Jaygo

May have a nasty one headed to Joe land this week. Thursday night landfall likely in the panhandle.

Is that Sherwin?

He could also just buys some awesome businesses outright but at some point too big is too big. I would not have been upset with 3M at the lows or Graco anytime. Why not buy out Suncor or TransForce up north? Lots of ideas but WB is the be all and end all so he will decide. Maybe he will buy out Cargill or Mars and we can all stop worrying about cash for a long time.

This is my hope too. A buyback would be great but unlikely unless shit gets crazy. Is a return of capital a tax advantaged possibility?

@Xerxes @John Hjorth You both have a point. Dont dish it out if you cant take it. He does seem to get mired in the BS instead of taking the highroad and ignoring it. I think he did the same with Cathy wood and others at one time. We all have flaws. I do think his fees and the way he has structured his business is a different matter and short of predatory tactics he and his clients should be left to themselves to evaluate. I guess i just wanted to defend him where he could not defend himself. I am totally in gratitude to his letters. Much like our @Viking amongst others and their efforts on FFH. When someone teaches you to fish you tend to think very highly of them.

The pace of buybacks is really impressive. At some point maybe 6 years ago someone mentioned an ( possibly Norwegian ) insurance co who bought back 90% of shares over time. Anyone remember? I think it was in the BRK thread, anyway I believe the setup was similar. Great company that people were just indifferent to and it allowed them to slowly take in the majority of shares over time at reasonable prices. I wonder if one day well look at our portfolios and FFH will be like 10k a share but the market cap will be still in the same neighborhood. I'm guessing WB would love to have a lower valuation right now to make his transition easier.

You guys banging on Chris seem a little jealous that's all. Who cares what he charges and for what services. As far as I can tell he's not out there preying on widows and orphans. His clients have made a decision and he runs his business in a way that he feels comfortable. All I see is a guy who has very generously given us his work. To this day I cant think of a better source of business accounting teachings than his letters. More granularly. Paying a guy to hold BRK or any other conglomerate business is fine. Have any of the guys bitching about his fees ran a business? Its hard, capital allocation is hard. Is he supposed to ignore BRK? the company he knows better than anyone not named Warren or Greg just because of the corporate structure. Maybe his customers say to him "Chris just get me to the finish line with some money left" and that's all they need to sleep well at night. I also see his defensive style as a very good Ying Yang for someone holding the rest of their assets in QQQ or something. His portfolio has a bit of an all weather feel to it.

I have some physical gold and without being an outright gold bug I am very in tune to the devaluation of currency. I look at gold as money and Mako as Money in the ground plus. In my younger more adventurous youth I bid on an abandoned railway in Algoma Ontario. 640 Acres with 2.3 km of raised rail bed totaling some crazy number of tons of gravel like 50-60 thousand that would be super easy to scoop up and load into trucks. The property was dead flat with amazing access along the entire length. I figured scoop up the gravel and sell it then keep the land as a kicker. The offer was stiffly rejected because of my financing clause and the bank basically laughed at me. Anyway the deal was supposed to work out as each ton of gravel was going to net me $4 bucks after me digging and second party hauling. 20 years later it would net me roughly $13.00/ton today because just like gold the price of gravel inverses the devaluation of currency. I look at Mako kind of like a gravel pit. Each ton they dig up and process nets them in the area of $300.00 ( my wild ass guestimate) That beats the hell out of any gravel pits around here plus you always have the potential of deals being done to increase the value. I love natural resource investment but rarely do it as the industry is ripe with fraud and shady characters. I am slowly settling into feeling comfortable with Mako if only because the CEO is open and seems rational.

Biggest adds this year have been Artis REIT and Mako Mining. Both around the end of February. Real estate and gold. No need to ask my Macro feelings.

