Dynamic

Perfect - thanks redhots. I'll add it to the look-through portfolios.

http://www.investopedia.com/news/buffettbacked-byd-profits-skyrocket-nearly-400-brka BRK has a roughly 8% stake in BYD. New reports make it 225 million shares, but not sure of the exact figure or where to find it. First-half showed 2.3bn CNY in profits ($344 mn USD) - up 384%. Chinese government incentives for low-emissions cars have seen major growth in EV sales, though other entrants are also being attracted to the market. I realise that BYD was not included in my look-through earnings/holdings Google Sheet (see recent thread). I've tried adding it to one version only so far, and it seems to update current stock price and financials like EPS. If anyone can point to the exact holding in BYD I'd appreciate it (or where to look it up - it was originally bought through MidAmerican Energy when Sokol was still in charge, which since renamed to BH Energy, but looking through various filings, I haven't found it yet)

http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BRK-A/history?period1=322099200&period2=1472598000&interval=1mo&filter=history&frequency=1mo Yahoo has prices back to about 1st April 1980. The above link is provides a list of monthly prices up to today. The chart is available at http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BRK-A?p=BRK-A by clicking the MAX range.

For those who want to play or to enter private information, like your actual BRK holdings, you can copy the "View Only" version of the Google Sheet to a Google Sheet of your own. [*]Open Google Drive or http://drive.google.com in the usual way. [*]Go to or create the folder you want then press NEW and select Google Sheet. [*]Your Untitled Spreadsheet will open. You can click in the title to change its name. [*]Open my view only Sheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ok3bOO4z_2Itbta6FguKbuFA1HvcQvzisspPBN6IpZY/edit?usp=sharing [*]Once it has fully loaded, go to the tab marker at the bottom called "Look-Through BRK earnings and holdings" and click on the light downward arrow on the right of its name [*]You will have only one option, namely "Copy". Click it. [*]Select your newly created Google Sheet from step 3 above and hit OK. [*]It will then say worksheet copied and offer a link "Do you want to open the target Google Sheet?". Say Yes and it will open your Google Sheet. [*]It will probably be open on the blank tab you created it with, but at the bottom of your window you can click the arrow to delete that tab and leave the new tab called "Copy of Look-Through BRK earnings and holdings" which you can now edit to your heart's content. I've tested this on someone else's Google Chrome and Google Account and it works fine. Feel free to share your own versions on this thread or to copy them to a new sheet you don't mind sharing publicly. BTW, if you ask me for permission to edit my "View Only" version of the sheet, I'll allow you Comment access, but not Edit access, so it won't get corrupted. If you want Edit access in the usual collaborative way, there's now a third version of my sheet to which you can request full access. Find it at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Um4ENkSz4tppynxqKAMVLrUcuNqn2JaVBBRu4CEVvGQ/edit?usp=sharing To request Edit Access, make sure you're signed into your Google account then click the blue View Only button to request edit access from me. I've granted edit access for that to the two people who requested it on my View Only version. Perhaps this version can be one that members of CBF forums can work on together when new financials come out. Whoever wants to can input, say, the Book Value per share, the shares outstanding (find these over to the right on the top rows) and the dividend income received from Berkshire's portfolio so that the right figures flow through. Post here or comment on the Google Sheet to say what you've updated. Also, various minor holdings have no valid EPS figure so I just took Wild guesses at normalised EPS for the purposes only of the Low, Typical, High crude valuation of each stock. In some cases, a multiple of Book Value of other figure might be a better valuation yardstick for a specific stock, so feel free to edit columns Q to AA on any rows you like. Do bear in mind that whatever you type there can be seen by anyone on the internet as can the edit history of the spreadsheet!!! Don't put anything proprietary or personally identifiable.

