KPO

Sounds like Berkshire’s MiTek business, which is a good little business.

+1 I feel like I’ve learned more from this board over the last few years than any other single investment resource. Merry Christmas folks!

I wouldn’t be surprised to see something as boring as CPRI beat the indexes next year with a 15% return from here when the deal closes. I realize this is boring, but it’s a solid risk adjusted return investment.

(Re)starter in BTI after a year hiatus. Kind of surprising to see this yielding 10%.

Medicis Pharmacuetical. Purchased around 1996 and in 2012 it was sold to Valeant for $2.6B. I don’t have good records going back this far, but it was a 12-14X return as I recall. The one that got away? MSFT bought in 1995 and sold after a relatively quick double…..

Agreed. Makes me wonder about the level of scum correlation to sports team owners as they immediately used the latest tranche of selling off the family business to buy the Milwaukee Bucks.

The United States, particularly the Midwest. This culture definitely still exists in some areas.

+1

In the case of Hess I suspect the family preferred CVX stock for tax reasons.

I have a smallish position and am thinking about rolling some of my ATVI proceeds here as I like to have one or two merger arb positions at any one time since the risk profile is usually disconnected from general market volatility. I can’t come up with a reasonable market concentration argument for why this shouldn’t go through with the concessions they’ve made. Political pandering risk seems the main reason this gets shot down, meaning the public will generally be against it because SAVE’s unsustainable pricing model will be at risk, so politicians will fall in line with their constituents. The other thing that holds me back on going big here is that I have zero interest in owning this if it doesn’t work out, which wasn’t the case with ATVI.

TRC

Thanks for posting

I’ve met Stewart before at the Berkshire meeting years ago. Can you send a non-paywall link as I’d love to read the story? Thanks for sharing.

This is 100% correct and glad you brought it up as I’ve been telling this to friends and family for years, but it’s not just asphalt. Can you paint your house, re-roof your house or provide tires for your car without fossil fuels? And that doesn’t even get into fertilizer, etc. The zero emissions revolution is largely nonsense. If we cared about the environment we would simply keep all assets such as cars, lawn movers, homes, etc. as long as possible, which no one does other than the cheap among us who are the real (accidental) environmentalists.

More TRC

TRC

More TRC at the close

https://archive.ph/D0KXm Happened upon this article about the other famous Buffett and it states that Berkshire has ownership in Margaritaville Enterprises, the holding company for most of the Jimmy Buffett related businesses. Was I the only one that didn’t know this? I wonder if it’s even true?

40% of my SHEL purchased when oil prices went negative in ‘20. Nothing specifically is negative about SHEL, but I own too much O&G(&P)!

A bit more TRC. This thing doesn’t trade much……

It sounds like you first bought Berkshire shares around the same time that I did, and I felt very late to the party. A year or so later I recall Michael Eisner handing out Disney/Berkshire pins at the meeting. Seemed nice enough. I also remember seeing folks the next year or two at the annual meeting, and in the Omaha bar district, with yellow-Brkers hats on. Can’t imagine anyone on this board knows who that might have been. Lol.

TRC

I’m familiar with them. Given the existential (at least for equity holders) tail risk it seems like a no brainer business case for the utilities.

Exactly. And it makes me worry about anything that touches public utilities….even Berkshire has exposure as we’ve seen recently in the the Pacific Northwest, albeit evidently hived off from the parent company.

CVS & TRC