Xerxes

At the very high level, does anyone know if overall Berkshire Hathaway had a good return on Wells Fargo since it got involved a decade ago. Does anyone has an overall gauge ? I know they have not been exactly selling it into the rally lately.

OMERS had the ONE job. All OMERS had to do was to clip the 9% coupons from FFH How did the OMERS scored a negative 2.7-per-cent return in 2020, when the juggernaut CPP return 20%. It could be that CPP year ended in March, therefore they are benefitting from calculating the 2020 annual return from a 2020 low in last March. Canada Pension Returns 20.4%, Boosted by Stock Market Recovery - Bloomberg

what's that about LBTYA - Liberty Global Inc. reduced by 80%

I made some good money on Shakespeare here, when I bought MSTR in mid-Dec and sold it north of $1050 several weeks later. Not in anyway close to the well-deserved 30,000% that Rkbabang tag & bagged !

No hope. It's dormant call option with shareholder patience as its only expiry Interesting you mentioned the FANGs. Unrelated to BB and going back to the discussion about the bond portfolio and talks about inflation (temporary or otherwise), it occurs to me at no point in the past 4-5 years have I heard FFH management talk about the impact of deflationary forces unleashed by the rise of the Big Tech' network. It would be more fruitful for them to focus more on that (if they are not already*) as means to try to counter their permanent-inflation-is-overdue thesis as oppose to talk about FANG's lofty valuations, which if i read Globe & Mail article correctly, not so lofty given that Canadian Pacific and CN are making bids at similar earning multiples. I say if they are not already, just because I don't know.

Boasting about catching Exxon when it dividend yield expanded to 10% on the 2020 shareholder meeting, strongly implies buying Exxon direct. "After the March/April crash in the stock market, we could not resist buying Exxon shares at a dividend yield of 10.5%, Canadian banks at an average yield of 6.1% and some other companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Alphabet, FedEx and Helmerich & Payne at very attractive prices. We sold approximately half of them in 2020 for a profit of $212 million or an average gain of 40% on our investment." I looked all the past 5 quarters' 13F; On Q1 2020 it shows FFH buying 155,800 shares of Chevron; but no Exxon. They still hold all of the 155,800 of Chevron. But no sign of Exxon anywhere unless it is being held elsewhere where 13F disclosures doesn't cover. But then again, it is not like it is an international equity. Would it be too farfetched to think that Prem thinks his team bought Exxon, whereas his team actually bought Chevron, and two sides within FFH haven't reconcile yet. Just weird. FAIRFAX FINANCIAL HOLDINGS LTD/ CAN Top 13F Holdings (whalewisdom.com)

Michael Saylor must not very happy. He is the one who pushed Musk into Bitcoin late 2020 and ignited this 2021 rally, and now the whole rally is coming down with Musk’ about face. Saylor is very smart and good marketer. But pushing for Tesla/Musk to go long Bitcoin was a bold move that is now going to end up biting him. Musk is at the end an engineer, always iterating and looking for a solution. Saylor is a marketer and a Bitcoin maximalist. His incentives are clear.

Indeed, I just hope that he didn't buy it from me back in Q1, when I sold my BBs at $24.99 CAD

Soros Bought Up Stocks Linked to Bill Hwang’s Archegos Implosion - Bloomberg

How did Chou got his cost so low for Resolute at $1.26 per share. BRK.A - Berkshire Hathaway CL A 40.83 150 Add 50.00% $272000.00 $40,800,000 ≡ BHC - Bausch Health 24.18 1,558,992 Add 1.30% $15.50 $24,164,000 ≡ WFC - Wells Fargo 6.02 209,542 $28.70 $6,014,000 ≡ RFP - Resolute Forest Products 5.77 4,571,960 $1.26 $5,761,000 ≡ MBI - MBIA Inc. 4.66 652,531 Add 5.33% $7.14 $4,659,000 ≡ JPM - JPMorgan Chase & Co. 3.09 34,275 $90.04 $3,086,000 ≡ GS - Goldman Sachs Group 3.09 20,000 Add 11.11% $154.60 $3,092,000 ≡ C - Citigroup Inc. 2.85 67,695 $42.12 $2,851,000 ≡ DVA - DaVita HealthCare Partners 2.49 32,743 Add 204.78% $76.05 $2,490,000 ≡ BB - BlackBerry Ltd. 2.17 529,040 Add 23.31% $4.10 $2,169,000 ≡ SNY - Sanofi Aventis 0.87 20,000 Buy $43.70 $874,000

Farmer's Edge down a lofty 17% in 1 day. Thank god it is not marked-to-market

13F Q1 An increase on Atlas ? maybe exercising some warrants FAIRFAX FINANCIAL HOLDINGS LTD/ CAN Top 13F Holdings (whalewisdom.com) Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd Can Top Holdings 13F Filings (holdingschannel.com) I find it interesting that you can neither see Exxon nor Bank of America in the list, yet those two name make it to the conference call and letter to the shareholder. Is that some sort of Marketing on some insignificant position.

I admit that I am not familiar with the 08-09 event with FFH getting a hold of Berkshire-backed municipal bonds and even less familiar with what is a "optimal" surplus ratio. But given some of the missteps they have done in the past few years, I think going in March 2020 on the risk curve with a 7% allocation wasn't totally a bad move.

Negative Oil: When Prices Went Below Zero, These Essex Traders Made Millions - Bloomberg

John, i must say, i was a bit surprised to see you start a position on BAM. I always saw you as sticking with the devil-that-you know-like story (yr long term holding on BRK). That said, glad to see you joining BAM.

It was not risk-free (and could have gone the other way (i.e. prolonged downturn)), but still lower on the risk ladder than adding to equity, but either way as shareholder aren't you paying the management team their annual salary to take risk to take advantage of market dislocation ?