I've made a couple of changes to both spreadsheets. I've inserted rows 7, 8 and 9 on the spreadsheet. Row 7 splits out the equity holdings per BRK.B share. It tells you how much one share of BRK.B contains in current Market Price of equity holdings. (Market Price is about $53.66 as I type this, with effective EPS of $3.05 per B share, P/E = 17.57 or E/P yield of 5.69% from column W). It also values your total holding in your native currency. Row 8 splits out the operating side of Berkshire Hathaway only (it does not back out cash equivalent holdings, however). It shows the operating earnings excluding dividends (as per the annual report for now, not per the 10Q). (Market Price is about $94.41 as I type this, with effective EPS of $8.86 per B share, P/E = 10.66 or E/P yield of 9.38% from column W). It also values your total holding in your native currency. Row 9 is the sum of the two rows above - the total Look-Through BRK.B share, with total look-through EPS in column S. (Market Price is the same as BRK.B = $148.07 as I type, Look-Through EPS = $11.91, P/E = 12.43 or E/P yield of 8.04%) You can use this in a few ways to approach valuation, according to your tastes, such as: • Apply an earnings yield or P/E multiplier to Total Look-Through EPS - see cell S9 then multiply by a fair P/E or divide by a fair earnings yield. • Back out cash and equivalents per B share then do the above to value the non-cash portion. • Apply a sum-of-the-parts valuation to both the portfolio's look-through earnings per B share (so you free yourself from it's current market price) and to the operating company's look-through earnings per B share. • Make a valuation of each significant holding individually and to each division of Berkshire's operating business. • Value various business units within Berkshire Hathaway separately and combine them. E.G. Insurance, Utilities, Railways, Retail and Consumer, Financial Products, etc. to value the operating portion, then add in the shares. • Use whatever crude metrics you normally employ to roughly gauge the relative attractiveness of different stocks. For example, my crude Low, Typical, High measure adjusted using columns Y, Z and AA.

View-only example look through portfolio (set to GBP currency - only I can edit this but I think you can select and copy the cells into your own Google Drive spreadsheet): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ok3bOO4z_2Itbta6FguKbuFA1HvcQvzisspPBN6IpZY/edit?usp=sharing Publicly editable version of look-through portfolio: (might get corrupted by someone else's edits, but you can have a play with it and try changing currency and number of shares held): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10gMfyZOFCW1-KrY_P8SGRf3pTstspdAGw_DuKSQxO8s/edit?usp=sharing At time of posting this is updated to 30th June 2016 holdings as declared in 15th August 2016 13-F and the shares oustanding at the same date from the 10Q. Commentary: I track our total personal portfolio and Watchlist using Google Sheets in Google Drive (the GOOGLEFINANCE function is very useful for currency conversion and delayed prices and basic financials such as EPS). I also use various tabs to track our investment ledgers and our monthly and annual deposits into our tax-advantaged investment accounts, and to keep an eye on our pension schemes. I wanted to make a look-through total portfolio, partly to gauge our total exposure to companies we hold that are also held by Berkshire Hathaway, such as Wells Fargo, where our look-through stake is about half of our direct stake because we're fairly heavily into BRK. As a by-product, I've created a Google Sheet which you might wish to look at, borrow from or select-All and Copy into your own Google Sheet on Google Drive. If you paste into Excel or LibreOffice Calc you'll probably lose the GoogleFinance functionality. The link below is my personal version (only I can edit it, but anyone can view it and I believe could copy and paste the cells to another sheet they can edit): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ok3bOO4z_2Itbta6FguKbuFA1HvcQvzisspPBN6IpZY/edit?usp=sharing The link below this is publicly editable by anyone (so you can play with it, collaborate on it or paste the contents of the other sheet into it): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10gMfyZOFCW1-KrY_P8SGRf3pTstspdAGw_DuKSQxO8s/edit?usp=sharing If you enter in the blue cells your number of BRK class A shares and class B shares and your native currency (e.g. GBP, EUR, USD, CAD etc.) it converts it into equivalent B shares and it estimates look-through holding values from row 8 down, and in columns way over to the right, it includes the EPS reported by GoogleFinance. Some shares have an Error (N/A) so I set these to zero in totalling EPS per BRK.B, but these are mostly minor holdings, so the overall look-through EPS at the bottom right is about right. As a crude indication, as for my full portfolio, I also include Low, Typical and High estimates of trading range based on some kind of fundamental and multiples of it. This also sets a colour scale to crudely indicate if the current market price is Low (DARK GREEN), Typical (BRIGHT YELLOW) or High (DARK ORANGE/BROWN). In my full portfolio I sometime use this colour scale to easily whittle down my list of candidates to sell at toppy prices in order to buy something else I think is cheap, and I use the Low/Typ/High idea to project long term retirement portfolio value without so much influence of current market-wide depression/euphoria. For BRK this fundamental is Book Value Per Share. For most others it's EPS reported by GoogleFinance. Where EPS is negative or N/A I've estimated some other value such as normalised EPS - using very little effort of analysis!!! Do your own research etc. and don't simply rely on the spreadsheet to make investment decisions! Soon I expect to summarise the key figures near the top and the left of the sheet and perhaps make the look-through list filtered/sortable.

