73 Reds

Depends on how much the broad market loses. The larger the loss, the better the odds BRK closes higher

For someone like me who doesn't trade short term price swings, you're right, other than Fairfax, which remains cheap.

Best move this investor ever made was NOT rebalancing BRK.

Yeah, rebalancing individual equities seems like a concept for those who don't know what they own. Buffett would be the last such person. My guess is he needs the money for something better but KO has seen its best days and AAPL probably has new business ideas that are yet unknown. Eventually he'll explain it.

I'm of a different ilk. If you believe this is a "better" than wonderful company, why pay taxes and then have to find an even better than "better wonderful company" in which to invest?

The irony is he sold "an even better business" and kept a mere "wonderful" business. Certainly valuation is a (the) reason but one has to wonder whether he would buy shares of KO today over AAPL.

Buffett's annual letters. They are not investing books per se, but I started reading them in the early 1980s knowing little to nothing about investing and the rest is history.

That would put every barber shop in the country out of business.

My daughter's alma mater now has a mandatory course in DEI. Mind you, tuition is $65k/year. I'd refuse to pay for those so-called credits.

But even you would acknowledge that you and your frat brothers are, as a group, exceptional. I'm not arguing that college education is a waste; in fact you can probably get a decent education almost anywhere if you stick with useful curriculum that can help you succeed in life. From my vantage point, colleges and universities offer all too many "degrees" and pathways that tend to lead nowhere without proper values or guidance.

There is value to the college experience if, going in, kids understand that they are there to learn a skillset or prepare for whatever further education is necessary to ultimately make a living. I gave my kids the option of going anywhere they wanted with that understanding in mind. They chose expensive private schools but to their credit they worked all through school and used their work experience to go on to successful careers. Funny you mention accounting; I hated accounting in college (nearly flunked) and didn't realize until later on how important fundamental accounting is to investing. I insisted that my kids take at least one accounting class and they did better than their dad.

Wait till your kids get into college. You may have to deprogram them after they complete their coursework. My kids would sit in class and just shake their heads at some of the nonsense being thrown at them. I seriously question the value of a liberal arts degree today and would like to think that if it were me, I'd opt for trade school.

Of course - almost anything can be deemed a mistake of sorts in hindsight because through that lens there is always some better way.

Nope. But what ought to be a more common refrain these days, we can agree to disagree.

You can characterize Warren and Charlie in a lot of ways, but "lack of effort" is not one of them. Even inactivity requires a conscious decision.

Financial crises are very different. In fact it is easy to predict the ultimate outcome of any financial crisis because the damage is never permanent. You don't have to know the "when" and "how"; ultimately the country and the world will survive. Those that have the financial strength to endure not only survive but often prosper from economic crises. Death, however is permanent and in March 2020 there was no road-map for how we were going to overcome a worst-case scenario.

On that day they didn't know, nor could they even credibly predict what they didn't know. IMO their inaction was logical but I understand why some would disagree, though Berkshire is probably not the stock for those folks.

Its hard to blame a 90-year old for hunkering down during a pandemic. As with any investment, shareholders or prospective buyers should ask themselves why they want to own the stock. Its not a stock for everyone, but conversely, owning it would probably not hurt anyone.

He has talked down the share price repeatedly throughout his tenure. I don't look at volatility as a bad thing; it has nothing to do with intrinsic value but it creates opportunities. He treats partners better with more opportunities to buy lower and sell higher. He rarely get an opportunity to make acquisitions with stock by advising folks not to buy shares because they are "expensive". And if he always want the stock to trade near its IV, share buyback opportunities are less frequent and the value of each buyback is also less than it would be at lower prices.

@crs223 I am not suggesting that Geico sell insurance "under cost" to anyone. But it seems that properly measuring "cost" may be an issue at Geico. Where I live Geico has never been a viable option for auto insurance. This encompasses a more than 40-year time span, multiple family members - young and old and in-between, who oh-by-the-way have never had a ticket, accident or claim. The only reasonable conclusion is that Geico should not be in business here at all or their standards of assessing risk need adjustment.

One common criticism of Buffett is his "management" of the share price. Were he to allow the stock to be more volatile, he would have more opportunities to both repurchase shares when the price is cheap and use the stock as currency when the price gets expensive. I would expect future management to avoid addressing the share price.

Not to minimize the issues at Geico but it is hardly the only company that shuns its best customers. In fact most renewal type businesses raise prices on existing customers at renewal time while offering first time customers a better deal - the telecommunications industry is perhaps the worst culprit. Call me naive but wouldn't rewarding loyalty (and lack of claims/incidents in the case of insurance) increase customer stickiness and thereby decrease marketing and turnover costs?

You're welcome, Viking! The irony is I wouldn't buy Berkshire today but I wouldn't sell it either; decades of deferred capital gains makes that entirely logical. Going forward, the appeal of Berkshire is that it can, and does invest in literally anything. Trillion dollar companies evolved from one idea/concept and each operates in a single industry. When viewed like that, size is really no excuse.

Viking, first I'd like to say thanks. You are the primary inspiration for me having recently joined this board. Your work on Fairfax has been the most thorough, spot on analysis of any company or investment that I have seen in a lifetime. That said, a little push-back on Berkshire. As you know, Berkshire has one huge advantage over the S&P 500 - insurance float. That alone ensures that with proper underwriting discipline, size is no barrier to success. To your point about size, it does of course minimize the playing field of needle moving investments, that is until it doesn't. Financial armageddon will most certainly recur one day, whether during Buffett's tenure or thereafter. What company is better situated to avail itself to a time of blood in the streets? My personal opinion is that shareholders will demand much more of successor management than they do of Warren. They won't tolerate some of Buffett's nuances that shareholders were always happy to overlook. This does not require a change in culture; rather the company could focus less on empire-building and more on broadening the so-called "circle of competence" to encompass industries, and even geographical regions of the World that have never really been considered. Older shareholders like me are happy to own Berkshire in its present form with a bent toward preservation of capital. But in order to attract new shareholders, successor management may have to loosen up the company's investment objectives beyond those of a 93 year old. Future management will surely recognize that they are not Warren Buffett, nor should they try to be him. My guess as a shareholder is that they will utilize their specific strengths and skills to see the company evolve in a way of which Buffett would be proud, as opposed to stagnation and/or a poor S&P 500 proxy.

Yes, he easily could have financed the house but instead he chose to pay cash. One lesson that made a lasting impression on this shareholder.