John Hjorth
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Posts posted by John Hjorth
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Question likely especially for @ICUMD and @CorpRaider,
Which Canadian and / or North American banks are you invested in?
I hope that you wouldn't mind to share. - Thank you in advance. - And as already written : All replies from everyone welcome!
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There is also this book by Terry Smith :
Amazon : Terry Smith : Investing for Growth.
We also have a discussion of the book here on CoBF in the Books forum in this topic.
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12 hours ago, gfp said:
It will be interesting to see when we get the 10-K for 2023, if this includes a sale of the final and remaining part of PilotJ to Berkshire, or not.
The Haslams instead of being partners with Berkshire and Berkshires shareholders seem to be a pretty troublesome, stressful, cumbersome and taxing minority shareholder to tug around as a drag if you ask me. It's just such a no-go. *sigh*
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BusinessWire [January 7th 2024] : Berkshire Hathaway Reaches Settlement with Pilot Corporation.
Typical Press Release format from Berkshire :
QuoteBerkshire Hathaway Reaches Settlement with Pilot Corporation
January 07, 2024 08:41 PM Eastern Standard TimeOMAHA, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(BRK.A; BRK.B) – Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement to fully settle the Delaware litigation, including all claims and counterclaims, between Pilot Corporation and Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Pilot Travel Centers LLC, and National Indemnity Company.
About Berkshire
Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiaries engage in diverse business activities including insurance and reinsurance, utilities and energy, freight rail transportation, manufacturing, retailing and services. Common stock of the company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, trading symbols BRK.A and BRK.B.
Cautionary Statement
Certain statements contained in this press release are “forward looking” statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Berkshire assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
Contacts
Marc D. Hamburg
402-346-1400 -
Thank you, @gfp,
You are exactly catching the only specific and for the specific case the only tangible figure I've been able to relate to the case for Berkshire.
Estimated economic value of the put option, according to BRK 10-Q reporting :
BRK 2023Q2 10-Q - "Redeemable noncontrolling interests - USD 3,210 M" [ p. 3 ], &
BRK 2023Q3 10-Q - "Redeemable noncontrolling interests - USD 3,230 M" [ p. 3 ].
To me, it's not totally clear what has triggered the Haslams to sue in the first place. Is it something internally processed by the board, or did they expect more than ~ USD 3,2 billion?
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Isen't there to some degree confusion about the numbers [money sums] involved in the description of the disagreement with the Haslams?
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The topic title is misleading and deceptive :
QuotePortfolio positioning asked somewhat differently , for 2024
, compared to content of the starting post, and shoud be accordingly edited to :
QuoteYour best one-stock bet with 5 year horizon for 2024
Let me just say, that those two questions appear to me to be far from identical.
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34 minutes ago, villainx said:
+48% taxable
+31% non taxable
+41 combined. ~40% position in Apple ... so nothing I did really mattered?
Take it easy, - no sweat, @villainx,
Just make AAPL your benchmark, drop all your laggards [relative to AAPL], and your nest would be a ... cuckoo's nest! - Naturally what you did in the past mattered : You bought AAPL to the extent, so it went to get 40 percent of your portfolio.
[I would argue there are worse problems to be the owner of
]
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3 minutes ago, CassiusKing1 said:
Nice price movement for the first couple trading days of the year.
Is it yet to an extent so we need to have a separate topic to show off our bulging belly buttons?
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Posted by @Xerxes,
In the above mentioned topic :
15 hours ago, Xerxes said:I suppose I can buy the book with the yellow cover that goes to 2014 and print the ones from 2015-2024 and staple it myself to the book
while I prefer to reply in this topic :
Yeah, naturally.
That said, I have to say one particular thing : I had low expectations ordering my first personal copy. It turned out that I ended up very surprised about the quality of the book [here, the book, based on the craft you can assess and make judgements about involved in producing it - here, not the contents as such], and surprised in a very positive way! - to me, it's really good quality! ,- despite a price that appears to me personally to be modest.
