Warren Buffett, who is a value guy and doesn’t even care about something so micro as one year’s returns, beat the S&P 500 by nearly +7% this year. That’s still a 32% drop, but it’s certainly better than losing 38.5% or worse then waking up today and looking at your funds and seeing that your fund manager has shuffled it all into Treasuries and MCD stock, as if you’re not gonna notice the whole lipstick-on-a-pig thing.

This year, Buffett used the market decline to cut what initially looked like sweetheart deals with Goldman Sachs and GE, bought up ConocoPhillips, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo and railroads, and took an investment in the Dow Chemical/Rohm and Haas deal which is now underwater. But see, he doesn’t care:

The stock plunge “doesn’t make any difference,” Buffett told Fox Business Network Nov. 21.

“It’s happened to me three other times,” Buffett said. “It happened when it went from 90 to 40 back in 1974, and it happened in 1987. It went down 50 percent in 1998-to-2000. I mean, I hope I live long enough so it happens a couple more times.”

Still, playing the market in 2008 was the kind of game where most of the “winners” are looking at negative returns that just happen to not be as bad as the S&P and thus, are not going to want a bucket of Gatorade (or, in Buffett’s case, KO-owned Powerade) dumped over their heads, and will instead be looking for a crying towel.