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A comment on Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram. Parent comment

Re:Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram by scarface74 on Thursday May 03, 2018 @11:21PM (#16991978)
It should be easy to see that one of the things that separates Warren Buffett from the rest of us is that he has a unique perspective of the financial world – he sees all of the dynamics and intricacies of the financial world in a way that few others do.

And it doesn't hurt that he can get special deals that most people can't.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/08/no_y...

On the Bank Of America deal.

This isn't an ordinary investment, in which an investor buys common stock. Buffett's $5 billion is buying him 50,000 shares of a special class of so-called "preferred stock," which will pay him a 6 percent dividend, or $300 million a year. Just for the sake of comparison, BofA's common shareholders get a quarterly dividend of one penny a share. That means that if you owned $5 billion of ordinary BofA common stock at its current price of about $8 a share, you'd be getting a paltry $25 million a year in dividends—less than one-tenth of what Buffett will get. (Earlier this year, BofA tried and failed to get permission from the Federal Reserve to increase the dividend.)

BofA can buy back Buffett's investment at any time for a 5 percent premium.

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Re:Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram by espeed on Friday May 04, 2018 @12:33AM (#16992213)
He didn't start out getting special deals. This is an example of the Pareto Principle [1] / Matthew Principle [2], which appears to be a natural law, an organizing principle like gravity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

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