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Nothing!

You have to admit that going to supermarket is much more fun that the other things you listed. I would race a Ferrari through the empty streets of Manhattan with a 25% chance of Corona. Fuck it! That would be a good way to die!

Don't know about the test, maybe you can summarize.

With the price of disinfectant these days you probably would have lost money. ;D

And here it is. Unemployment claims came in and futures spike up. I guess they expect Jay to come on later today and throw a couple more trillion to the market.

I was actually thinking about this for a while. Something to do with lack of knowledge of adversity in recent generations. I don't mean Millennials, I mean baby boom and after. Before you used to have a lot of adversity. So you were ready for it and ready to deal with it. Your children will die on a sort of regular basis - vaccines changed that (now we have anti- vaxers). Wars would happen with some frequency. Those were real wars. If you were an able bodied man you had a fair to decent chance you would go to war. Would sit in some shithole and had a good chance something bad would happen to you - bullet in the ass or worse. Now when you have a war is more theoretical "those other guys" will fight it and even them will do pretty well through it. But zero chance something bad will happen to you. The Great Depression is an interesting name. That was just the great one. There were other depressions before it not that far behind. When's the last time we had a depression? Now having to wear a mask while you shop at Costco has become a great adversity. Geez! We've become a bunch of fat, spoiled babies because a bunch of smart people worked really hard to make things easy and safe for us. Then the fat spoiled babies throw poop at the smart people because that's all they know how to do. Progress!

I don't know. But swastikas do have a tendency to show up at these things don't they?

The President who didn't fill the US seat at the WHO, and who now claims the US has less influence than China at the WHO? The one who loudly praised the Chinese handling of the virus on Twitter in late January? Who ignored US Intelligence warnings about the virus? And now blames the WHO as part of a CYA compaign that includes blaming the governors for the US's stay-at-home response at a time when the Federal guidelines recommended stay-at-home? Right... nice to see all of that. Trump taking on corruption is the most laughable idea I've ever heard. It's like OJ Simpson saying he's going to find the murderer... Anyone who seriously believes that, I have a bridge to sell them. Trump is looking for someone to blame for his shortcomings and incompetence, as usual, and the WHO is just one of the latest victims. The WHO might be too heavily influenced by China. I have never disputed that. I have merely pointed out that Trump has withdrawn the US’s influence — if someone filled the void, how unexpected. This is pretty typical Trump supporter logic. Trump: Let's pull out of X international organization. China moves in. Trump Supporter: Let's pull out of Y organization. China is has too much influence, just look at X organization. China has already proven that they're willing to spend money to get influence. There must be a collective laughter somewhere in Beijing when they see China haters making their job easier. Now that is really dumb - let's give money to a failed organization so they can fail some more. The WHO corruption is completely obvious. Once again, your logic does not pass the smell test. We should have given NATO some more money instead of threatening defunding an organization that had a bunch of free riders underfunding it. Oh, shit ! That worked brilliantly for Trump - much to the embarrassment of idiot liberals. Here's a brilliant liberal idea for you: LET'S GIVE IRAN BILLIONS SO THEY WON'T BUILD A NUKE AND DESTABILIZE THE MIDDLE EAST. Oh, shit! We tried that brilliant idea too. You guys are full of laughs today ugh

The President who didn't fill the US seat at the WHO, and who now claims the US has less influence than China at the WHO? The one who loudly praised the Chinese handling of the virus on Twitter in late January? Who ignored US Intelligence warnings about the virus? And now blames the WHO as part of a CYA compaign that includes blaming the governors for the US's stay-at-home response at a time when the Federal guidelines recommended stay-at-home? Right... nice to see all of that. Trump taking on corruption is the most laughable idea I've ever heard. It's like OJ Simpson saying he's going to find the murderer... Anyone who seriously believes that, I have a bridge to sell them. Trump is looking for someone to blame for his shortcomings and incompetence, as usual, and the WHO is just one of the latest victims. The WHO might be too heavily influenced by China. I have never disputed that. I have merely pointed out that Trump has withdrawn the US’s influence — if someone filled the void, how unexpected. This is pretty typical Trump supporter logic. Trump: Let's pull out of X international organization. China moves in. Trump Supporter: Let's pull out of Y organization. China is has too much influence, just look at X organization. China has already proven that they're willing to spend money to get influence. There must be a collective laughter somewhere in Beijing when they see China haters making their job easier.

Good luck buddy! I've enjoyed your posts and I've learned a thing or two. Cheers!

This was literally an episode of Silicon Valley!

I would do the same if I had confidence that their earnings would keep growing, which means 1. Capturing more market share. 2. No or low mean reversion in combined ratios. Do you have confidence in their growth? Their lead is supposedly in loss ratios, not structural costs like GEICO. Isn't that just a matter of building better models for underwriting. Why won't others catchup? (Their is a 8 year old VIC writeup, I think). Oh they have a structural cost advantage, just like GEICO, for the direct business which is the high growth business. The agency business is dragging them back. But yeah, my confidence in growth is driven by market share. I think both PGR and GEICO are gonna keep growing market share and they're gonna slaughter the likes of AllState. I don't think there's much threat from the competition. It's very hard to transform/adapt/copy them. In fact the only "traditional" company to go direct successfully anywhere in the world that I know of has been Progressive. They've put in a lot of work to thread that needle. They're not that good on the investing side, but they're not bad either. I like that they acknowledge that it's not a strength of theirs so they stay in their lane. That means that they won't go out and do a bunch of dumb shit on the investing side. So I'm fine with that.

