Even the Oracle of Omaha can't outsmart the Boston Behemoth's young guns. The Wall Street Journal's Serena Ng reports that Fidelity [profile] folks asked (directly or with the help of journalists) more than their share of questions of famed billionaire investor Warren Buffett at the latest annual shareholder meeting of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. And the Fido team did it despite a three-year-old system at the Berkshire meetings that's designed to pick questioners at random.

Business Insider, Financial News, Mother Jones and ValueWalk also covered the news.

"There's no question they figured out how to game the system," Buffett reportedly said upon learning of Fidelity's question-asking success at the meeting. "It's not in the spirit of the meeting."

Buffett added that he "might have done the same thing" when younger, but he told the WSJ that his company will change the meetings' question system again and "take steps to make sure that the questions from the audience are really by chance."

According to the paper, Fidelity claims about two percent of Berkshire shares, amounting to about $4 billion. More than 40 Fido folks attended this year's meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, and spread out to enter the raffles to ask questions. The result: the Fidelity team asked six of 27 audience questions, journalists asked two more questions for Fidelity. So eight of 54 questions, almost 15 percent, came from Fidelity. Not bad in a crowd of more than 30,000 people. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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