Dynamic

I also bought some on BRYN ticker this morning filling at €175.49 via SMART routing on IBKR, but a couple of hours later than Valuehalla. It may just be a short-term trade. The volume is tiny normally, about 3700 shares per day. It's a lot more today. BRYN is used for a number of exchanges in Germany and XETRA and Frankfurt seem to be busiest. I usually track ETR:BRYN on GoogleFinance to see the price before the US markets open, but I'm aware that the spreads are wider and the volume smaller and commissions are higher, so it's not ideal most of the time. Try typing slowly into the Yahoo Finance search box to see a lot of different tickers, then go in and compare daily trading volumes. For my UK Capital Gains Tax I am considering that this could be useful to take advantage of my tax-free gains allowance every tax year. I can sell my BRK.B position and buy some BRYN at about the same price, realising gains to increase my cost basis without exiting my effective position. This is completely legitimate and doesn't come under "bed-and-breakfasting" rules that stop you realising gains if you buy back the same security within 30 days because it is different under the identification rules. And if the volume is low, I can just do so gradually at times when both US and EUR markets are open. Likewise BRKB.MX is in Mexico City, but the market hours match the NYSE, so I can switch at any time the NYSE is open. Berkshire Hathaway Class A is traded in Euros too, and probably at very low volume.

My estimate of Book Value if it were calculated up to yesterday 3 August comes to $150 and change per B Share. That is not adjusted for Kraft Heinz price increase. That has advanced a long way from 31 March and from 30 June's estimated $145.10 - 145.20 that will be revealed in a few hours, so the error bars are probably fairly wide - maybe +/-$0.50 around the $150 estimate of yesterday's BV. It depends what assumptions Mr Market has factored into the current stock price and whether the Q2 results are a positive surprise, but it's certainly possible that 3rd August 2018 was the last day BRK.B traded below $200. I hope not - I'd love to pick up more at low prices when I have more funds available.

It sounds good to have an alternative, and we can only learn from seeing the scripts. Please do if it's not to much trouble.

I had reported both to Google Finance's team using the feedback form. SP500TR is now working again on both Google search and GOOGLEFINANCE("SP500TR", "price") function. That is more important to me than .INX However, .INX is still not working and I cannot find the normal capital-only index under any other symbol in Google Finance search (except the .INX version that returns no results). Perhaps that will be fixed later. If it becomes a persistent enough problem there are ways of scraping it from other sites using a macro function, but I'd rather use GOOGLEFINANCE() if possible. UPDATE: SP500TR just stopped working again! That was short lived! UPDATE 2: They both worked for a short while, then stopped working once more! Clearly something behind the scenes is changing from time to time, so maybe it will start working again soon

I think the buyback, assuming there's no tender offer or large block purchase, is likely to merely keep the cash growth in check, perhaps stopping cash from exceeding float and maintaining that low-risk uncallable leverage. I wouldn't be surprised to see Berkshire take 5 to 10 years to gradually reduce the cash balance towards $20bn through buying a small fraction of daily volume. In reality, there may well be a modest bear market in 2-5 years, allowing Berkshire to make some meaningful acquisitions or other sensible capital allocations, which could put a sizeable chunk of its cash to work.

Yes, having exactly the same issue. I suspect their data supplier has issue but sometimes the ticker needs modifying to include something before a colon, and I find out searching Google / Finance results. Today, even the suggested search results list results shows INDEXCBOE:.INX yet you click it and it doesn't find any results. I wonder if it's down because it's end of month?

I take it you're referring to your Mexican Peso (MXN) position, frommi? I take it that worked out well then? MXN seems to have strengthened against GBP by about 8% in the last few months from my memory, but that could so easily be GBP weakness!

Thanks. Glad you haven't mentioned any pitfalls I haven't thought of as I have some GTC orders in place ready to take advantage of certain seriously advantageous prices that might come along once in a blue moon. I usually monitor and re-evaluate these from time to time. I now use IB myself for part of my portfolio and I'm well aware it can take an age to log in. Usually faster and a lot less hassle on the Android app if I just want to monitor (I'm fairly inactive), but if I'm intending to trade, the Trader Workstation or Webtrader each take a long time to load. Good luck with your put-writing!