Yes, PGR is a LT winner. They have increased their revenue growth going into property insurance (they used to do only car) and it’s not clear if they have the same advantage there. It’s trading a bit above its LT valuation baseline. I would buy it if I can get it below 1x EV/ sales. I absolutely love PGR. It's a fantastic business. I've been watching it for years waiting for a good prices to get in. All I've seen was the price going up. I've finally decided that this is just one of those businesses that you have to pay up for if you want it and bought some. They've been growing so much that if they would drop to the price it was at 2 years ago that would imply a ridiculously low valuation.

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-proposed-public-offering-shares-common-stock-0 You just know that there's a guy from the Bush administration going like "Wait, you can do that?!"

LOL!

At this point you're not gonna be able to get the kind of stable, reliable energy in volume from your own setup like you get from your utility company. I think it's likely that you never will.

Here Here Brother!

Well I think this comes down to a few things. Do you have young kids or not? Bosses are usually insecure and want to keep an eye on their employees. Employees will be lazy as well. If you think an IB analyst and law associates will put the same slave work in from home you are delusional. A lot of the real estate is not just to house employees. I'm thinking about law firms here. How long before a bunch of companies get hacked because some idiot's smart fridge and a $40 router?

The the thing with major economic, military and nuclear powers. You don't "let" them do anything. They do whatever the like. Nobody "lets" the US to do anything. They just do it All this was stuff is bullshit anyway. The US will not go to war with China. The US could not solve Afghanistan. Which were a bunch of barefoot, impoverished, malnourished motherfuckers living in caves. But yes they'll have great success against China in a conflict. By the way, how's that liberty thing going in Afghanistan? Last I checked the US was negotiating with the Taliban. You know, that beacon of liberty.

At least according to ycharts 2010 eps was around 13$ which would be a cagr of ~14%. Don't know about ycharts. I used the 10-k. See attached. Missing the stock split--in today's numbers it was $13.16 Thanks racemize. I was surprised that the Google's number was so low too and did double check - not well enough. So that puts Google's EPS CAGR at 15.7% vs 12.6 for Berkshire. It's still not bad for that decrepit company. The point I was trying to make is how well actually BRK did with rail and bricks and all the other boring stuff. If they have another one of these "lost decades" and one buys it at these prices I suspect that one will do quite well.

At least according to ycharts 2010 eps was around 13$ which would be a cagr of ~14%. Don't know about ycharts. I used the 10-k. See attached.

You should double check your numbers :) The numbers are good. Maybe you can point where I made a mistake.

BRK is this city on a top of a crumbling hill with dilapidated walls, surrounded by half empty moats with couple of zebra fish floating in them. FAAMG are shining metropolis in the cloud(s) with glass and steel skyscrapers, flying cars zooming around, protected by laser beams, firewalls, and army of Agent Smiths. SP500 actually includes the metropolis. Includes some slums too. Your pick. Google 2010 EPS 26.31 Google 2019 EPS 49.16 Google EPS CAGR 7.2% Berkshire Net Operating income CAGR 12.6% But hey, cat videos.

The dragons will take care of it.

I think that's a rather simplistic look at the situation. It's pretty easy to dump some things in excel, do some correlation and the say "Aha, see!". I like to look at what I actually own. So let's take a look at that. I went a bit further back to 2000 because 2001 was a messed up year and looking at 2000 to 2019 is actually peak to peak so it works out nicely. In 2000: S&P500=1336 S&P500 EPS=74.17 BRK pre tax ex insurance earnings =871M BRK equity position=37.6B BRK cash=bonds=34.2B BRK total financial position=71.8B In 2019 S&P500=3278 S&P500 EPS=140.09 BRK net ex insurance earnings =17,700M BRK equity position=248B BRK cash=bonds=143B BRK total financial position=491B So S&P500 EPS CAGR=3.4%, BRK operating earnings CAGR=17.2%. 2019 earnings are post tax and 2000 are pretax I just didn't adjust cause it's Saturday and I'm lazy. But it doesn't actually make much of a difference S&P500 CAGR=4.8%. I'm not gonna go back and check for the divvies for all the years (again lazy) so I'll throw in a 3% for that and call S&P500 CAGR=7.8%. BRK financial position CAGR=10.6% So basically since 2000 BRK wins hands down. Total smoke show. Let's look though from 2010 to now - the "lost decade". In 2010: S&P500=1282 S&P500 EPS=91.09 BRK pre tax ex insurance earnings =6,100M BRK equity position=61.5B BRK cash=bonds=87.8B BRK total financial position=149.3B Here the S&P EPS CAGR is higher at 4.9%. BRK net operating earnings CAGR 12.6%. S&P 500 CAGR=11%. Again throw in 3% for divvies and call S&P CAGR 14%. BRK financial position CAGR=14.1%. While this is not the absolute annihilation of the S&P that happened over the past 20 years and I would still prefer to own BRK over the S&P based on the numbers. Then I really prefer to own BRK once I know how those numbers were made - rail, utilities, huge cash in the bank, low leverage, etc. The S&P over performance over BRK has not been due to underlying performance. It has been due to multiple expansion. Picking the S&P over BRK is akin to buying a stock because it went up. BRK is basically this city on top of a hill with huge walls, surrounded by rows of moats filled with crocodiles and sharks and with dragons flying around. The S&P is the slum down below. If the economic performance is the same you should pick the castle. Sure the slum can be more fun than the stodgy castle. But when the Mongol hoards come around being in the castle is pretty sweet. And those damn Mongols have a tendency to come with some regularity to ruin the party.