The answer is apparently a lower stock price:
Despite the increasingly vocal criticism of his
shareholding, Mr Buffett insisted the decision to sell his remaining
stake was driven by valuation issues rather than politics. At a
Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting earlier this year, Mr Buffett
opposed a motion that would have obliged it to divest its stake. The
motion was defeated.
Mr Buffett has left the door open to a return to the share register of China's biggest company.
"If
it went down a lot I'd buy it back," he told Rupert Murdoch's Fox
Business Network in an interview, admitting that Petrochina's recent
share price performance meant he had "left a lot of money on the table".
"Our preferred holding time is forever." LOL.
I like to see Buffett exposed as a TRADER.
Posted by: Bill aka NO DooDahs! | October 22, 2007 at 05:59 PM
Bill, well, there are a couple of books on Buffett's so-called trading techniques. Haven't read any books (the one I want isn't at the library :( ) but some supposedly explain his shorter-term strategies.
I think it's misleading to call Buffett a trader, but he definitely does do short-term stuff. He has done risk arbitrage throughout his investment career, with the latest being his position in Dow Jones early this year.
Posted by: Sivaram Velauthapillai | October 22, 2007 at 09:26 PM
A trader buys in order to profit from selling. It is certainly not misleading to call Buffett a trader.
Posted by: Bill aka NO DooDahs! | October 23, 2007 at 10:43 AM
Bill: The guru of all value investing gurus, Ben Graham defines trading in the market as follows. "This usually means buying stocks when the market has been advancing and selling them after it has turned downward. The stocks are likely to be among those which have been behaving better than the market average"(intelligent investor p11)
Your defintion is overly broad and poorly misused...i think it is pretty amusing for you to classify Buffet as a trader.
Posted by: mbk | October 23, 2007 at 03:34 PM
I'm glad you're amused. I live for your amusement. Regardless, it's an accurate classification.
That passage by BG was one of the weaker ones in the book, and was overly limited to momentum traders. He (and Zweig) made similar misstatements about others' methods in that book, including several flawed straw man arguments.
Hey, was the dollar already going down when WEB made his big bet against it about a year/two ago? Did he cover that bet after the dollar reversed?
Mind you, I'm not saying WEB is a poor trader, it seems he's a pretty good one. But he IS a trader.
Posted by: Bill aka NO DooDahs! | October 24, 2007 at 08:04 PM