bizaro86

Actually Jack Ma is an interesting case where a founder created a cooperative culture from the get go. Alibaba created several billionaires while AMZN only created one (Jeff Bezos). There are some interesting articles pertaining to how Jack Ma ran Alibaba early on. He never was the all controlling operator , he was more like a leader why deputized most of the operations to a core group (who all become very rich) with him being the face until 2 years ago, https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-secret-to-alibabas-culture-is-jack-mas-apartment Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that BABA had a bad culture. More that a Jack Ma discount could be an opportunity if you think the culture is good.

The market seems to think Jack Ma's relationship with the CCP is a very large liability for BABA right now. As for Musk, I think it's obvious the "Musk premium" at Tesla is bigger than the WEB premium at BRK.

How permanent is your move, and what is the reasoning? Where do you live now? If you're sure you're going to like it and live there forever you could maybe justify buying. Its seemed like a bubble for a long time, it could keep going. If you plan to be in the market for 30+ years maybe the entry point isn't that important anyway. I bought a house in Calgary 12 years ago, and its been worth more than I paid for it for about 3 weeks the entire time I've owned it. Happily those are the most recent three weeks. I would have absolutely been financially better off renting over that time, but owning has had other benefits (stability, can customize, etc). I think it depends how big a portion of your net worth the house will be as well. If this is going to be your main asset, having it depreciate significantly and then needing to sell would be disappointing.

Thats something I've never thought about. Does anyone know how much of BRK net worth is in the insurance subs and how much is at the holdco?

I would be pissed if I was a policyholder of a firm and their regulator let them mark privately held equity to a public comp. Where's the line there? Maybe with NI and BNS its fine, but what about a little lifeco that has a venture investment in a meal delivery service. Should that get marked to Door Dash EV/sales for the purpose of determining if they have enough capital to write your Grandma an annuity? Book value at a discount, imo.

F*cking hilarious. The reversal of the ticket in the reverse card, and shaking the 8-ball 4 times to get the answer he wanted, is amazing! I know he's having fun with this, but I also have to wonder if this is what he did with GME Lol. Maybe I should replace my screener.co subscription with my kids banagrams.

FRPH has royalties on aggregate mines. ALS.TO is a big royalty firm mostly metals. Both have a thread on this board.

You made a put position 5% of your capital? The combined basket of puts was 5% of my capital. Not at my computer so don't have exact numbers, but SPAK puts were the largest thing in the bucket at about 1.5% of capital. They were about 3x, and everything else was up dramatically that day as well. So my 5% position became a 10% position, and I sold a bunch down.

IBKR won't do some of the less prominent Canadian registered accounts. For instance, RESP and LIRA are both a no-go. I'm about to move my RRSP there out of general dissatisfaction with my existing Canadian big bank broker.

Yeah, the amount of A shares that seem to be available at even a slight premium to the Bs is pretty significant. The $22 billion I mentioned above would only be ~250 shares per day for a year.

I agree they might get 15% on a few year stretch (and maybe this upcoming one if they monetize investments into the bubble and capitalize on the hard market), but think 15% long term (10+ years) even from here is basically a pipe dream.

Nobody who owns Fairfax over any period except since inception has experienced 15% book value growth. 10 yr: 2.4% 20 year: 6.0% 30 year: 12.3% Even starting from the end of their second year in 1986 until present the bvps compounding is (slightly) under 15%. But yes, if you include the tripling in BVPS between 1985 and 1986 then they have been close to 18%. I should have re-worded my post, my apologies. I guess I wonder what is more indicative of future results - a tripling of book value from a distressed beginning in one year in the 80s or the couple of decade long period of recent underperformance. YMMV, obviously.

I think using their stated plan of 15% compounding for anything is very aggressive. They haven't come close to that in the past, while constantly reiterating it. If you have your own growth forecast worked out that's great, but using that one is awfully trusting where trust hasn't been earned, imo.

Except after WEB converts his A to B, the voting control of the remaining A becomes even more pronounced. At that point with current share prices, a 10% voting stake would only be ~$22 billion. That isn't spare change, but I bet Ackman could raise that, and might want to. Especially if he/the market thought BRK was being mismanaged/undervalued.

