MarketFoolery－Buffett’s Latest Buys

​Warren Buffet Celebrating his 90th birthday by buying shares of the five leading trading companies in Japan, 5% stake in each which worth $6.5 billion in total. Those companies are Sumitomo Corp., Itochu Corp., Marubeni Corp., Mitsui&Co., and Mitsubishi Corp. Bill Man analyzed that $6.5 billion is not a huge investment for a company like Berkshire-Hathaway. Interesting point appeared when Buffett has started to look outside the U.S. market; he bought a *German Company and he also invested in China and Brazil. Now he invested in trading companies in Japan, known as sogo shosha, those that import everything from energy and metals to food and textiles into resource-scarce Japan. They have join venture all over the world. Bill Man continued that since Shinzo Abe became a Prime Minister, Japan stocks have always been outperformed. He thinks American investors have dramatically too low exposure to the market outside the U.S. and they should somehow look outside. Japanese market is an interesting choice as their market is relatively inexpensive. (* Berkshire-Hathaway acquired German family-owned Company Detlev Louis Motorrad-Vertriebs in February 2015)
Economic Legacy of Shinzo Abe: Abe is the longest serving PM. His term will end in September 2021 and he is stepping down due to health reason. It is yet to determine who is going to be the next. Bill Man explained that Abe believes the power of Japanese. He targeted Japan up to 2% of inflation and he has broken the Japanese culture of cross-holding. Most impressive thing he did was sweeping program of a structure reform by making sure there are much higher component of females workers in Japanese industries. Bill Man said Abe leads Japan to the right direction even though it has been difficult.
Stock split: Apple split 4 for 1 and Tesla split 5 for 1 on the same day. Bill Man said this action sent the wrong message to a lot of investors. He added that stock split should not matter. To scale in should matter more.