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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/24/2026 in Posts

  1. +1 One other big difference versus BRK in the 1980s/1990s is that Fairfax is already returning large amounts of capital through both dividends and buybacks, while Berkshire did neither. In 2024 Fairfax returned about $1.93–1.95B to shareholders, roughly 50% of earnings, and in 2025 it returned about $1.94–1.96B, roughly 40–41% of earnings. That matters because a great business that retains 100% of earnings gets big very fast, and the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to reinvest every new dollar at the same high rate. A business that can instead use a meaningful part of earnings to buy back stock below intrinsic value can keep compounding per-share value at a very high rate without needing the whole enterprise to become gigantic. Buybacks (below iv) hold market cap down AND push iv/share! Take a simple example: start with 1,000 shares and 100,000 of equity, so intrinsic value starts at 100 per share. Assume both companies earn 18% annually for 20 years (I am oversimplifying iv as bv to keep the example shorter). Company A reinvests 100% of earnings. Company B retains only half and uses the other half to repurchase shares at 75% of intrinsic value. After 20 years, Company A has 1,000 shares outstanding, equity of about 2,739,303, and intrinsic value per share of about 2,739. Company B has only about 117 shares left, equity of about 560,441, and intrinsic value per share of about 4,787. That is the punchline: Company B ends up with only about one-fifth the market cap of Company A, and only about 117 shares left out of the original 1,000, yet it creates vastly more value per share for the continuing owners. Bigger is not better if the smaller company is buying in stock below intrinsic value. So yes, Fairfax may be entering a Berkshire-like capital allocation phase. But because Fairfax pays a dividend and is aggressively shrinking the share count when the stock is cheap, the per-share compounding path could end up looking meaningfully better than many investors expect.
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