All this talk about Warren Buffett not buying....Buffett is not...

All this talk about Warren Buffett not buying....

Buffett is not a market trader; he buys and holds wonderful businesses and portions of wonderful businesses for the extreme long term, preferably forever.

He also will not pay more than a fair price, which may support the theory here that "the market's overpriced and headed for a second big fall".

But consider two facts: (i) Buffett wasn't buying anything much at the March lows, and (ii) Buffett isn't selling anything much - apart from airlines - at these supposedly nosebleed general market levels.

This suggests that the other side of Buffett's value coin is stumping him, namely the calculation of the present value of all future cash flows from potentially wonderful acquisitions. He needs a very high certainty of what future long-term business conditions are going to be, in order to do this calculation. Buffett himself has stated there is a plethora of potential possible economic and business outcomes resulting from the coronavirus.

This is the main reason he's keeping his powder dry. He knows that even a 50%, 60%, 70% drop in stock prices is still no reason to buy, when a miscalculation of the order of 1000%, 2000% or 3,000% over the next couple of decades of a business's cashflows could otherwise permanently impair Berkshire's valuable capital.

Buffett is also self-admittedly clueless as to what negative interest rates have on valuations.