A few days ago, Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A) (BRK.B) released its annual report. Markel Corporation (MKL) has not published it yet, but it released its full year results.

As the readers of Warren Buffet’s letters already know, in 2015, he decided to slightly change the comparison criteria he had been using to evaluate Berkshire’s performance. He had always just compared BH’s book value appreciation against S&P 500 appreciation.

Since 2015, he has been taking into account also Berkshire stock price appreciation. The official reason for the change was that book value could not completely reflect the intrinsic value of the company (arguably, when we also consider good will and intangibles), but the real reason was that, for the first time in history, S&P 500 total return in the previous 5 years had surpassed Berkshire’s book value total return, whereas its stock price delta still performed better.

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