So I ordered a few more copies, that I have used as gifts to family members.
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We can think and speculate away in any direction each of us personally want.
What one gets from buying the original book from www.lulu.com [ Link ] is a survey of the central facts, that turned Berkshire Hathaway Inc. from being a turd to a company saturated with greatness :
Survey of :
1. Float development
2. Cost of float development.
[In the book, it's outside pagination, in the front.]
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Max Olson [ CoBF member @maxprogram ] has recently released a new digital version of this book.
Please visit this CoBF topic in the Berkshire Hathaway forum for further information.
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I speculate that Mr. Buffett has never forgotten how his cooperation with the author of 'Snowball' turned out [the only book about Berkshire / Buffett that I own, that I've never finished reading [in the meaning : reading it from first page to the last], and likely never will].
Maybe Andrew Kilpatrick with his several and regularly editions of "Of permanent value"- 'regularly' at least untill the latest 2020 edition - may be the exception from that rule of thumb.
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28 minutes ago, KJP said:
Cash only has fully stable value relative to itself ($1 is stable relative to $1), as opposed to relative to another asset, e.g., cash does not have stable value relative to BTC or Berkshire shares. But every asset has the characteristic. Once to get beyond stable relative to itself, then you need to introduce some other comparator and assess one thing's stability relative to the other.
Cash has the benefit of less short-term volatility relative to most people's short-term obligations, e.g., the cost of food or your mortgage payment, and it's currently necessary for nearly all transactions, including paying your taxes, so it provides a necessary liquidity function.
What do you think will be more stable relative to the value of your house over 20 years, cash or SPY?
@KJP,
That was very well said.
When we hit February 1st 2024, that's one month from now -, - if nothing seuriously really starts to break somewhere before that date, we will have have had and experienced one the longest bull markets - 15 years! - in economic history, - if not the longest ever, with only short periods over those 15 years where cash in clear hindsight was to be preferred over the stock market.
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Happy New Year!
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17 hours ago, backtothebeach said:
Regarding book keeping: I calculate monthly returns looking at the month end-values of my portfolio. The annual return is the monthly return compounded.
If I take out money I try to do it at the beginning or end of the month and subtract it from the starting value or add it back to the ending value of that month. It would be the opposite for inflows. Example: Let's say I start with 110k, and take out 10k on one of the first days of the month, I just pretend I started the month with 100k.
Or, with a lot of inflows or outflows you can net them out and adjust the starting and ending balance by half the value.
Nothing too fancy, everything else would be too much work for negligible extra precision.
1 minute ago, coc said:This is exactly what I do as well. Compounded monthly returns with inflows/outflows intra-month left out of the calculation.
The only more precise method would be to do it daily, but as you said, doesn't really gain enough useful precision unless you're a professional fund manager.
After thinking a bit about it, this approach appears to me to generate good 'approximation towards and near perfection' for practical purposes.
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~19%, with S&P500 at ~24%.
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Years ago, I did spend many hours each year on such excercises, with what I would label immaterial differences to a straight IRR calculation as outcome. Pragmatism made me leave this activity for good, as immaterial. But YMMV, dependant on how stable [to which degree stable] your capital base is.
Progress in our endavours to become richer aren't really measured in 0.1 percentages!
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18 minutes ago, dwy000 said:
just out of curiosity, how is everyone calculating returns? I contribute and take cash out of my investing account on a regular basis during the year so it's not just a clean "end of yr compared to beginning of year". If you add cash in December the dilutive effect should be substantially lower than adding that same amount in February. Conversely, if you add cash and buy a stock in December and it immediately goes up 20% it should have an outsized impact vs buying some stock and having it immediately go up in February.
Do you just use the IRR or XIRR function, have the broker do it or something else? I've always done it like a mutual fund where there's a "unit price" and then I add or subtract cash at the previous week's unit price. But it's a lot of work and I'm not sure if it's the same calculation method that others use.
