I have written many times about how the long-always financial sales machine uses the legend of Warren Buffett to dupe customers into buying their products and their passive buy and hold strategies. See my articles: Buy and hold Buffett necessarily perpetually bullish, and Buffett explains the single best measure of where valuations stand today and Buffett’s Berkshire: return-free-risk round trip, and Warren Buffett must be the most misinterpreted guy that ever lived , for just a few.
Today someone else offers a rare insightful article on the truth behind the much abused myth of Warren Buffett. Well worth the read, to wit:
“To a large extent, the myth of Warren Buffett has fed a stock market boom as a generation of Americans has aspired to make their riches in the stock market. And who better to sell this idea than financial firms? After all, a quick allocation in a plain vanilla “value” fund will get you a near-replica of the Warren Buffett approach to value investing, right? Or maybe better yet, reading six months of Wall Street Journals and reviewing the P/E ratios of your favorite local public companies will send you on your way to successful retirement.
By oversimplifying this glorified investor named Buffett the general public gets the false perception that portfolio management is so easy a caveman can do it. And so we see commercials with babies trading from their cribs and middle aged men trading an account in their free time.
And an army of Americans pour money and fees into brokerage firms trying to replicate something that cannot be replicated. Financial firms want us to believe the myth of Warren Buffett. In fact, many of their business models rely on our believing the myth of Warren Buffett.” See: The myth of Warren Buffett is one of the greatest misconceptions in the financial world.