That's not even remotely the case. Bruce went deep in the trenches with his DD. He was over concentrated and stubborn and that has been his undoing but Chamath barely does any DD, has lots of positions and doesn't have anywhere close to the same conviction as Bruce did. He is the polar opposite Not BargainValueHunter, but there are some similarities. Bruce B outperformed dramatically, got famous and then underperformed dramatically. Chamath P has outperformed dramatically and got famous. I think the third step is pretty likely to occur, unless he keeps selling out (eg recent sale of SPCE) although if he does that i think it will eventually damage his reputation among his followers.

What expected return over the next 5 or 10 years would make you consider FFH? What are some of these better opportunities and what are their expected returns? Not Gurjot, but I think something like E-L Financial compares favorably. Bigger discount, better investment track record, I like their investment strategy better, and doing aggressive buybacks to close the discount. I think its a 10-15% go forward return. Thats probably what FFH does too if there are no big errors. And I think E-L is quite a bit less likely to have big issues. Excluding the pandemic because its a one time issue not likely to repeat is fine. But in insurance one-time issues of some sort recur with regularity. Maybe not a pandemic, but an unexpected winter storm, earthquake, bad hurricane, or new type of health risk on commercial policies (asbestos 2.0) all seem possible to me.

That is interesting. Focusing the buyback on the A keeps his control up during his lifetime, but also makes the firm more vulnerable to an activist/breakup after his death. Berkshire has devoted shareholders and a big market cap, so it would probably take a period of underpeformance and a group of activists. But lowering the number of A shares through buybacks and the eventual conversion of WEBs shares lowers the dollar threshold for someone else to exert influence.

In fairness to Prem, the insurance companies did have an outstanding year and the investments are almost all performing well. Security prices might not be, but the underlying companies (which is what Prem is referring to) largely are. All those answers about the rear view. I’m talking about the present, about what is written in the 2020 annual report. We had a bad year and Prem is not candid about it. That is why he didn’t convince me that the futur will be different. On what basis did we have a bad year? The stock market valued certain assets at certain levels as it always does. On that basis, maybe. But did the insurance subs have a bad year? Did any of the big investments have a bad year operationally (ie, in the way that matters?). You’re absolutely right about the short. But as one example, if you’d told me that Atlas would have sailed through the most aggressive recession in history the way it did, I’d have laughed at you. And I own it. Yet it did. Who cares whether the stock (and therefore Fairfax’s BV) reflects that yet? I really don’t mean to get at you. But I think Fairfax had a spectacular year, all told. It went into the first global financial pandemic in 100 years overlevered and with a raft of cyclical holdings. It came out with cash, rising book value, and an underlying CR of 93%. Works for me. I think reporting combined ratio ex-one time events is really disingenuous. Literally the reason why people buy insurance is to protect from one time events. If you exclude them, of course your CR is going to look great. Their investment performance is great if you exclude the mistakes too, but that's just not how it works.

Rolled my bubble put gains into Costco

So this basket of puts on crap has ~doubled in the last 48 hours. The best performer was the OTM ones on SPAK (which i sized the largest as I had identified it as my favorite) That took a 5% position to a 10% position, and being a chicken I've sold a bunch of them today to lock in profits, so its now more like a 2-3% position. This isn't advice, and I cost myself a great deal of money last spring by closing my puts way to soon. So I'm going to keep the last chunk (using the house money fallacy they're free!) and ride this out.

I would venture that the $19m per year has almost no marginal utility for Greg. Nor for Jain for that matter. It's relatively rare that people give up their compensation, even when it has little or no marginal utility for them. For WEB, taking a very low salary probably saved the firm enough on compensation for the employees (and especially subsidiary CEOs) that at his ownership share he comes out ahead. That won't be the case for the successor, and I'd expect the pay package to reflect that reality.

This This play, which he only held for 1 day, was a 5x and more importantly helped him build goodwill with the next generation of investors. These are the investors who will be buying his holding company when it goes public. It was a smart business move that communicated to retail investors "I'm on your side." Really? Even Chamath wasn't thinking that far ahead or communicating that. Either he'll disappear 10 years from now or he'll be huge. There's no middle ground here with him. We've seen these shows before...they go one way or the other. Cheers! He was probably thinking ahead to getting them to buy his next SPAC.

Yeah, Burry sold out during Q4, which isn't really a surprise, imo. Some discussion here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4406847-assessing-michael-burrys-portfolio-changes-after-profitable-gamestop-trade

Were you able to buy all of those at $10 in the IPO? I think the risk reward is materially worse the further away from $10 you get.

8.6bb investment in Verizon. $4bb in Chevron. That doesn't seem like as good a use of capital as doing buybacks to me.