I did find it interesting that they did not react more forcefully in 2018. If the framework that they have is that in 2016, the economy flipped and therefore higher rates were coming, one would have expected that in 2018 they would have bought the dip in the bond market (i.e. locking in some parts). That they didn't, could mean that they expected the rate to go even higher than it did. In late Dec 2018, when the stock market took a plunge, it took some dovishness from the Fed in mid-Dec 2018, to calm the beast. So maybe that dovishness ended that rate increase cycle then. Fast forward into this new economic cycle, if there are far reaching consequence from pedal to the metal Fed policy (i.e. inflation being more perm than transitory), than that would be another opportunity. It just seem to me they are "waiting" for substantially higher rates before locking. If there is an opportunity in the next 8 months, i hope they wont miss it. March 2020 was interesting. They deployed about 7% of their $40 billion portfolio as spreads opened (corporate bonds i believe) up, and rode the collapsing spread from 4-5% to 1-2% approx. Amazing but one would ask, why not more than 7% allocation. Was it because it was too fast ? if the downturn was more prolonged, than that new reality would have different than the one we went through, therefore, it is likely that a larger 15% allocation as spreads opened up would not have snapped back that fast. Therefore, current reality: 7% allocation in March-April 2020 as spreads opened up => made your money in 6 months Alternate reality: +15% allocation in March-April 2020 as spreads opened up => still licking your wounds

I think the tailwind from substantial deployment of that dry powder in the bond portfolio will totally crush and net out any headwinds on its equity portfolio. Until then the stock doesnt deserve a premium to book. I complained in the other thread, about him being perma-bear for so long (2010-16), the positive effect of that is him having that substantial dry powder available and un-deployed.

Matt, If I may suggest: Own FFH for what it is & not what you want it to be. What FFH is today is a company with large bond portfolio with short term duration, well suited to deploy it into this transient/permanent rising inflation/rate environment. J. Powell is helping to create that mother of opportunity for FFH. Druckenmiller talked about just now on CNBC and had a piece on WSJ. If the fall in growth/ARK and rise of value are the two sides of the same coin, than FFH can play that trade through its bond portfolio and stay away from something that historically may have been just awful in executing. Said differently, you are getting what you want but through a different lever. Lastly, at no point Prem did mention Tesla as as short. The Tesla short speculation started here.... that said it is also true that a number of 2008-09 bears who did well during the GFC seem to have a correlated point of view that Tesla was doomed and shorted it. So by that logic one can correlates that Prem also shorted Tesla but that is purely speculation. We did however get an additional piece of info during the AGM about it. He said it was one short position from 2019. After AGM, i said to myself let me go through the realized/unrealized shorts in the 4 quarters of 2020 and find out the likely 2019 short candidate, but then wisely decided not being worth my time. Prem mistake was to think that he was the Valuation Policeman giving speeding tickets to inflated tech names. For a macroinvestor, I think he entirely missed the impact of a lasting low-interest regime on valuations. Chanos and other successful short sellers, on the other hand, makes their dough by shorting mostly names where there is trigger or reason (fraud etc.) in the same period. PS: but then both Buffet and Druckenmiller also did not see the magnitude of Fed intervention to prevent a complete market collapse. BUT they pivoted when facts changed through 2020, while Prem remained perm-bear from 2010 till 2016. Or at least that is my understanding.

Interesting clip with the Redfin CEO on low housing inventory. My personal view has been that once the economy re-opens and rate start to climb up the great dash to move to suburb will slow down. As folks settle down and start enjoying life. I of course have no global view on the housing market but listening to this clip, they see this (bias view for sure) as a multi-year event that igniting a housing construction boom given the low inventory. So, does that mean lumber prices will stick for some times if this rally has some legs. Redfin: U.S. Housing Inventory at Record Low, Getting Worse - Bloomberg On a different note, all these houses that have been bought by the newer generation using apps like Zillow, Redfins or Opendoor, will probably come with an owner that is more likely than not make use of services like ANGI as oppose to call up contractors like I do to get a quote. The opportunity is there for ANGI, the hard part I guess is execution and having that pipeline of "pros" that haven interest.

thepupil, i probably have the same thinking as you do in terms of having a continuous flow from the paycheck, but cap that contribution when i hit the ceiling of the tax-free account. i rather use the surplus $$ to do renovation work in the house, first, then adding to non-taxable account.

TRS are a levered-play, if they sense the bounce back is losing steam at some point in 2021, they ought to unwind the position, capture the gain and live to trade another day. Good news is that with some of their holdings doing well, their margin of safety keeps increasing.

While Munger + Buffett are not above criticism, it is also true that CNBC is a TV show, and the more critical they are the better they'll do. No one is going to click on YouTube to hear Cramer saying how right Buffett was about Robinhood. Few quarters ago, Adam Jonas gave a really weird price target for Tesla (something like low two digit for a bear case), and Cramer toasted him for that, saying that the only reason that price target was made by Morgan Stanley was to generate discussion & a buzz about themselves .... i guess Cramer did the samething. In the next few days, we will probably have Chamath weigh in as well. To stay/look relevant, irrelevant people need to anchor themselves against the words of the relevant few. full disclaimer: i am irrelevant as well.

SD, i dont think that last statement is correct, just based on my understanding of a TRS. FFH can of course buy whatever quantity it wants of its own shares at the end, but i dont think it will be as part of TRS agreement or within that sandbox. Of course if FFH does a buyback at the end funded by TRS gains, than it would akin to doing a buyback in Q4 2020/Q1 2021 when share price was much lower.

And there is the Munger statement as well when they were discussing culture where he said: "Greg will keep it that way"