The new moat in financial services (and why Peter Thiel, not Warren Buffett, is the investment wizard)
In the networked age, scale of production is no longer a moat. Instead, network effects are the new moat. Peter Thiel gets this; Buffet doesn’t.
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The investment “moat”
I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’ -Warren Buffett
The quote above from Warren Buffet, a statement he first made in a 1996 investor letter, is one of his most famous. It neatly encapsulates his investment approach: invest in giant companies that can achieve a “moat” by operating at a scale that others can’t reach.
By spreading the fixed costs of expensive, non-transferable assets like machinery or a banking licence, as well as highly-geared operating expenses like brand marketing and regulatory compliance, over a larger revenue base than competitors, these companies could be better known and cheaper. And, if you look at Buffet’s portfolio, it’s full of companies operating in industries with high fixed costs and high operational gearing: capital goods companies like BYD, consumer goods like Coca Cola and, above all, financial services companies like Wells Fargo, Amex and Bank of America.
The investment approach was massively successful — until it wasn’t. In the period 1979 to 2008, Warren Buffet outperformed the S&P 500 by 12.6% a year on average, cementing his reputation as the Wizard of Omaha, the most successful investor of all time. But — a less known fact — since the financial crisis, Warren Buffett has underperformed the S&P. One might be tempted to attribute this relative under-performance to the heavy financial services weighting in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. However, while a factor, deeper structural changes are at play.
