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Because it isn’t a blueprint. Most of Buffet’s gains happened before data and computers were involved. Buffet isn’t a mathematician or a scientist.

If you followed Buffet’s blueprint last year, you would have lost a lot of money on Kraft Heinz. That was around a $5 billion loss for Buffet.

Today, his earnings underperform the S&P. In the middle of this coronavirus storm, his portfolio looked something like this:

At the peak of this virus, he was probably down around $50–70 billion.

Another point is that you simply can’t follow someone’s work. 13F filings make it impossible to. Even if you saw every equity he owned, he doesn’t need to show you all the options he has on those equities. He might very well be shorting something he owns, and you wouldn’t know because it doesn’t need to be reported on his 13F filings.

Renaissance Technologies has had over $100 billion in investor profits over the last 30 years. That turns out to be about 70% gains annually. They are the greatest hedge fund to ever exist; it was founded by Jim Simons, a mathematics Ph.D. Everybody at the firm is either a scientist or a mathematician or a statistician or a physicist.

But even then, you don’t have enough information to understand what they’re actually doing. A 13F doesn’t need to be filed up to 45 days after the quarter ends. That’s a lot of time where you don’t really know what’s going on. They have something like 4,000 equities being traded at any given 13F filing. That’s just for their Medallion Fund. That’s not including any derivatives trading—that they don’t need to report on a 13F—they are doing, which I would guess is where most of their gains are made.

In an ideal world, if you had billions of dollars, you would want to follow their strategy.

In reality, you can’t.

Credit: Anthony Andranik Moumjian