Chou Associates Management Inc 13F holdings and portfolio analysis
Sign in to clone a new branch from the selected plan, then continue optimizing in the new branch.
Baseline
Analysis messagesPre-generated Q&A about this fund. Use as reference context for your own analysis.
Directly following the baseline exposes an investor to a very top-heavy portfolio dominated by Berkshire and financial/value-sensitive names. In the baseline artifact, Berkshire is 35.25%, Alphabet 12.33%, and Synchrony 9.77%; the top 5 holdings reach 70.83% and the top 10 reach 89.47%. Sector exposure is 62.11% Financials and another 16.77% Communication Services, so the portfolio is effectively a concentrated bet on a few financial and platform businesses. That structure produced only 7.25% annualized return with a -2.50 alpha and -37.61% max drawdown, so the investor is taking substantial concentration risk without benchmark-beating results.
The recent baseline periods that best explain the trade-off are the very weak 2022-12-31 period and the mixed 2024-06-30 and 2025-03-31 periods. In 2022-12-31, the baseline lost -4.68% versus -0.25% for SPY, for -4.42% excess return, with 41.04 turnover and 12 trades. In 2024-06-30, it gained 10.09% versus 9.83% for SPY, only +0.26% excess, but turnover spiked to 65.76 with 20 trades. In 2025-03-31, the baseline returned 3.51% versus 9.22% for SPY, a -5.71% excess result with 32.01 turnover and 21 trades. These periods show the core problem: occasional decent absolute returns, but high activity and inconsistent excess performance after lagged implementation.
A user should inspect three things next: concentration, period-level excess returns, and the lag/trading burden. Concentration is severe in the baseline artifact, with Berkshire at 35.25% and top-5 weight at 70.83%. Period-level results show repeated benchmark lag, including -4.42% excess in 2022-12-31 and -5.71% excess in 2025-03-31. Finally, implementation frictions matter because recent turnover reached 65.76 in 2024-06-30 and 32.01 in 2025-03-31, while the strategy is explicitly based on delayed 13F disclosure. If those three issues—top-heaviness, excess-return inconsistency, and filing lag—are uncomfortable, the baseline is probably not the best version to copy blindly.