On the face of it, Mr Buffett's gambit looks both unwise and uncharacteristic. Shares in Berkshire Hathaway, his holding company, tumbled last week (they have since recovered) because it is nursing a mark-to-market loss of about $5bn on the derivatives contracts.
In fact, a casual observer might question what Mr Buffett, who once condemned derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”, was playing at when he bet that four equity indexes, including the Standard & Poor's 500, would not be below their existing level in 2019 to 2027.
Mr Buffett himself conceded the point in his 2006 letter to investors. Such transactions, he wrote, “may seem odd . . . Why, you may wonder, are we fooling around with such potentially toxic material?”
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