Berkshire Hathaway is down 1.8% this year. The S&P 500 is up 10.7%. That's a 12.4 percentage point gap for anyone keeping score, which apparently includes every financial journalist who graduated into a bear market and never recovered.
The S&P 500 contains Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire is being beaten by an index it's part of. Let that marinate. It's like losing a race where you're also the track.
Retail traders who bought Berkshire because their dead grandfather mentioned Warren Buffett once at Thanksgiving are now staring at negative returns while the broader market rips higher. They thought they were buying wisdom. They got a conglomerate that owns insurance companies and railroads. Turns out railroads don't moon.
The truly deranged part is that Berkshire's underperformance means it's dragging down the very index that's embarrassing it. If you removed Berkshire from the S&P, the gap would be even wider. Berkshire is getting its ass kicked by a benchmark it's actively making worse. That's not investing. That's performance art.
Every value investor who spent the last decade explaining why price-to-book ratios matter is now refreshing their brokerage app wondering why their net worth looks like a canceled Netflix show. They read the shareholder letters. They bought the B shares because the A shares cost more than their house. They diversified into quality. They did everything right except make money.
The second half of 2026 will bring more of the same. Berkshire will continue to exist. The S&P will continue to include Berkshire. Retail traders will continue to lose to an index that's specifically designed to be impossible to lose to. And somewhere in Omaha, a conglomerate that sells insurance and owns See's Candies will keep doing exactly what it's been doing while everyone pretends the chart doesn't exist.
Imagine being so bad at 2026 that you lose to yourself.
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