I have only recently had the facility to use limit orders on US stocks, so I don't know how it works inside and out, but would a Good Til Cancelled (or Day) limit order have given you a good chance of picking up some stock below $29? I take it you're saying you missed out on buying the stock for <$29 rather than on selling another put, though I guess you could even put a limit order on selling a $29-strike Aug 3rd or Aug 10th put at, say $0.50 minimum price (assuming selling implies writing the put rather than shorting it). I guess there are some downsides to leaving a limit order in place, especially if you have less cash than you might end up spending if your limit order fills and you get put-to on your put options and cannot or would rather not use any margin. I'm guessing the other reason is if there's material news affecting the company in question that causes permanent impairment to its value, but then that's a risk with selling puts too. I'd be interested in your thoughts as an experienced put writer, boilermaker75.

I have to say that you're starting to look prescient, Valuehalla! I'm sure glad your analysis helped persuade me to keep adding to Berkshire from December 2017 onwards. It's a great day to already be fully invested in Berkshire!

I too think Q2 is going to be very good especially in GAAP terms and rise in BV. I do wonder if a significant block of stock has been offered to Berkshire for example for reasons such as estate planning, as it was the last time they modified the repurchase plan, so that transaction could be conducted after the next earnings release at a price well above $170 On the other hand, now that the Apple position is full sized (above 5% of Apple seems to be where Berkshire would have to file Form 4 with SEC) they may have just decided not to tie their hands behind their backs with a publicly disclosed limit any longer so they can stop to cash pile building as much as it probably has during Q2 and without a precise figure known publicly they'll be able to actually buy back a lot of stock instead of setting a soft floor under the price. With this thought in my mind I immediately understood what bizaro86 meant in the earlier post. As for the stock price action, here's some rational speculation. I imagine that 120% of Book Value will probably remain a soft floor, perhaps with a thick layer of a spongy carpet on top! In other words in times of low prices, there will still be a lot of buyers with the old threshold in mind as being a sure bargain price, giving a reasonably firm lower bound to the trading range except in extreme circumstances. But I'd also imagine that there will be a slightly increased willingness to buy at various prices above this threshold. These softer buy prices may gradually become refined as people infer from future buybacks at what price Berkshire seems willing to repurchase its stock. If a consensus builds, this may firm up the metaphorical carpet on the soft floor by increasing buying interest above 120%BV and resist price falls a little more strongly even than now. BTW, the after-the-close market and the FRA:BRYN stock thinly traded in Frankfurt on the morning 18th July show almost a $3 rise to around $193.28. I woke up a little confused that my broker said my portfolio was up so much, but they showed the closing price when I opened the app instead of the after market trading.

I think you're saying that Berkshire has dipped below the threshold of 120% of BV (or 110% of BV at the short-lived previous threshold) on a few occasions, but Berkshire has not purchased its own shares (except in the bulk private arrangements announced with the announcement of the repurchase authorization). I believe that Berkshire's interpretation of the authorization is to only act on the basis of publicly disclosed information, in fairness to its shareholders, giving them equal treatment, meaning that Book Value Per Share used to calculate it is based on the last Book Value and the last Shares Outstanding published by the company and filed with the SEC. At present the last know Book Value was at 31st March 2018 and the last published share count was dated 27th April 2018 (see 2018Q1 10-Q for both, the bottom of the front page for the share count). I'm fairly certain that Berkshire's open market price has not traded below the stated threshold in place at any time since the buyback program was introduced so long as you interpret the buyback price limit to be based on the last-published Book Value. Take for example the Jan to early Feb 2016 period, when the last published BV was 2015Q3's figure, giving a buyback limit around $120.83. On 3rd Feb 2016 I bought some BRK.B off market (because the quote had to be denominated in GBP in my tax-exempt ISA) for 85.121 GBP (estimated ~= 124.26 USD ) which was 123.4% of 2015Q3 BVPS. It turned out to be 119.9% of 2015Q4 BVPS when announced later that February. The price was so low I sold out of my other position in my ISA to fund it, having already spent my cash balance at about $126 on 13th Jan 2016. I had anticipated a rise in BVPS for the quarter just ended, and the 120% threshold increased to $124.40 later in February when the 2015Q4 10-K was released, so whoever got in at the low point of the quarter that same day at $123.55 saw the soft floor rise $0.85 above their purchase price within the month even though they bought above the buyback limit. I bought more BRK.B in my wife's account on 11th Feb 2016 at 86.3759 GBP ~= $124.56 USD (123.7% of 2015Q3 BVPS, 120.2% of 2015Q4 BVPS as it turned out) having brought forward some of our planned cash deposits to take full advantage. The low that day was $124.04. Another good daily low was 25th Jan 2016 at $123.90. All these daily lows were about $3 above the buyback threshold based on the published figures then available, so I don't believe Berkshire was authorized to repurchase its own shares at the open market prices the stock reached. There were no announced buybacks when that quarter's results came out in May 2016, seeming to confirm that they only act on public information not on undisclosed financial figures, unless of course they were too busy buying Apple to buy their own stock! I think the excess cash above the $20bn minimum is not a huge drag on returns, as it's about the same as the insurance float most of the time, but when it does get invested when prices are sufficiently cheap to limit downside and boost upside and there's panic in the markets, it will be leveraged by virtue of being funded by other people's money (and money Berkshire usually gets paid to hold!) thanks to their combined ratio.