I travel with my young children all the time. The biggest things id recommend: 1. Pack light. luggage sucks especially when you have to drag the kids around too. Make sure they have a little backpack for kid shit so yours doesn't get filled with stuffed animals and sticky objects. 2. Dont bring a bunch of activities, waste of space. Just buy a shiny object and toss it when they get bored. Rinse, repeat 3. Do bring kids Tylenol, Benadryl, Diarrhea meds and diapers. Very hard to find sometimes. 4. Pack a patience. Kids and old people are slow as hell. Get your mosey on and try not to loose your mind. 5. Buy sugar free snacks and keep them on you all the time. Its amazing how it will occupy them while you tend to travel related issues that need a focused attention. 6. It may seem silly and kind of messed up but consider a leash. We hiked some cliff side trails in Arizona and Utah and honestly the little springy leash on my son was a literal life saver. It goes from your wrist to their backpack or their wrist. I could see it coming in handy on busy streets with lots of traffic in India

I would consider the Apple position too big for shareholders and that is why he is selling. I would not keep 20% of my net worth in Apple so why should he keep 20% of BRK in Apple. I am also fully willing to acknowledge that had i kept 20% in apple for my lifetime I would be far more wealthy than I am now and I could be making a mistake here. It honestly just seems like it makes fiduciary sense to lighten up on it.

Cash Flow Quadrant 100% one of my favorites as well. Its such a simple idea it could probably be 20 pages vs what it is but the idea is you have four boxes that you can fit into. You can technically fit into all of them at once but more likely into one or two. E for emplyee, B for business owner, S for self employed and I for investor. I read this in my early 20's and immediately realized I want a small business to generate proceeds to move into the investing box. So i'm a S for Self Employed but now the snowball has started to roll a bit I am probably 2/3 S and 1/3 Investor as far as income goes. I really liked John Neffs book on Investing too. Just seemed to jump out to me as obvious easy wins. It has really helped me this past couple years with some large caps that were sold off. 3M, the Smoke co's, Citi, Home Depot ect I dont want to put WB's letters in since they are not books but obviously grouping investor letters into one category is likely the most valuable reading anyway. Buffetts letters, Chris Bloomstran's for accounting has been amazing, Bezos letters are outstanding too. The final book choice is like picking a favorite child. I just cant. I love biography, macro, investing books and the like so much I cant pick. Ive read 100's - 1000's of books because I have a very boring physical job so just devour audio books all day long like I ply my trade. The ones that jump out still: Sunrise about Suncor, Buffettology ( not because its good, it just turned me on to buffett ) Semour shulichs book, The 4 hour workweek Profit first by mike michalowicz E-myth Snowball Rainmakers Atlas shrugged Blue Ocean strategy Shoe Dog The Carnegie bio

Yeah the traffic at any particular store is not relevant. Most volume is delivered to the site or to the shop of a contractor. But that's the low margin business. The high margin is good quality house paint and its also hurting right now. I just consulted a job at a pigment manufacture and all this guy could talk about was how bad things are. He said his products go into everything from A-Z with a colour and they generally get an order 12-18 months before the product is manufactured. Be it plastics, clothing, paint, furniture ect. Their pigments are bagged and shipped to the manufacture globally.

Sherwin is on my radar big time right now. (not as an investment right now ) Its not a bellwether because paint finishes go last in contruction but I think these guys have a terrible year ahead of them. I am really interested to see how bad sales get and if it ends up on par with the GFC. I dont short and I dont think its a good candidate either but I bet a few quarters from now they their sales will be rock bottom. They produce an incredible amount ( weight and volume ) of shitty paint for the contactor market and that scale helps keep cost down for the whole business and allows great returns when a guy comes in to buy ten gallons for his house. Well contractor is dead in the water without a constant flow of new builds and residential is hurting too. If anyone else follows the paints industry Id love some feedback

looks pretty good to me. The smaller operating subs are likely flat to down. Just like the majority of industrial America btw. I am please with the stock sales. It makes it easier on the others to have major decisions made before the handoff is completed. Greg is going to be a great operator and I wouldn't be surprised to see the operating earnings start to grind higher or those business be sold off. The investment team is good but the size is just too much so sell some stakes and buyback the equivalent. A special div or return of capital if possible wouldn't be the worst outcome to start a fresh too. Let say they return $ 50.00 a b share. My average would be under $100 bucks on a 380 share price. if its possible to do it tax free all the better.

