Warren Buffett and his company, Berkshire Hathaway, have a reputation for wise, disciplined investing. As I came across this dataset, I realized that I didn’t know the answer to this question. I’ve always been intrigued by the stock market and investing more broadly. This topic and dataset really spoke to me, so that is why I decided to try to improve upon this visual with an interactive dashboard of my own.
As I reviewed the original visualization, I realized that the work that was done was good, but needed to be enriched to answer more specific questions.
Here is the original visualization that I decided to improve on for my capstone project:
The dataset was a bit sparse and the answer to this question not readily available. Therefore, it required some effort to clean and enrich this data before visualizing it. I will start by sharing these steps with you.
Cleaning and Enriching the Dataset
Here are the steps that I took to setup and enrich the data.
- Unpivot the data and move it into a data-friendly format. This means making each dimension it’s own column as the dataset had “Years” as columns. This task was very simple with the use of Power Query.
- Enrich the data — That’s vague, what do you mean by that? In short, I converted the data into the STOCK data type in Excel by bringing in Ticker symbols for each of the holdings. Next, I used the STOCKHISTORY function in Excel to bring in historical price information.
- Lastly, I brought in the historical data for the stock ticker BRK.B, which is Berkshire Hathaway’s Class-B shares. I then brought in the same data for the ETF: SPY. This is important to remember because the STOCK data type in Excel works for ETFs and Stocks, not indices. SPY is an ETF that tracks the S&P 500 index, allowing investors to buy the index as an equity.
What does the new dashboard improve?
There are several points that I think are improved in the new dashboard.
- The user controls the navigation and speed that the information moves. The original visual moves through the years at high speed, making it difficult to really understand how the portfolio has evolved over time. The user can control the level of detail and the year in focus in the bottom visual, advancing at their own pace.
- Problem statements are more easily answered. The top visual in the dashboard directly answers the question of whether or not Berkshire Hathaway has outperformed the market. The bottom portion of the visual allows the user to select different years and understand how the sector, industry or stock allocations changed over time.
- The new visual is cleaner, with less chart junk. The original visual has a large picture of Warren Buffett in the middle of a pie chart and stacked bars on the bottom. These are both dated, difficult visuals for a reader to understand.
Hopefully you found this information useful. There is still more to this story if you’re wanting to gain insight to how Berkshire Hathaway’s strategy has evolved over time. If you are interested in seeing the progression of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio over time, click below to access the dashboard and guide your own journey through Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio.
