The next Warren Buffett is who?

There won't be another Warren Buffett for a number of reasons

According to Terry Tanaka, the opportunities are no longer available because the times have changed.

In a statement released on May 3, Warren Buffett announced his resignation as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, giving Greg Abel control of one of the biggest and most prosperous investment banks ever. If Abel is not capable of handling the task, investors will question where they can find someone with the same level of intelligence as the man he is replacing. The simple response is that there will never be another market like this. This is due to three factors.

He began his lengthy career at the ideal moment, as Buffett himself was always the first to note. The US economy, which produced the majority of his wealth after World War II, experienced a prolonged period of unprecedented rapid growth that may never occur again. Accurately identifying the right stocks and trends required extraordinary skill, but it is much simpler when the economy is expanding concurrently. The opportunities will be different in a slower global economy that is equally dominated by China and the US.

There were also many small businesses to invest in when Buffett first started that had the potential to yield enormous returns. Buffett's major early successes were all in unnoticed industries. He made significant investments in businesses like Dempster Mill Manufacturing and Sanborn Map in the 1960s, which produced exceptional returns. Particularly for smaller businesses, there are now far fewer listed companies to pick from.

Over the past 20 years, the number of quoted businesses in the city has decreased, as we are all aware. But on Wall Street, it has been equally dramatic. More than 8,000 quoted companies existed in the US in 1996; however, that number has since decreased to just over 4,000, and it continues to decline. There were many companies that Buffett could invest in when he first started out, and there were many more that had long been overlooked by investors or their managers. Consequently, there was a much greater chance of discovering a spectacular winner. It will unavoidably be much more difficult for anyone else to perform the same trick because there are so few left.

"There isn't a next Warren Buffett."

Lastly, compared to earlier times, the markets have undergone a great deal more research. Buffett is well known for his insatiable reading of accounts and reports in order to identify the next venture to invest in. He combed through financial records from the beginning of his career in order to find untapped resources. If you are proficient at scanning balance sheets and no one else is willing to put in the effort, that is feasible. However, compared to when Buffett began his career, a lot more information is available today. Private equity firms and hedge funds are examining the same data and attempting to identify the same opportunities. That procedure will be even more streamlined by AI.

No matter how intelligent they were, it is difficult to believe that two men in Omaha could have seen something that the rest of the world had somehow overlooked. Buffett's reputation is well-earned. However, it doesn't seem likely that another investor will ever perform as well as he did. By making wise investments, anyone can become one of the five richest men in the world, but the investment landscape has changed too much. There is no such thing as the next Buffett, and searching for him is pointless.