We are home now to concrete and honking horns. Another few days on the river would be so nice. We are definitely going to prepare for it next time. And yeah we had a great time just standing in the river currents anyway. Fish or no fish I read A river runs through it last summer and totally forgot about the idea when planning this little trip.

Just got back from a family RV trip to Charlevioux QC. Man what a joyful trip! The scenery is amazing and Quebec food really is good in a homestyle way. We hit 3 national parks and one Marine park. The RV was a fun thing to do and beat the hell out of our usual Coleman tent. The mountains and rivers have a much more human size and feel compared to the Rockies. We biked, hiked, white water rafted, dune sledded, combed the ocean floor at low tide, bathed in waterfalls plus many other physical activities. My son and I wanted to try fly fishing but apparently you cant rent the equipment so it was buy cheap shit and wing it or save the idea for another time when more prepared. My daughter saw her first real impressive shooting star while her and I were laying on the ground staring up at the milky way. We went whale watching and had the show of a lifetime as a humback jumped out of the water 6 times less that 100 feet away, one was real close and the captain had to reverse the zodiac pretty abruptly to mind the regulations for proximity. I love travelling to other countries but Canada in the summer is very tough to beat.

For those selling BRK into some strength here. What is the destination for the cash? Ive long traded brk but i just dont see too many quality destinations to reinvest the proceeds.

Starter in MLM. 10 shares to keep me digging deeper. A few things have been pointing me in the direction of aggregates. To me this may be the easiest picks and shovels play for Ai (datacentres), deglobalization, infrastructure ect, housing ect.

Ok now you got me searching. it was business breakdowns or colossus. DR Horton from march 2024

I’m Canadian. Bring on the warmer weather. We will lower our fossil fuel use by not having to heat our homes 8 months of the year. I couldn’t care less about carbon dioxide when there is major environmental destruction going on. Why people fixated on the temperature vs poisons going into the air and ground is beyond me. Was it a documentary gregmal?

Unfortunately I don’t recall exactly what it was. I want to say it was a business breakdowns on one of the major home builders.

Better to be lucky than good. Very big bounces in all of these today with the slightest hint of a rate cut. A podcast a while back about the US housing sector really opened my eyes to the potential here. There are millions of homes in shortfall and 10's of millions in need of rehab, gut or rebuild. I think this is a sector you can kind of just bank on to work for another 10plus years. I think an easy way to play it is with Lowes since the capital allocation is quite good. Ive gone smaller and more niche with hardware, lumber, supplies and spray equipment. Reichelue, Sherwin and Site are all pretty good picks too. Jeldwen and masonite for a possible rebound is interesting too. I am a firm believer in the continued global migration to NA. It may be Canada or the US but homes and housing will need to be built at a gdp plus number for a very long time. I also dare say this may be one of the biggest beneficiaries of tech that still goes unrecognised. Yeah robot call centres are cool but have you seen robotic band saws! much cooler, much safer and they dont take smoke breaks.

Ive been nibbling at some homebuilder type stuff. Nothing new in the portfolio just adds to Builders first, Graco, Simpson and Doman. I sold my Simpson 38 bucks higher and just bought it back. Nice little trade but won't be surprised to see these shares trade much lower. Are we entering a recession? yeah most likely but that is potentially a benefit to this sector since its tailwinds are temporarily being held back by rates. I think the outcome will be a steep drop in the cyclical industrials but then a very strong rebound in a few years. I could see doubles out of Each of these minus GGG in the next 5 years but with lots of ups and downs ahead.

To me having another is like saving for retirement. Small sacrifices now for the betterment of your future self. Sure there are some sleepless nights and life changes and the house looks like bomb went off at toys r us but man kids are fun. They make you young and when you’re old you’ll be glad you had them just like saving for retirement.