usdaed

2025-08-01 11:36

Buffett has always seemed immortal, in the way that, say, the Queen was immortal or the geese in Hyde Park are immortal (i.e., not actually immortal). My entire investing adolescence has been spent comforted by the idea that buying Berkshire Hathaway was like bunking onto Buffett’s lifeboat: safe, if alarmingly full of insurance documents.

But now, there’s an expiration date on this cozy arrangement. By the end of 2025, Buffett steps down as CEO. The new protagonist? Greg Abel—loyal, steady, big on utility companies, perhaps not so into Cherry Coke. Buffett himself remains as chairman, which is reassuring in a “parental controls still on the telly” sort of way. But, as a growth investor, I must acknowledge the awkward breakfast-table truth: Abel is not Buffett. No one is Buffett, except, of course, Buffett.

Current status: Monitoring Greg Abel for signs of endearing quirks, spontaneous stock jokes, or an ability to resist meme stocks. Watch this space.

Now, if these predictions come to fruition, for the shareholders, it’s… fine. I guess. It’s fine for them. But it’s about the principle of the thing.

Let’s talk about two, shall we? Not because I want to—I don’t particularly enjoy giving the market free PR—but because, much like the guy in front of you at the bagel shop who insists on paying with nickels, these stocks refuse to go away.

Such a paradox prompts the astute observer—and the business historian, in particular—to inquire: How can colossal accumulations of wealth, orchestrated by figures of unmatched influence, fail to set the market ablaze? The answer lies partly in the shadowy mechanisms that underpin modern finance. Many of these transactions occur not on the open exchanges where prices are publicly discovered but in the discreet corridors of over‐the‐counter (OTC) markets. When Strategy secures its vast reserves or when Bitcoin exchange‐traded funds (ETFs) amass billions in net inflows (as was the case by mid‐July, with one fund drawing $1.3 billion in just two trading days), the bulk of these movements occur away from the watchful eyes of the mainstream. Thus, the visible price—a mere echo of hidden currents—remains largely unswayed by the colossal transactions that take place behind the scenes.

Rivian builds motorized boxes for hauling things and people. Electric ones, naturally. They’ve decided, quite sensibly I think, that big vehicles – the sort Americans adore, even if they only use them to pootle to the shops – are a good place to start. They’re aiming, you see, to be the Tesla of…well, things bigger than Teslas. A perfectly reasonable ambition, as long as you don’t mind being compared to a rather overhyped electric carriage maker.

Among these countless bastions of commerce, the S&P 500 stands as a perplexing monument—an index, a benchmark, a mirror held up by a committee of faceless arbiters, each element chosen not by rational necessity but by labyrinthine criteria: profitability according to GAAP, liquidity that borders on the spectral, and a minimum market value that teeters at an arbitrary threshold of $22.7 billion. A list curated in a process that seems to loop endlessly, an exercise in selection that resembles a Kafkaesque trial where the rules shift and the reasons dissolve into confusion, yet the index persists, reborn quarterly, as if to remind us of our helplessness in the face of its immutable cycles.