aws

Trump was clearly BSing when he said Buffett took a similar deduction, because it just wouldn't make sense for Warren to ever have a substantial loss on his personal return. 99+% of his assets are in C-Corporation stock and so none of the activity would end up on his 1040. We don't know what makes up the remaining 1%, but it's likely mostly publicly traded stocks which can never result in more than a $3,000 net loss on your taxes in a given year. The returns of people that own lots of privately held investments (such as real estate partnerships or small business s-corporations), are much lumpier and can often result in NOLs in some years. Simply taking an NOL like Trump did is not dishonorable, and Buffett certainly used them over the years in his corporations. Dempster Mill and Berkshire Hathaway itself both had substantial (relative to their size) NOLs when Buffett took over which allowed him to earn some very useful tax-free cash to fund future investments. Trump may have used some shady paper losses to inflate the totals though, which is another issue entirely.

I haven't read much on Graham specifically. What I read on Buffett gave me an impression of Graham's strategy as making a great number of very small investments in a large variety of net-nets, and that he preferred not to talk to management as he felt it gave him an unfair advantage over smaller investors who didn't have that option. I thought concentration and activism were areas Buffett differed from Graham, but I can't recall where I read that and it might be unfounded.

I did a little digging. Portland Gas & Coke Company was spun out of American Power & Light Company in 1952. They changed their name to Northwest Natural Gas in 1958 which is still in operation. I couldn't find the specifics, but according to this page: csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/stubs-final.doc there was some type of tax ruling related to the spinoff that allowed a cost basis of $69.87 per share to be applied to the shares even though the market was under $20. Perhaps there was some type of tax special situation behind his involvement. Perhaps due to the timing this was a Graham investment and he put Buffett on the board, although from his hands off approach that may be unlikely.

I think you mean AET - Accumulated Earnings Tax, which is code section 531. It's an archaic provision from back in the days when individual tax rates were substantially higher than corporate rates and there was no preferential rate for dividends. I don't think it gets enforced much at all these days, and if you can show a business purpose for maintaining the earnings then it's not considered improper.

::) Points ain't free. First of all, you can use them for other things including cash, so they have monetary value. Second, even if you get them for signup, it's not really "free". Do you do accounting this way too? :) Would you like your companies to do accounting this way? "Yeah, we give out options, but it's really no cost. It's free." ??? OTOH, if you can get everything for two signup bonuses, that's around $400 or so. So yeah, very cheap for a flight + 5 nights in a hotel + car rental. The hotel seems to be the biggest score. Great point juggling there - I don't do points, always take cashback. This is second time where I'm amazed how farther points seem to go. Not free though. ;) Well with that logic nothing is free, because no matter what you were given you could always sell it and keep the cash instead. There's an opportunity cost, but it still meets my definition of free. Let's just say yes I do my accounting this way, at least with the IRS. I believe airline flights show up 330 days in advance. What takes you six hours to book? I think I spent less than an hour to book everything and did each part separately, but I did know where I was looking in advance since I've done it three years in a row.

I'm staying for five nights and everything is basically free with points, obtained from three different credit cards. I booked my hotel the farthest in advance. I stay at the Sheraton and booked in May using SPG points so my room is free. It's a cheap hotel in their rate schedule so I only had to pay 18,000 points total for the five nights. With the SPG credit card you can usually get 30,000 points for free just for signing up and I still have some points left from a couple years ago when I got two of the cards. I booked my flights later in the year using AA miles which are easy to get from Citi AA credit cards. I have over 200k in leftover miles from old credit cards and used 45k for the round trip, including one leg in first class. I rented a car using chase ultimate reward points. I got a compact car from Avis for 5 days for 19,000 points. You can get 40-50k points pretty often for signup offers from their cards. So all totaled I basically used up a little less than two credit card signup bonuses for my trip.

I haven't worked it out exactly but it was around 30-35% in USD, mostly because of lucky timing on some oil/gas stocks, partially offset by pretty losses in Valeant.