Interesting. You could argue that most of that cash is not included in book value anyway as it's roughly equal to the insurance float which is a balancing liability. You could also argue that it is worth more than carrying value if you believe it will be wisely invested soon.

Don't worry, @rolling, I think it's been a good discussion to have and I value your contribution, and how indexing may or may not affect market prices is an important question to consider if people are pontificating about calling the top of the market based on such effects or thinning of gains to just a few popular names.

I know where you're coming from and there's certainly some merit in this model. A lot of this was discussed in the thread about the Semper Augustus Letter, so you might find that interesting, even if I'm not sure we agreed or came up with a convincing conclusion. There the point was made that the proportion of declared index funds is about 13% of all activity or maybe 25% of all funds in the market (from a skim read - perhaps need to check the sources). So even if many managed funds are closet-indexing a substantial part of their money, it still represents probably no more than 50% of the market cap, and if indexers trade much less frequently, it also represents much less than 50% of the traded volume in a given period. If there are no deposits or withdrawals from index funds, they do not impact the market for the buying and selling of underlying stocks at all, except on the re-weighting of the index or at any other times when the algorithms start to adjust the weightings of their stock holdings (e.g. they may choose to select only a sample of the smaller-weighted index components to reduce costs while maintaining reasonably small tracking error, or to allow larger deviations between the index fund's weighting and the official index weighting among those smaller positions where it matters less overall). If there are net withdrawals from index funds (and others too) for a certain period, that will produce selling pressure on all the stocks they contain over that period on average proportional to the rate of withdrawal and how that compares to traded market volumes. Conversely, if there are net deposits, which is probably more normal, especially with reinvesting dividends, that will produce buying pressure on all the stocks contained. Nonetheless, for market-cap weighted indexes, as far as I can see, essentially, 1 million units of the index, say, represents x% of each company's outstanding share count, regardless of their weighting in the index. As long as they remain in the index and the index has the same number of constituent companies, their weighting is adjusted according a fixed percentage of the number of shares outstanding (except for rare occasions when it's adjusted for free float, which would include Berkshire Hathaway and a few other stocks where insiders are not expected to buy or sell stock and contribute to the trading market or where there are substantial numbers of restricted shares and so on). So if Apple buys back and retires 2% of its outstanding stock, its weighting will decrease to (0.98 x its previous weighting) so that 1 million units of the index still represents x% of the stock outstanding. The buyback program actually eventually causes the index funds to sell stock (or to buy less stock than the inflow would otherwise make them buy) once the index weighting is readjusted. If there is net inflow into index funds it certainly does provide some buying volume to all component stocks regardless of the underlying price whether the stock is ludicrously expensive or ludicrously cheap or somewhere in the middle. So it may cause a net upward push to the market prices of all index components over time until everyone decides to head for the exits in a panic! But it seems logical that it's a small proportion of traded volume that doesn't care about the price at all. It seems the stock turnover and thus trading volume generated by managed funds and institutions and for many individual investors is far, far higher than for index funds, so they should still have an outsized influence on price-setting. Nonetheless many fund managers do experience pressure to include the popular names to attract assets under management, so may be pressured to buy even when they're already rather fully priced, possibly at the expense of fund performance, even if their past performance came about by buying those names only when they were much more undervalued. And many individual investors of a similar mind but who don't choose to invest in funds are attracted to the familiar names they read about a lot too and want a piece of that action (especially if it has risen recently - 'momentum' again), without necessarily having any grounding in the difference between price and value. But the passivity and moderate market volume caused by indexing and the static weighting (in terms of proportion of market cap and thus proportion of shares) - unless I'm entirely wrong here - should be relatively minor impacts, shouldn't they? Perhaps the counter-argument is that indexing is a more insidious and powerful form of volume, because it is all in one direction (net inflow-and-reinvestment or net outflow of funds causing only either continual buying pressure or continual selling pressure respectively on all stocks in the index) while other market participants who are actively trading are acting on opinions about the correct current and future pricing of the securities under various strategies, and largely offset each other's bullish or bearish opinions, but nonetheless the balance is skewed by the one-directional pressure from indexers.

