I'd like to send this letter by
cams
But Warren Buffett! Everyone likes Warren Buffett. Value investing, buy and hold, Cherry Coke, the whole schtick is so wholesome and appealing and throwbacky. Saying “Warren Buffett’s investment process is really just overweighting a couple of statistical factors and levering them 1.6 times” is really a way of saying “levered quantitative hedge fund investing isn’t so different from what Warren Buffett does, you know,” though of course it is. Translating folksy value investing into the language of quant hedge funds is a way not only to analyze the folksy investing but also to make the quant funds feel down-to-earth and accessible. “We’re just like Warren Buffett,” they can say. “A cold, heartless, non-ukulele-playing binary version of Warren Buffett, true, but the resemblance is still remarkable.”