Why Warren Buffett is bad for your health
WARREN Buffett knows you are weak. Even if you hit the gym regularly and demonstrate Buffett-esque discipline with your investments, sooner or later you are going to gulp down a sugary cold drink and put your money into mac and cheese with a bright orange hue.
Buffett believes in bad food, as a consumer and an investor. Although there might be no long-term reward in risky eating, there is relatively little risk in buying best-of-breed junk-food holdings — at least if Berkshire Hathaway returns are any measure.
Omaha has made a mint on artery-based arbitrage.
Let us take a stroll down Buffett’s bad-for-you buffet:
1940: Buffett has been a Coca-Cola investor since he sold the stuff door to door in his childhood. At the end of last year, Berkshire owned 9.2% of Coke shares;
1972: Berkshire Hathaway buys See’s Candies for $25-million;
1998: Dairy Queen, which had 5 790 outlets at the time, becomes a Berkshire Hathaway holding for $585-million;
2008: Berkshire Hathaway puts up $6.5-billion to help Mars purchase chewing-gum maker William Wrigley jnr.
2013: Buffett pours $12.25-billion into a deal to take tomato sauce and packaged food giant HJ Heinz private under 3G Capital, a Brazil-based private equity firm; and
2014: Berkshire Hathaway pro- vides $3-billion financing for Burger King’s purchase of the Tim Hortons doughnut empire. It is getting a 9% annual return.
Buffett is back at it again, working with 3G to bring together Kraft Foods Group and Heinz. The deal creates the third-largest food and beverage company in North America — a veritable mountain of tomato sauce, cold cuts, Kool-Aid and lots and lots of cheese.
While cutting these deals, Buffett was putting his mouth where his money was. His diet consists of Cheetos, liquorice and — most often — Utz potato chips as an important source of vegetables.
He is even known to drink Coke at breakfast, a meal for which the main event is occasionally ice cream.
When asked about his diet, Buffett has said he aims to eat like a six-yearold because that is the age at which mortality is least likely.
In terms of investing, his junk-food strategy is even more straightforward: people like to indulge. “No business has ever failed with happy customers,” Buffett said at Coke’s annual meeting in 2013.
Like most koans, however, that little gem makes more sense the longer one thinks about it.
Consider health food. It can be fastgrowing. But it’s also volatile. Going long on carbs before the Atkins diet hit would have been disaster. Glutenfree has been great in recent years, but the backlash is building.
From an investing perspective, sugar and fats are blue-chip stocks — steady, long-term performers not unlike the utilities that Buffett also likes to buy. Burger King has never been mixed up in any kind of health-food trend, and bottled water is about as close as Coke has come to a good-living trend.
Kraft Macaroni & Cheese will be paying dividends for decades, just not for diners.
Buffett knows this better than anyone because he literally eats the stuff for breakfast.
Plus, Berkshire has a healthy hedge: its core business is insurance. — Bloomberg