Brett

Of course! Hochschild Kohn was as private company when Diversified Retailing bought the company in 1966. But they had a number of stockholders (all family) and issued debt, so they put together some annual reports. HK was a critical company to the Baltimore community, so one of the local libraries had a whole host of company documents, including annual reports! In terms of finding old annual reports, these are some great websites: https://apps.lib.purdue.edu/abldars/ https://www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/bruno/annual-reports/ The Mergent archives, a database that some public libraries, such as the New York Public Library, have is a great resources as well. They have a ton of them on PDF that you can download.

Ha! Of course, will always remember you folks. To answer your other question: I had a much harder time finding enough investments on Charlie's partnership to write about. His documents aren't public, so I don't know enough of his positions. Kilpatrick's book has 1950 and 1951, and then I had to piece together the rest from The Snowball... so the answer is no! Thank you! Have you seen this video by her? She does a great job here of analyzing it.

I'd say three things: 1. The degree to which Buffett was concentrated not only in his partnership but throughout his Berkshire years. I had an idea but the data surprised me! 2. The level of gumshoe / detective work Buffett did. People think Buffett got rich reading Moody's Manuals... It's a gross oversimplification. He burned a lot of shoe leather to uncover differentiated insights into companies. 3. The amount of activism Buffett performed in these early days, and how it informed the creation of Berkshire Hathaway. My favorite chapter in the book is Philadelphia and Reading--I think you can draw a straight line from P&R to Berkshire. Buffett saw all the levers a control investor could pull to create value... and then did the same with Berkshire!

Great question. I have read this. I believe I go deeper on each investment and my work is much more valuation and financials focused. The annual reports for these companies are the foundation of my work--I think I'm the first author to obtain the Hochschild Kohn annual reports, for example. My book is aimed more at practitioners than a general audience, with more data on each company. I probably spend less time on 'lessons for investors' than that book did. I also think I have different takes than his: for example, Buffett had to underwrite a major corporate governance risk with the Disney investment that I don't think other authors have covered. I tried my best to analyze these investments the way Buffett would have at the time, with proper attention devoted to the underlying risks of each investment.

Hi all, I recently wrote Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns, which is coming out in one month (Amazon: https://amzn.to/4gRJaiy). I cover ten case studies from the 1950s and 1960s (which includes both partnership investments and investments he made pre-partnership). Pre-partnership, I cover: Marshall-Wells, Greif Bros, Cleveland Worsted Mills, Union Street Railway, and Philadelphia and Reading. The partnership investments I cover are: British Columbia Power, American Express, Studebaker, Hochschild Kohn, and Walt Disney Productions. I have been posting some Buffett-content that didn't make it into the book on X, such as his letter to Merchants National Properties: https://x.com/brettgardner_10/status/1836016824833515657 Happy to answer any questions about the book! I will be having some events in NYC promoting the book and will be at Berkshire next year.

BTW, I'm writing a book on ten of Buffett's earliest investments (50s/60s). This is one of them. Happy to send a draft if you'd like.

Buffett bought the stock in '66. Bought $4mm, sold it for $6mm a year later. Disney compounded at around 18.9% from '67 to '95. Berkshire compounded at 24.8% during the same period. Dividends would close the gap a bit, but not much. The investment in '66 had so many ways to win. Theme park business was set to explode. Monetization of the film library. The film business actually was not a good business post the Paramount consent decrees in '48. Disney had a niche in family focused films that allowed them to earn supernormal returns/margins. Animation capabilities no one really had. So cheap. ~4x EBIT. Mary Poppins just came out. But it was still going around the globe in '67. '67 earnings were actually up vs. '66. Walt passed away in '66. You lost a driving force of the film business and strategic force of the company. The 70s and 80s weren't great decades. You needed Roy Disney (Walt's nephew) to replace management and bring in Eisner to turn the company around in the 80s. Look at the current company. Massive amounts of value has been created due to ABC and ESPN. ESPN in particular has driven enormous valuation creation. How can one Buffett anticipate that? I don't think selling was an error at all. My view is Walt drove the film franchise when Buffett bought the stock (he had a meeting with him in California, he made a judgement on Walt). His passing was a huge blow to the upside of the company. You had film in the library you could re-release or sell to TV that was probably worth the entire market cap of the company. You had the theme parks. But underwriting the film franchise growing post Walt was very hard. Forecasting theme park growth was very hard. You knew earnings were going up, but how fast? The price gave you a huge margin of safety for most of these. But it made sense Buffett sold after the pop + Walt's death.

Thank you so much!

I'm curious if anyone here has written to Munger. Did you write to the Daily Journal address? Did you receive a response?

Does anyone have access to HC Wainwright's research on RIOT that they could share?

This is a great suggestion, thank you Brett! You're welcome - I think you probably only need to do it for 10-15 years - I imagine other websites (maybe Bloomberg?) will have it for 1980 onwards.

rb just got disqualified from CoBF. ;D :o Did I miss a dividend in 1966 or something? 1967: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/041714/how-warren-buffett-made-berkshire-hathaway-worldbeater.asp#:~:text=The%20only%20time%20Berkshire%20Hathaway%20actually%20paid%20a,bathroom%20when%20the%20dividend%20was%20authorized.%2015%20%EF%BB%BF I was close eh? I beg pardon to the CoBF gods. Stil I think that the method would work pretty well instead of trolling through the new york times stock pages of the 60s. And miss out on all the fun?

Go to the NYT Wayback machine: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/ Type in January 1 or 2 for each year. You'll see the prices in the stock pages. I think Berkshire was traded OTC in the early days, so NYT might not have all of them.

Curious, what investments do you think have been insufficiently or poorly covered?

I'm curious, what will the book focus on?