I would think it would be a pretty big waste of time. Most likely even if you are the best bid or offer and someone does a market order the shares probably wouldn't get to you. The order would probably get internalized and filled at a price like 1/100th of a cent better than your quote.

I was buying some BRK.B right before the close today and ended up watching something weird happen after hours. Normally I don't think Berkshire trades at all in AH, but it started trading pretty heavily and was down almost 1% on over 1 million shares of volume. I spent like 10 minutes looking for some type of press release because I was curious what was causing the stock to move. I think I just figured it out though. The last print on B shares was 129.10 but on A shares it was 192,200. 1/1500th of that is 128.13, meaning A shares could be converted at a profit to B shares. I'm not sure how often that happens but it caused both B and A shares to have a lot of after hours activity. I wonder if any humans were involved in those trades or if it was a flash crash type situation.

Well, that is what I'm trying to assess. I looked at many canadian pure oil producer( no gas and gas liquid) and I cannot find any one that is a bargain if you take a 75$/barrel of oil as an average price for the next ten years. Add production + royalty + administrative + inerest + D&A costs, and no one is breaking even below 60$. Take (75-60) 15 * boe/day production * 365 = X Put a P/E ratio of 15 on this, (X*15= IV), and you will soon find that the market cap of a given oil company is 3 times higher than the IV Do you have an example of company you have valued in this way? It looks like your methodology is saying that the IV is $82,125 per boe (15 x 15 x 365). If the current market cap is 3x this that's $246,375 per boe, which sounds very high.

In case anyone wants the 1968 BRK 10-K. It's right after they bought National Indemnity, whose financials are also included but not consolidated. BRK-1968.pdf

On the topic of old reports, does this database have any pre-1995 Berkshire Reports, or related companies like Blue Chip Stamps? I've tried finding the items older than what's on the brk website before but all I've ever managed to come up with is the 1968 Berkshire 10-K.

Ditto

Does anyone know what the Lightstream senior unsecured bonds are trading for? I can't seem to find a CUSIP and I don't have any type of bond trading platform. Just curious because I heard the company say they were buying them back at a discount in November. They didn't give the exact figure but I think it worked out to around 67, and the stock is down 80% since then.

For the company the ticker symbol has nothing to do with how they are taxed. You could have dozens of tickers under one tax entity, especially with different types of preferred shares. If you mean the tax for the shareholders then it works just like any other stock - you are taxed on any gain above your basis. Working out the basis can be a headache when shares are acquired in splits or spinoffs.

I just did an estimate for the year and came up with a 2% gain. I calculated it with a back of the envelop method where I just added all my realized gains for the year plus my unrealized change, and compared that to my ending balance. On a CAGR method it would probably be much higher, because my portfolio tripled in size in the past six months due to much more investable cash becoming available. I also didn't take into account some small dividends that may have added another .5% or so. My results are bad and I would have been much better off if I did nothing but by BRK, but I'm still somewhat happy because before I just did the math I would have thought I was down 4 or 5% for the year. I'm holding a lot of stocks in the red at the moment and that's been getting me down a bit. The new cash has allowed me to average down so hopefully that works in my favor in the new year.

I hope they kill the dividend at the same time they are doing the buyback, unless this announcement is just for show. I can't imagine they can support both a buyback and a 15%+ dividend yield at the same time. On a good note I'm now green in this stock. I bought in a month ago, quickly lost 40%, and then doubled down near the bottom (doubling my cost, which bought considerably more than double the shares). This lowered my cost basis to $2.65 USD and with this bump today I sold back half for a small profit. In a week I went from down 40% to up a bit.

I ended up starting around a 5% combined position in TGA and LTS without putting anywhere near enough due diligence into the purchases, and I've been justly punished for my sins. It's almost comical how quickly things have deteriorated since I bought in - down 40% in a month.

I bought a little LTS yesterday, my first oil patch stock or any Canadian stock actually. I bought at C$4.20 and it's now C$3.52 a day later. That's a nice welcome to Canada - I thought you guys were supposed to be nice.