Cigarbutt, I'd agree that momentum is a very real effect. Unlike momentum or intertia in physics however, it can reverse very quickly, so don't assume that a stock with high momentum will continue moving upwards albeit more slowly and then gradually reverse direction in the event of bad news or results. It might be better to call it speed or velocity than momentum, as momentum is velocity x mass. Stocks don't tend to have much mass or inertia, but some of them maintain a pretty steady speed of price movement for quite a long time unless a force acts upon them, but a fairly moderate force can overcome their most mass (inertia) to make them take on substantial velocity in the other direction. Certain people in market will look at what has 'performed' well recently and jump aboard, either directly or by looking for smart managers who were on board that train where they want part of that action. That is certainly what happened with the huge interest in tech or TMT funds in the late 1990's and into 2000-2001. Now a lot of this focuses on FAANG and friends. If applying this to value, some value investors may delay their buying decision until not only is a stock sufficiently undervalued but perhaps they'll wait until it shows some signs of beginning to be revalued upwards by the broader market, so they avoid tying up their capital in 'value traps' or having to wait a long to for the unrecognised value from being priced into the stock and for it to rise. They might even use some chartist approaches to time their entry, foregoing some of the gains, but potential reducing the time waiting in an undervalued stock. I could see this is a particularly valid concern in the cigar-butt type positions where the stock is not expected to experience compound growth in the business fundamentals, so all the time waiting for the price to rise, you're not benefiting from the business gaining fundamental intrinsic value over time (unless they pay out a substantial dividend of course). Conversely, if you buy a fundamentally good or great business that is able to compound over time with a good ROE and ROIC and no concern over heavy debt loads, you can be very happy watching it slowly compound for the long term even if your stock price remains resolutely stuck at a 30-50% discount to IV, especially if you are considering adding to your position. If you already have the full exposure you desire, you may prefer the kicker of seeing not only compounding IV but an upward re-rating of the stock, then you can get maybe 30-40% cagr and be able to sell later to take advantage of the next great undervalued idea you have in a year or two (or if not simply hold and enjoy the decent compounding in the fundamental IV. Likewise, if you have a good to great business that compounds or distributes most of its free cash flow, selling at a substantial discount to IV, you should probably buy regardless of the danger signals visible in the broader market and its thinning number of outperformers or fears of trade wars or recessions. Very often such danger signs are around for many years before the actual top of the market (I think I remember some quite convincing danger signs being persuasively express by value legends in 2015-2018 at least, if not longer), and if you aren't fully invested in good compounders, you could well have a lot of your capital on the sidelines missing out on 3-6 years of good to great compounding (10%+ and possibly a lot more like 20% in a bull market) that would still see you well ahead of cash even after a 30-50% market crash eventually arrives. When that crash arrives, you may have to be willing to sell some moderately undervalued positions in good to great companies to raise the funds to buy some deeply undervalued huge bargains in previously overvalued great companies, rather than just using cash you had waiting on the sidelines, but it really doesn't take many years of good compounding while you are a little concerned about frothy markets to compensate for the eventual and inevitable downswing and leave you well ahead of cash earning next to nothing. If you accept that smart people will be calling the bear market for year before it arrives, and you have no ability to accurately estimate its time of arrival, you may be able to ignore it, so long as you can stomach severe 'losses' in market value. Then again, if you're deep value and insist on a particularly high margin of safety, you might get better returns when you do invest but actually make investments far less often. Then, you should expect to have a lot of money on the sidelines while you patiently await the next big opportunity and should compensate by the outsized gains when you finally put it to work and your outperformance of folks like me in crashes when you're holding a lot of cash. Inside Berkshire it's a little different. It seems to be mostly the float that's sitting in cash, waiting for a good buy with strong downside protection and reasonable to great upside. The shareholders' equity portion of investable funds is pretty much all being put to work already while the float portion of non-callable funding using other people's money is pretty much all in cash and short term T-bills/deposits. In the event of a downturn, the downside protection and the range of opportunities is likely to produce a sensible situation to invest much of the float portion into undervalued equities or whole company acquisitions, then over a few years, the operating profits of Berkshire's subsidiaries will gradually refill the pot and again float will be represented by mainly cash and equivalents as the next cycle matures. Returning to momentum not being part of value. Chartists tend to try to imagine psychological factor like 'resistance' and 'support' levels or slopes or perhaps statistical lines at 1 or 2 standard deviations, such as Bollinger bands or moving averages and to some extent some of these methods try to capture momentum effects too. In their pure form they ignore the fundamentals, but their are many flavours of chart-reading too and they can pick and choose. In looking at Berkshire I have an element of appreciating some of these factors actually. There is a fundamental providing a moving support level or soft floor, and that's the stated buyback threshold of 120% of Book Value per share, which gets updated every quarter. Perhaps the upper part of Berkshire's trading range is in the 160% to 170% of BV area nowadays, rather than maybe 200% as it was maybe 20 years ago. I imagine that soft floor support level will be breached in the event of a serious market crash because there will be great value opportunities in many places that will look more attractive than Berkshire to a lot of smart value investors, at least for a few months, but in normal market conditions, ever since Berkshire introduced first the 110% of BV threshold then the 120% of BV threshold for their buyback authorisation, I cannot recall either level being breached (if BV is defined as the last published BV), or being only slightly breach on rare occasions (if BV is defined as the live Book Value or the yet-to-be-published book value of a quarter just ended). To me that gives enough downside protection and long-term compounding that I can meet my goals yet still take advantage of great opportunities that might come up once every few years by selling some BRK.B. If the market really crashes, I'm sure my Berkshire will be well down from its peak and quite undervalued in the market, but I may still preserve enough market value to find worthwhile trades among stocks that are more deeply beaten down that it would be beneficial for me to sell BRK.B at the bottom of the market. But there are many ways to adapt value investing to your style and your goals, opportunity set and circle of competence, so your mileage may vary, and I certainly don't profess to be anything like a great investor.

