alt Hacker News>Historically, BRK-B has very often outperformed the SP500.
Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.
> It's a solid alternative if you distrust tech which is today very heavy in the SP500.
The only reason BRK kept up with SP500 over the last 10 years is because of its outsized investment in Apple in 2016 or so, after the disastrous results of sitting out of tech in the 2000s and early 2010s and pursuing other investments such as Kraft Heinz or whatever.
As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:
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It's disingenuous to lump AAPL in with the tech stocks that compose the top part of the S&P 500 right now. Much of their valuations are highly-leveraged bets on a massive and nearish-term realization of a dream AI business scenario (NVDA, TSLA, AVGO, and to a lesser extent MSFT, GOOG and META).
What % of AAPL is a highly-leveraged bet on AI, in comparison to those listed above? If you could only own 1 of those over the previous and incoming 10 years, it'd be challenging to not choose Apple, with maybe Google as second (albeit with a sizable regulatory asterisk).
I know there's a tendency to reduce everything to numbers, but Berkshire is playing a qualitatively completely different risk management game from the rest of the companies in the top 10 in the S&P 500 right now.
Edit: selfishly, I think you have more to gain from understanding why BRK chose to invest in Apple, than you do from aiming to "explain away" BRK as unremarkable.
If you're trying to choose where to lazily (i.e. with as little mental effort as possible) stash away your investments, that's a separate discussion. Buffet himself recommends S&P 500. But BRK is playing a fundamentally different game from the S&P. An investment in VOO vs an investment in BRK support very different theses.
> Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.
Except this not factually true.
BRK-B has outperformed the SP500 on pretty much every time horizon outside of the 2009-2019 period and as you have pointed it significantly does so in the last 5 years.
> As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:
Tech is 34% of the SP500.
There is valid reasons to prefer SP500 ETF in a diversified portfolio. Hoping that it will perform better with less risk based on historical data is not one of them.
SPY has a cumulative return of ~370% from start of 2000. BRK.B is at ~1,200%. That's a pretty big difference.
You can discount Apple as being part of the portfolio, but that's a bit like saying, well they wouldn't have done so well if we remove the high performing stocks in the portfolio.