Pellom

Continuing to add to GRBK slowly.

Berkshire finally owns Google. What a day.

Got it. Market mechanics are over my head. Could be a pretty interesting way to round trip all the cash Berkshire has -- start buying back shares around the time the kids' foundations start selling.

Maybe I'm misguided here, but isn't the fact of the matter that he won't sell them, but the charitable trust (after his death) will begin selling them, with all distributions expected within 10 years? "At the latest, the proceeds from all of my Berkshire shares will be expended for philanthropic purposes by 10 years after my estate is settled. Nothing will go to endowments; I want the money spent on current needs." Warren Buffett - The Giving Pledge To me, this week's letter suggested he is speeding up the process by which his shares are converted and sold, because of his children's advancing ages. Again, he is not technically selling anything. He is gifting the shares to be sold.

I'm not sure he's worried about the activist standpoint so much as the optics of him selling his shares as soon as his replacement takes over. Maybe I'm misguided in how Warren's kids typically operate their foundations, but the A shares aren't being converted simply to sit as B shares for the next 100 years. Those shares are going to be sold -- and according to his wishes, sooner rather than later. The stock will likely move lower as a result.

I am puzzled by opinions - both here and elsewhere - that Buffett is trying to hold on for too long, hog the spotlight, or make Greg's job tougher in some way. Warren knows the cult of personality that follows him, and he knows Greg won't have the same benefit, so my read is he is using as much of his goodwill as possible to help him, not hurt him. Greg is going to have a lot of pressure on him immediately, and he'll almost certainly be faced with tough operational decisions that both Warren and Charlie admitted they ignored or tried to delay due to faith in well-meaning but poor management.

Agreed. He has clearly been laying the framework for Berkshire to be thought of as an operating business, not an equity investing business. (This has been happening for decades, of course.)

I think he gave Greg cover to sell off some of the lesser performing business lines.

No doubt. Not necessarily betting on it getting spent. We know x amount is there as reserves for insurance. My general feeling is they'll be more of a distressed player (thinking in terms of, say, Goldman Sachs or Bank of America deals in the past) under Abel than going for huge swings in the equity market. Either way, I like the set-up over the long-term as I am not chasing performance. I understand people not being super excited about it as a market beating stock over the near or medium term.

Got it. I'm thinking about it in terms of putting the treasuries and stock portfolio to the side, removing it from the market cap, and basing the operating earnings multiple on that lower number. I know this is not a technically correct way to think about the accounting and how the market is valuing the company, but I try to think of the operating business and the investing business as different things -- I wouldn't do this for any company other than Berkshire, whose management I trust implicitly.

So, if I'm thinking about this correctly, Berkshire is trading at a 12-13x Operating PE with nearly $400 billion to spend in the next market downturn?

I doubt this is happening, but I hope he is writing a memoir or at the very least committing to paper some of his non-Berkshire related ideas/memories. I'm sure he is happy to let the annual letters speak for themselves, but one can dream.

"Berkshire's out of touch" is usually the sign of a market top. We'll see.

The Berkshire Beat: October 24, 2025 - Kingswell

Not so much the 90's, but I would guess there might have even been a negative perception of Buffett in the early 80's, even if the results were great. He was much more of an "activist" investor in the 70's, and much of that work was making unpopular decisions.

Starter position in GRBK. More GHC (it's falling quickly as I assumed it would when I started.) Probably not the best reason, but I've got way too much cash. I probably need to set some upper and lower bounds for myself. Was at 27% cash before these purchases.

I wouldn't be surprised if it rubbed Omaha wrong when Vicki publicly said she'd love for Berkshire to buy all of the company. It seems to go directly counter to their preference for people who love the job they're doing. Speculation on my part, but by buying this in cash, it seems they got their preferred piece of the total operation.

New book coming from Tobias Carlisle. Really interesting premise.

Decided to dip a toe in with GHC (0.5% of portfolio). Could build over time as I expect the price to drop when earnings are released -- non-election cycle so earnings should look really bad superficially for the next couple of quarters.

You're right, let me be more clear. The assumption has been Berkshire has been unhappy about this investment -- specifically the CEO's decisions. By buying a piece of the business they clearly like, I wonder if this begins a gradual exiting of the ownership stake of Oxy.

I imagine they will exit Oxy altogether once this is finalized?

It's also *slightly* different given Buffett (maybe not in the 1950s, but you'll get my point) had the ability to affect outcomes directly via a larger capital base and needling of management. In a lot of those instances, he was telling people "throw money into this company" because he could be sure management would do the right things one way or another.

My and my wife's IRAs, two UTMA brokerage accounts for our kids, and a couple of managed accounts for friends and family: FFH - 19.9% BRK.B - 16.3% SGOV (I think of as cash) - 15.6% NTDOY - 13.4% MKL - 13% KOF - 7.8% GIL - 6.8% GOOG - 5.8% CROX - 1.4%

More Gildan, newly into Crocs at $76.31.

Munger has always said three companies is probably the minimum diversification he was comfortable with. I'm at about 22% FFH in the accounts I manage, the biggest of seven holdings. This has happened not intentionally, but because we add new money each month and there hasn't been much opportunity elsewhere. Our newer/smaller accounts are probably 50% FFH right now. (I've been splitting new money between FFH and SGOV.)