Tesco's share price has fallen nearly 50%, a huge mistake by the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett

Tesco's share price has fallen nearly by 50% reducing the value of investment by 50%.

The Sage of Omaha has said that his decision to invest in Tesco is a "huge mistake."
Berkshire Hathaway firm owns a 3.7% stake in Tesco, worth hundreds of millions of dollars and now  the supermarket's sales are declining and in addition to that share price has fallen to an 11-year low this year.
Tesco shocked investors last week by issuing a string of profit warnings. It revealed it had overstated its expected half-year profits by £250m.

The chairman of the Parliamentary Business Committee, Adrian Bailey, has described Tesco's error as "stratospheric".

He told on CNBC,"I made a mistake on Tesco. That was a huge mistake by me."

Mr Buffett is famous for comprehensive ability to understand the performance of a business for long period of time but now it does not seem so. The risk this time in Tesco are high.

Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio consist names like Coca-Cola, IBM and American Express and it started to include Tesco in 2006 and by 2012 owned more than 5% of the business.

What happened next?
The stake had fallen to 3.7% by the end of 2013 , with investment capital of  $1.7bn and continuing the fall since then Tesco's share price has fallen nearly 50%. It has now made the value to investment half of it's original value.

In addition to that Tesco has seen declining sales amid increased competition. The discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl are in the in the market and Marks & Spencer and Waitrose are providing high end offerings to attract customers.

Tesco says  Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has been notified it that it is under investigation following its admission last week that it overstated its half-year profit guidance by £250m.
The supermarket giant will co-operate fully with the FCA and other relevant authorities.

The news induced a new fall in Tesco's share price, its lowest for more than 10 years. leaving it down 3% at 180p.

Tesco has itself has  launched its own investigation into the issue.  Deloitte, together with Freshfields, the group's external legal advisers will do the investigation.

Four executives were suspended in connection with accounting problem and there was change in high level management. Chief executive Dave Lewis has only been in the job a month, while chief financial officer Alan Stewart, who was originally due to join the company on 1 December, had his start date brought forward and took up the post last week.

JPMorgan shares rose 1.5 percent to $59.72, but got a massive cyber attack.

JP Morgan is the US's biggest bank and it got a massive cyber attack on 76 million private and seven million business customers in the US. An employee password was used to crack a JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) server and ultimately pull off one of the largest cyber-attacks ever, accessing data on 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. Even though the hacker collected  information and addresses of the account holders, the collected information were not critical.
For Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it had not seen any "unusual customer fraud related to this incident". Home Depot and Target have been the subject of similar wide scale attacks. JP Morgan says customers are not required to take any action, such as changing their passwords or account information.

Its company spokeswoman, Patricia Wexler, said that the bank is not offering credit monitoring to customers either because it does not believe any financial information, account data or personally identifiable information was taken. He added, some of those affected by the incursion were outside the U.S.,  In addition to contact information, hackers tapped into internal data identifying customers by category, such as whether they are clients of the private-bank, mortgage, auto or credit-card divisions.

She further added that all details has not been exposed, so there's no need to take actions by customers.Information on both current and former customers was exposed, as well as on some non-customers, including people who may have logged on to JPMorgan websites to conduct transactions with bank clients. Data were compromised through Chase.com and JPMorganOnline.com, and the mobile apps that support those websites.

JPMorgan shares rose 1.5 percent to $59.72 at 9:56 a.m.(October 3,2014) in New York and have gained about 2.2 percent this year, trailing the 6.1 percent advance for the 85-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index.

The U.S. total household is 115 million and  76 million households were affected. Earlier this year, 145 million personal records were taken in a breach of EBay Inc. An attack on retailer Target Corp. during last year’s holiday season affected as many as 110 million shoppers. An attack at Home Depot Inc. disclosed last month compromised 56 million payment cards.

According to the people familiar with the bank’s review the attack at JPMorgan started in June. The hackers entered a web-development server with an employee’s user name and password, then got their access into lender’s network, the people said.

Government officials and security specialists have long warned of the possibility of cyber disruptions in the financial system and other services and utilities. Those concerns are heightened in times of conflict.

Having said that people should themselves be aware about the possible threat and must take actions to stay away from trouble. Changing password often and signing off from devices when you leave the desk will help to increase security.