I think maybe i went a little too far the other way actually on reflection, but I did have some difficulty accepting Semper Augustus's view that index investing was exacerbating the thinning out of the distribution of returns so that tech names contributed almost all the gains. Their Berkshire analysis later in their letter was the best I've read. Anyhow, while I like to remember how probability distribution trails work and avoid cherry picking, I was too strong implying that cherry picking accounted for all of it. There is some real skewing going on and the returns so seem unusually concentrated even if we should always expect concentration in gains.

Quite possibly but it's cherry picking. You can always find companies with large weightings and strong performance but perhaps it shows how difficult it can be to match the index in short periods when extreme price changes are so concentrated and contribute a lot to index performance. edit: What I'm trying to say is that it's a distribution with long tails of both positive and negative price moves, some of which are may times the average move of the index as a whole. If you weight each stock according to their index weighting you can plot each stock's contribution to the index move. Even when the index goes up 3% in a quarter, there will be a few stocks that have risen 15% to 50%, and there will be a few stocks that have fallen 15% to 50% plus many more in the middle. Of those outliers, any with a reasonably large weighting that rose will contribute most of the index's 3% move up, possibly more than 3%. This gain will be offset by the larger weighted stocks in the big fallers group to a large extent, pushing the index performance back down, and the group in the middle might contribute to either a few percent rise or fall. It's just how distributions and weighted averages work. It's a lot like molecules in a fluid such as a gas or liquid, perhaps moving along a pipe. Most molecules move relatively slowly, and perhaps flow slightly in one direction or another, and a small proportion move relatively quickly in one direction or another. You could say the high energy molecules moving in the direction of bulk flow provide an outsized contribution to the bulk flow of the fluid, but the distribution of energies is a natural consequence of temperature and how the statistics work. Returning to stock index effects, often certain industries gain favour based on the latest trends or legislative changes, so it's not surprising that many of the major contributor's to one quarter's change in the index are linked in some way, giving grist to the mill for such stories to be produced (humans love spotting patterns). Now and again, such a group of linked in-favour stocks, will contribute over 100% of the index's gain (perhaps as much as 4%-5% of the index's market cap), offset by a group of out-of-favour stocks that have declined in price and moderated by a whole bunch of stocks that barely moved to bring the average to maybe a 3% rise in the index.

