Here's how badly Warren Buffett has beaten the market

Warren Buffett has beaten the market to such an extreme degree that comparing his success to everyone else can't be done using a normal line chart.

Business Insider compared the historical performance of Berkshire Hathaway's stock price from a 2001 retrospective and Yahoo Finance to the performance of the S&P 500 since Buffett bought the company in 1964.

Berkshire Hathaway's stock price increased by a mind-blowing 1,000,000% between December 1964 and December 2015. The S&P 500, on the other hand, increased by "only" about 2,300% over that time.

Here's a chart showing the evolution of Berkshire Hathaway's stock price and the S&P 500. Berkshire outperformed the broader stock market by so much that the only way to meaningfully compare the two is on a logarithmic scale, in which the vertical axis represents powers of 10:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz

Another way to look at Buffett's superhuman investing powers is to compare annual growth rates of Berkshire stock and the broader stock market. Since year-to-year changes are extremely noisy and volatile, we made a chart showing the five-year moving-average annual price returns for Berkshire's stock and the S&P 500 since Buffett's takeover:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz

Through the end of the 20th century, Buffett handily outperformed equities as a whole. Since 1999, he's still tended to beat the market, but by a more modest amount.

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