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Warren Buffett thoughtfully explains why investing in stocks/equities is better than real estate, during Berkshire's latest annual meeting: "In respect to real estate, it's so much harder than stocks in terms of negotiation of deals, time spent, the involvement of multiple parties in the ownership. Usually when real estate gets in trouble, you find out you're dealing with more than equity holder. But there have been times when large amounts of real estate... I've changed hands at bargain prices, but usually stocks were cheaper, but there were a lot easier to do. Charlie did more real estate. Charlie enjoyed real estate transactions, and he actually did a fair number of them in the last five years of his life. But he was playing a game that was an interesting game to him. But I think if you'd asked him to make a choice when he was 21, he'd either be in stocks exclusively the rest of his life or real estate the rest of his life. He would have chosen stocks in a second. There's just so much more opportunity, at least in the United States. There's so much more opportunity that presents itself in the security market than it does in real estate and in real estate. You're usually dealing with a single owner or a family that owns maybe a large property they've had a long time. Maybe they've borrowed too much money against them. Maybe the population trends are against them. But to them, it's an enormous... When you walk down to the New York Stock Exchange, you can do billions of dollars worth of business totally anonymous, and you can do it in five minutes. And the trades are complete when they're complete. In real estate, when you make a deal, a big deal with a distressed lender, when you sign the deal, then you go into another phase. Then people start negotiating more things and more things. It's a whole different game. And a different type of person, to some extent, enjoys the game. We did a few real estate deals that came our way in 2008 and 2009, but the amount of time that they would take us compared to doing something intelligent and probably better in securities, there was just no comparison. I mean, in a real estate deal, every sentence is important. In stocks, if somebody needs to sell 20,000 shares of Berkshire or something and they call us and the price is right, it's done in five seconds. And it closes all the time."