I'm guessing that's why we came up with similar numbers, Valuehalla, as I used the same sort of method albeit with the portfolio adjustment before the markets closed on the 29th June. It seems to be a pretty sound approach to estimate one quarter ahead.t

I have found value in having an estimate of the quarterly numbers in the past. Frequently there is a 5 week window or even 7-8 weeks in February from the quarter end date until the results are published. Having an idea of the likely soft price floor that will arrive in a few weeks can really help if you want to take a high conviction bet and get a feel for the likely downside once the numbers are released, within the normal range of market price fluctuations (which could all go out of the window in the event of a crisis, of course, but is a useful gauge of short-term risk at other times). It really came good in Jan-Feb 2016 in particular but I also find it useful today in gauging when the asymmetry is strongly in my favour. Buying Berkshire at reasonably cheap prices can both improve the preservation of your capital so that it is ready to be deployed elsewhere if you find high conviction value, and help your IRR exceed the growth in Intrinsic/Book Value by a small but worthwhile amount over time. Buffett is right to point out that the days of 19-20% annualized returns are gone. We don't want shareholders to expect those sort of numbers and be disappointed. Likewise, with low interest rates and low inflation, fairly certain 9-11% annualized returns for a decade or so are still attractive. I think that from now on (and perhaps in the last 10-15 years too) there's a lot less opportunity for Berkshire (after tax) to greatly outperform the markets (before tax) with its stock picks in normal markets, and just keeping pace in normal times is still good. Nonetheless occasional bargains will come along. Apple was a good one, and the initial investment in the $90-$100 range in 2016 was a case of a very large company with hugely loyal customers, deeply undervalued, presumably on fear of a continual decline, offering an earnings yield of 9-11% (depending whether you back out the cash or not) and with a strong buyback program picking up and retiring cheap shares and paying a decent dividend too. However, even now Berkshire holds 5% of Apple and it's double the price, those shares only represent about 10% of BRK.B's value, so the ~40% IRR on the revaluation of that stock in 2 years provides a much smaller look-through increase in BRK.B's value, of course, though still very worthwhile and with a decent runway of per-share compounding likely to lie ahead. Even the poorer picks like IBM have not been money-losing disasters, just trailing the S&P500 a bit with mundane price action. In these relatively fully valued markets we see at the moment, the amount of cash awaiting investment in securities or acquisitions tends to reasonably well track the insurance float most of the time, so the cash isn't a huge drag as it's other people's money we're holding onto for now and the insurance combined ratio usually averages out in our favour. In a bear market, I imagine the opportunities and the aversion to risking the float in chasing modest returns will allow outperformance and investment of much of the float (keeping at least $20-30bn in cash on hand to cover the largest correlated insurance losses) to really take advantage of the float's long-term low-risk non-callable leverage when the downside is most limited and the upside is most lucrative. I think that's where BRK.B will lay the foundations for another moderate surge ahead of the S&P500 Total Return Index (perhaps a 20-40% relative gain, which might annualize to around 1-3% advantage over the index in 10-15 years). I also see Berkshire's discipline to only increase premiums written and thus float when pricing is right, but forego premium volume when pricing is soft, as a huge advantage. With so much liquidity seeking returns, we haven't had a hard market for a long time. Insurance isn't as important to Berkshire now, either, but it's still a very valuable business and the float is useful too. All in all, I think Berkshire should be very likely to perform at least as well as the index in the long run and likely to outperform it by a percent or two per annum in the long run, partly thanks to the float leverage and partly thanks to rational opportunism. At the right sort of price it seems to me to be a great stock to compound your money slowly over time and achieve long-term accumulation goals without incurring taxes (and I willingly hold Berkshire at near 100% portfolio weighting at times) and it's a good place to park your money while awaiting truly great high conviction opportunities to enhance your returns (such as a 25% weighting in Apple at $95 in May 2016, which I funded by selling some of my BRK.B at $142, which I had taken to over 90% weighting three months before at around $125).

