 90% of the income of the people that were speaking would disappear."
Buffett says the best investing strategy is 'not taught in schools'
In addition to betting on primates over financial advisors, Buffett said the best trick for investing is something "you can learn in the fourth grade."
Instead of trying to time the market, Buffett says to buy shares of the companies you want to own and then observe the stock market over time to see if you should purchase more of that stock or sell it.
"We haven't the faintest idea what the stock market is going to do when it opens on Monday," Buffett said. "We've not been good at timing. We've been reasonably good at figuring out when we were getting enough for our money."
Using this strategy to navigate the stock market instead of trying to predict it is almost like having an insurance policy in an often volatile market. Twice, Buffett said, he'd tried to predict the market ahead of time — once in 2008 during the Great Recession, and again in March 2020 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic crippling global markets.
Those decisions cost Berkshire Hathaway billions of dollars.
Why he'll never buy bitcoin
Buffett also reiterated his famously negative views on bitcoin and crypto in general, saying he wouldn't buy "all of the bitcoin in the world" for $25.
He described bitcoin as not a "productive asset" like owning farmland or rental properties, saying that making money from the cryptocurrency "depends on the next guy paying you more than the last guy got."
"Whether it goes up or down in the next year or five years or 10 years, I don't know. But one thing I'm sure of is that it doesn't multiply, it doesn't produce anything," he said. "It's got a magic to it, and people have attached magic to lots of things."
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