aws

The average volume was always a lot more than 15. I do see that printed as the volume history on yahoo, but it's definitely not correct. Volume is higher now, but not THAT much higher. Volume was about 500-1000 shares a day for the last couple of years.

It seems like yesterday that I was thinking it was absurd that Tesla had a higher market cap than Ford. Today, Elon's favorite meme crypto Dogecoin, passed Ford in market cap. It doesn't matter much of course, but I just wanted to mention it for posterity's sake just in case this happens to be the moment of peak ridiculousness.

I've seen it a few times but I think it might have first been from the 1999 Berkshire letter

Possibly the Scott Fetzer deal. Here's a bit of a write-up about that which gave us a nice Charlie one-liner: He told a story about how First Boston (now Credit Suisse) tried to gin up interest in the mid-1980s for Scott Fetzer, a hodgepodge of small businesses based in Cleveland. It called on 30 firms to help make a sale, but failed to find a buyer. Mr. Buffett then called Scott Fetzer’s chief executive himself and negotiated the deal face to face. Just as they were about to sign the deal, a banker for First Boston said that the bank was still entitled to a $2 million fee. The banker asked Mr. Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, whether he’d like to read the firm’s analysis of Scott Fetzer. Mr. Munger replied, “I’ll pay $2 million not to read it.”

We can only hope there will be several 100 year old board members soon enough.

Digital art sells for $69 million and digital socks sell for over 100k per pair. What the hell is wrong with people? https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/unisocks/

The guy was apparently worth $100 million like 15 years ago before losing most of it in the financial crisis. Then after already facing a murder charge in Belize he decides to stop paying taxes in the US, and flaunts his tax evasion. Then he steals a few million with the crypto pump and dump scheme, and decides the best thing to do next is run for president so his crimes stay in more of a spotlight. The guy really wants to spend the rest of his life in prison apparently.

The balance are reported under New England Asset Management's 13-F.

Since the vast majority of the stock is held in Street name, that really doesn't tell you anything about the actual number of shareholders. I imagine it is well in excess of a million shareholders in the US.

There was also a smaller position MMC which was not disclosed until just now, but they had a $386mm stake on 9/30. Of the three, VZ was the only one there were significant additions to in Q4, so I wonder why they bothered to avoid disclosing the other two. Only bought about 4 million shares of CVX and less than 1 million MMC during the quarter.

I seriously doubt it's a mega cap tech company. They wouldn't really need to be concerned about the market moving substantially just because Berkshire invested a few billion in a $500b+ market cap company, and they didn't seek to hide investing much larger sums in Apple. Something in the $100b size range makes a lot more sense to me.

Well it's good they were able to raise additional capital and then felt safe enough to remove most of the limits on stocks. If only their communication at the start hadn't been disastrous, then they might have been able to get through this without much loss is customer confidence.

Well they only allow personal, and non-professional, accounts, so that obviously excludes anything you named. But yes, I am certain I am saving money with the trades I do at Robinhood. I have accounts at IBKR and a couple of other brokers and I execute only certain orders there, after using my other accounts to get market data. But getting back to the question... Is it really a risk if you kept 7 figures worth of long stock positions there? It sounds like it's not a risk if they are doing everything they are supposed to be doing with asset segregation, but it could be a risk if there were fraud and somebody were dipping into client assets.

Personally I have cashed down to under 250k, but I have seen many 7 figure screenshots and I'm sure some are for good reasons. I use Robinhood for all my long options and spreads trades, as being free is nothing to sneeze at. IBKR charges me up to $2 per contract when I take liquidity on options. I'm pretty sure Robinhood has saved me five figures in commissions at this point.

This has probably been discussed elsewhere, but with all the news this week about trade restrictions, liquidity issues and bridge loans needed at Robinhood this week, I felt like a new topic might be in order. How worried does someone realistically need to be if they have over $250k in their Robinhood account? I guess I always assumed, perhaps naively, that SIPC limits only really became an issue when you held cash in excess of that amount in your brokerage account. So like any amount of stock or other securities is fine, but over 250k in cash could leave you exposed. I thought all securities were held separately from the broker's assets and would never be touched even if the broker went bankrupt, and then since the broker knows the beneficial owner of every security they would just be returned directly to the owners right away. From some quick Google searches, that appears not to be the case, but I haven't really found a situation where they said customers took a loss because of a broker bankruptcy either. Right now Robinhood's issue just seems to be SEC capital requirements blowing out because of the increased volatility, and there is no indication that has led to any losses yet. But then again the bubble hasn't really burst on any of the WSB stocks yet. If many of them are loaded up using margin or instant deposits, and there is a crash that actually bankrupts Robinhood, and for whatever reason no one stepped in to make everyone whole, could customers lose their stock portfolio's (the amounts in excess of the insured limits)?

Both Robinhood and IBKR were down this morning, and yet somehow Robinhood is the one to be back online first.

So the mystery new holdings were ABBV, MRK, and BMY. I think your screenshot is cutoff a bit. It misses the complete disposition of COST for example.

Happy to see the buybacks and the trimming of Apple. I wonder what the big new stock purchases were. That's a pretty hefty total of purchases for a single quarter.

Picked up a lot of RVRA today from a pretty big seller. Substantially all assets have been sold and the plan is to return capital to shareholders. I expect something north of 2.00 to be distributed in Q4 vs. the 1.75 current price. Normal volume is like 20k shares and today it was over 300k plus another 300k shares on the offer at close. Hopefully they don't know something I don't.

I'm more inclined toward thinking we are somewhere in the 1999-2000 timeline with these tech IPOs. What is it now with this pop, like 150x revenue? It's working now but how many companies can trade at such insane valuations? Are they all going to get 100% revenue growth a year?

Great to hear the deal I was already skeptical about is now on track to cost 30% more for the same shares. Although at least it's a relatively tiny position for Berkshire. A year from now I'd expect to more likely be disappointed that Berkshire didn't sell any Apple near these recent tops than that they paid $105 a share for this.

Berkshire agrees to buy over $500 million of stock in a tech IPO. And they are locked up shares and are paying the full public offer price with no extra incentive. Not the news I expected to see today.

Is it possible that Buffett had to make some agreement with the fed to own more than 10% of BAC which required him to sell out of the stakes in JPM and WFC?

Buffett is the one who said it was a mistake. On Coca-Cola and Gillette:

The mistake with KO was not selling any in 1998. He was sitting on massive gains, which were both a much bigger percentage gain and represented a bigger percentage of the Berkshire portfolio than AAPL does today, and then the stock languished for almost 20 years.