Elaborate post maybe - probably not very elaborate figures (except for the Look-Through part, which is elaborate!). It was a few rough numbers for after tax segment earnings or losses based around the 10-K and 10-Q on a sheet of paper plus the reasonably accurate Look-Through portfolio change (excluding KHC). But the good thing is we're estimating the difference from Q1 BV to Q2 BV - about $4.00 added to BV per BRK.B share for the quarter so roughly right give or take $0.20 to $0.30 either way may be a +/- 5-8% window around the real increase, but is still pretty good for estimating the buyback threshold we'll have from early August within a dollar or so, and I'm happy enough with that. It's a lot easier to be roughly right than it was when we were estimating the unknown impacts of the new Tax Cuts back in December. I was a bit over-optimistic at that time. For Q1 I was a lot closer but still a little optimistic.

Yes, it looks like about $5.9bn gain in market value for the quarter to 30 June 2018 aside from KHC which is treated more like a subsidiary. I estimated the tax on the realized gain on the Monsanto merger arbitrage already, but crudely assume 21% deferred tax liability increase is a little over $1.2bn and net gain in portfolio is about $4.6bn-$4.7bn for the quarter. This does include the effect of known disposals but the economic effect will be the same. Pretty sure the Apple position cannot have grown or they'd have filed a Form 4 on reaching 5% as @globalfinancepartners said on the Look Through thread. It's possible that other positions have been added to or initiated and likely that there is some small trimming required to keep banks like Wells Fargo below 10%, but I'd imagine they won't make a dramatic difference. Running some rough numbers for fun on 29th June, just before the quarter closed I was within the ballpark of Valuehalla's estimated Book Value - perhaps 10-20 cents below a few hours before the portfolio market value got a late boost- I don't remember exactly - but I haven't tried to account for seasonality of each earnings line and I'm not sure of the tax effect accounting and have no particular insight into the insurance environment. I would personally ignore KHC's price action given how it's accounted for and aiming for a conservative number. In the past, I've done pretty well estimating about 2-2.5% quarterly increase in BV from 2015Q3 to Q4 and even picking up some BRK.B at 1.234* Q3BV in Feb 2016 $~124.56, which turned out to be 1.19* Q4BV when it was announced later that month with the 10-K. We're not so very cheaply priced now, the holiday season boost won't help Q2 gain so much as Q4, and the tax cut mixes things up, but I estimated BV just over $145 per B share and buyback threshold will provide a soft floor of a little over $174, much in line with Valuehalla. I don't have the figures to show my working except for the portfolio gain, I just recall the resulting figure for 2018Q2 BV and the estimated buyback threshold, which I've used recently to estimate my downside in BRK.B. I may have the sheet of paper somewhere but probably won't dig it out. When the tax cut first came through I slightly overestimated BV at year end by a dollar or so, so take my estimate with a pinch of salt. I'm certainly bullish on Berkshire Hathaway in the mid to high 180s and I expect the buyback threshold to catch up to my buy prices since Dec2017 by about this time next year. I'm in an odd position that my home currency GBP has weakened so although BRK.B is down from the mid 190s, it's more expensive in GBP than when I bought in December. I'd love the price to hit the mid 170s for a while, but I'd be surprised

Thanks for your response, GFP. I'm reassured that the look-through sheet is a better tool now than before these changes and the various others (such as accounting for the New England Asset Management and pension holdings) that you inspired earlier in this thread.

Thanks GFP, I was hoping you'd tell me if I had the essence correct or not. Would I also be right to imagine that changes in KHC's market price would not carry over to Book Value except perhaps in the annual report where Berkshire might reassess its carrying value, as I think it did in the 2017 Annual Report?