I totally missed the market timing in March 2020, says Warren Buffett

hello warden and charlie it is great to see you both and the wonderful berkshire managers our thanks for everything that you do my name is rajiv agarwal and i am from new jersey my question is on market timing you have always said that it is impossible to time the markets yet if we look at your track record you have had amazing timings with some of your key decisions you got out of the stock markets in 1969 70. you got back in 72 70 to 74 when the markets were really cheap you did the same thing in 87 99 2000 and today we are sitting on a significant amount of cash when the markets are going down my question is how do you time the big market moves so well uh we'd like to offer you a job first i was ticket the uh the interesting thing is uh you know obviously we have the faintest idea what the stock market is going to do when it opens on monday we never have had we have never made charlie and i i don't think in all the time we've worked together and i'll tell you something later on maybe about how learning takes place but we have we have never uh i don't think we've ever made a decision that where either one of us has either said or been thinking we should buy yourself based on what the market market's going to do no or or for that matter on on what the economy is going to do we don't know and the interesting thing is uh some sometimes i get some credit someplace for the fact that you know how wonderful it was that we were optimistic in 2008 and when everybody was down on stocks and all that sort of thing you know we we we spent a big percentage of our net worth in a very dumb time and i i shouldn't say we it's i we spent about 15 or 16 billion dollars which was a lot bigger to us then than it is now we spent in the last few weeks a period of three or four weeks between wrigley and goldman sachs and generally at a terrible time as it turned out i mean i didn't think i didn't know it was going to be a good time or a bad time but it was a really dumb time and i wrote an article for the new york times and by american and all these things well if i'd had any sense of timing and waited six months until i think the law was in march and in fact um i think i was on cnbc maybe that day or something but but uh i totally missed that opportunity i totally missed you know in march of of 2000 2020. uh we we we have not been good at timing we have we've been reasonably good at figuring out when we were getting enough for our money and we hadn't had no idea when we bought anything well we always hoped it would go down for a while so we could buy more and we hoped even after we were done buying and ran out of money that if it was cheap the company would keep buying in effect taking our interest up i mean that stuff you could you could learn it in fourth grade but but it's not what's taught in school and i mean so never give us any credit well actually give us all the credit i mean go out and tell everybody how smart we are but we aren't they we we [Music] we haven't ever timed anything we've never figured out insights into the economy i mean when i was when i was about 11 years old march march 12th i guess 1942 you know at march 11th you know i bought stock when the dow was 90. it was 101 in the morning it was 99 at the end of the day i think and uh you know now it's 34 000 or maybe it's a thousand less than it was on thursday [Laughter] but i just you know it's one decision

Channel: CNBC Television

Views: 243,201

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Id: 0QS2Ve3dGNw

Length: 4min 49sec (289 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/wntrsux]

We all did. No one expected that insane rally after the instant crash, when the entire world came to a halt. Not sure when we had a rally like that that pushed the US stock market by 250% in a year and a half.

[u/MichiganFB1965]

Boglehead DCAs didn't...they kept buying enjoying turbocharged returns when the market normalized....just like this week's fire 🔥 sale is going to do.