Before Berkshire’s big meeting Saturday, revisit 60 years of Warren Buffett’s best investing tips

This Saturday, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders will descend upon Omaha, Nebraska, for the company’s annual meeting, just as they did for over 60 years before. But for the first time ever, they’ll be doing it withoutWarren Buffett sitting in as company CEO. Recommended Video Though Buffett, 95, will still be in attendance this year, but he’s not set to speak, according to the meeting schedule. And even though he’ll be less hands-on this year, Buffett is still chairman of Berkshire’s board of directors and remains the company’s largest shareholder, holding about 30% of the voting interest and 13.7% of the economic interest. Every year between 1965 and 2024, Buffett wrote a letter to shareholders ahead of the annual “Woodstock for Capitalists.” Here are some of the “Oracle of Omaha’s” best reflections from his annual letters: The best holding period? Forever Coca-Cola and Apple rank among Berkshire’s most successful investments, but when Buffett started to buy Coke shares in the 1980s, the choice wasn’t so obvious. “We made major purchases of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Pfd. (“Freddie Mac”) and Coca-Cola. We expect to hold these securities for a long time. In fact, when we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever,” Buffett wrote in his 1989 letter. In the years after that letter, Berkshire bought 400 million shares of Coca-Cola stock, spending about $1.3 billion in total. Now, the company owns 9.3% of Coca-Cola, worth more than $31 billion. Don’t be a duck In 1998, Buffett warned against overstating your impact. “In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond,” he wrote. “So what’s our duck rating for 1997? The table on the facing page shows that though we paddled furiously last year, passive ducks that simply invested in the S&P Index rose almost as fast as we did.” Where we went wrong in 2008 In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Buffett shared one place he thought Wall Street went wrong. “When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary,” he said. He added that investors who “clinging” to cash equivalents and long-term government bonds felt validated by commentators saying “cash is king” would be in for a rude awakening. “Approval, though, is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns,” he wrote. Betting on the U.S. In one of his last letters, Buffett shared how being a U.S.-based company contributed to Berkshire’s success. “At Berkshire we hope and expect to pay much more in taxes during the next decade. We owe the country no less: America’s dynamism has made a huge contribution to whatever success Berkshire has achieved – a contribution Berkshire will always need. We count on the American Tailwind and, though it has been becalmed from time to time, its propelling…

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