A place to start [, by Joel Stevens, [ @austinvalue ], our CoBF member @racemize ] :
Austin Value Capital [writings : Writing - Measuring returns ]
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KAL's Cartoon this week :
To stay on top of this tooth issue, I highly recommend The Deluxe 5-stone System from Lansky Sharpeners as an ideal DIY-solution - based on personal experience, I have to say it works great! :
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War is indeed ugly and meaningless from a humanitarian point from view. Very hard to belive that only one human being lost the life in this brutal Novocherkassk event.
Morbid humor may be needed to survive :
If what is seen at this photo seems look like a submarine conversion of Novocherkassk, I tend to disagree.
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Message text translated to English :
QuoteHe is accused in absentia of a terrorist act after a drone attack on Russian territory
MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/.
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has put on the criminal wanted list the commander of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Nikolai Oleshchuk, who is accused in absentia of a terrorist act after a drone attack on Russian territory. This follows from the department's search database.
“Oleschuk Nikolai Nikolaevich is wanted under an article of the Criminal Code,” the database says. It is not indicated under what article the search is being conducted.
At the beginning of October, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation filed charges in absentia for committing crimes under Part 2 of Art. 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (terrorist act), to the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine Kirill Budanov, the commander of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Nikolai Oleshchuk and several other Ukrainian military leaders.
The investigation has collected sufficient evidence of the involvement of the top military leadership of Ukraine in organizing and carrying out from April 2022 to September 2023 more than 100 air strikes using aircraft-type drones in the territories of Moscow and the Moscow region, Crimea and Sevastopol, Rostov, Belgorod, Bryansk regions and other regions RF.
Earlier, Budanov was already put on the wanted list in the Russian Federation under a criminal article.
In short, Russian war logic, based on what is going on in Ukraine is not a war.
Now isen't that just something very special. Anyway, I'm impressed.
Merry Christmas.
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Yesterday I ordered this book :
, based on comments from Javier Pérez Álvarez, Edelweiss Capital Research, on Substack, and the description of the book on my preferred [Danish] bookstore www.saxo.com :
QuoteIn Future Luxe: What's Ahead for the Business of Luxury, Erwan Rambourg identifies the major forces and emerging trends that are set to reshape luxury over the next decade. The expansion of Chinese consumption and the boost in women's spending power around the world will fuel continued growth in the industry-but even more importantly, fundamental changes are on the horizon. The younger generation is entering the luxury market, bringing new values and demands that will redefine the very meaning of luxury. The sector should expand in the realms of travel, health, leisure, even cannabis. For brands to resonate with these younger consumers they will have to develop substance beyond a high-quality product or a desirable logo. Greenwashing won't cut it-brands will need to take seriously issues like diversity, sustainability, and ethical production. To ensure his portrait of the industry has the depth and nuance of real-world experience, Rambourg interviews several CEOs from the largest groups and brands, including Kering, Cartier, Puma, and Moncler, in addition to drawing on his own observations from over two decades in luxury. Future Luxe is engaging, wise, and deeply informed, a vital read for those new to the industry as well as veterans planning for continued success.
This topic is actually rumbling in my head, and I hope to get a better structure on my thinking about it from reading the book.
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1 hour ago, yesman182 said:
... but it seems like managing the day to day operations would get tiring. ...
The day to day operations of the Berkshire subsidiaries are the responsibilities of the CEOs of the respective Berkshire subsidiaries. The management [on strategic / board level] of what capital is already invested in Berkshire subsidiaries will continue to be of imperative importance and the root of future Berkshire growth going forward.
-Merry Christmas!
2023: the year of cash and t-bills
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by John Hjorth
Thank you very much, @ICUMD,
To me, they all [the largest Canadian banks [5 or 6]] appear really impressive.
Those 10-years surveys in the annual reports for several of them really makes one stare at them [as were they some super curvy eye candy]! -All while pretty much nobody here on CoBF talks about them, while it's not even talking dirty talking about them here on CoBF!
- Just absolutely outstanding return metrics for them as whole compared to similar clusters / groups of large banks in other countries.