Xô pobretada.
"Shareholder eugenics,” Warren Buffett once wrote, ”might appear to be a hopeless undertaking” – but by refusing requests for a stock split at Berkshire Hathaway, its founder believes he has attracted a better class of shareholder.
"Were we to split the stock or take other actions focusing on stock price rather than business value, we would attract an entering class of buyers inferior to the exiting class of sellers,” he wrote in the 1983 letter to shareholders, which he has cited on occasion since.
Making the stock more expensive, he argued, encouraged investors to take a long-term view and locked out those more likely to trade on emotion.
At the age of 83, questions of Mr Buffett’s succession plans are never far from the surface, but analysts say he has persuaded the market to view Berkshire as a holding company that will outlive him, rather than as a quixotic collection of investments assembled since he took control of what was then a small textile firm in 1964.
“People are realising that this is a great standalone mix of businesses, available at a reasonable price, with one of the world’s best managers at the helm,” said Jay Gelb, analyst at Barclays.
Berkshire’s A class shares at a price of $201,697 at lunchtime in New York compared to $1,288 for the travel website Priceline, the next highest-priced stock.