I think you're probably right that in the general market the publicly stated 1.2x BV limit on buybacks (and the remark that this is still a significant discount to Intrinsic Value) along with general worries people have about succession and the potential for a short-term decline should Buffett cease being CEO are keeping the price only moderately above 1.2x. Right at this moment BRK.B is trading at 1.38x BV, so I'd revise the range to at least 1.2-1.4x and possibly a little higher - I had a feeling it was close to 1.5x BV on odd occasions. Even if the trading range is restricted, I do have a trick for earning 34% in 6 months with BRK.B though. Step one: Buy in February at a fraction over 1.2x the currently known BV, then see the 31st Dec 2015 BV announced as a little above where you purchased, meaning you paid just under 1.2x BV at time of purchase. Step two: watch the price rise to about 16-18% above where you bought in over the next 4-5 months. Step three: Get your Prime Minister to hold a referendum on leaving the EU. Step four: when 52% of the voters vote in favour, TA-DAH!! Your currency plummets against the US dollar and you have a 33.95% gain in your native currency! :P

Key for me is that Kara is to look for growth WITHOUT sacrificing underwriting discipline and business integrity. It will also be interesting to see how she performs with GenRe.

I've long been under the impression that great investors like Buffett are able to buy close to the bottom of the market not so much by TIMING but by more by PRICING. I have a feeling an old article on fool.co.uk by TMFMayn might have clarified this. The essence is that if you have a bunch of companies whose qualities you like (management, moat, consistent earnings, fair treatment of shareholders etc) then you can regularly reappraise their intrinsic value (by which I mean their conservatively appraised IV based on cautious assumptions) or some proxy measure appropriate to each company. Then, you calculate how much of a discount to IV you require to buy the shares in a truly meaningful amount, which might vary given the qualities of the company and their prospects for reinvesting earnings (e.g. incremental ROE) to compound earnings over decades to come. That might be a certain multiple of book value, a certain ratio for an insurer or financial company, or a certain earnings yield (inverse of P/E), Free Cash Flow yield or Dividend Yield (possibly averaged over a few years if earnings are lumpy) gives you your entry price. There's a certain minimum hurdle such as initial earnings yield or 'coupon' even where Munger would say it's worth paying up for quality, and for good but not superb companies, a bigger discount would be necessary to achieve high returns. For high quality companies like Coca Cola or American Express that might mean he needs to wait for a temporary mishap like New Coke or the Salad Oil Scandal, for others it might be in times of market or sector turmoil (e.g. the 70s oil crisis, 80's Black Friday, Sep 11 2001). It doesn't mean the price won't fall further. I suspect it can involve a little bit of assessment and feeling for how low the shares typically trade to set the pricing rules for your brokers to build a position. For me, I can buy my entire portfolio in a single day through a discount broker without moving the market. For Berkshire, it has long required weeks or months of buying a good fraction of daily volume unless off market deals or preference shares/convertible warrants can be arranged. It does occasionally mean that the price he chooses will not quite be reached and he might miss buying a Walmart, which thinkll call an error of omission. Once you've narrowed your list to quality companies within your circle of competence, the bigger the discount you insist upon (given the qualities of the company), the bigger your return. Insisting on a discount at all also helps you to preserve capital and often get out of mistakes (companies whose problems weren't temporary after all) with most of your capital intact or even a modest profit. Given that the future is murky and we can't invest with perfect foresight for how value will grow, I think a discount that adds twenty percent to fifty percent to first year returns, is very valuable, especially if repeated every few years over a long investing career. I feel personally that by aiming for PRICING the market rather than TIMING the market, I have significantly improved my returns on my most significant positions and preserved my capital for times when I needed it. For example I bought Halma plc in the UK for about 136 GBX (about 8.4% earnings yield and about 3-4% dividend yield) in October 2011 and sold at about 808 GBX (about 3.6% earnings yield) in Feb 2016 to but BRK at about 124 USD (1.234x historic BV, estimated 1.2*BV for 4Q15), being a very passive investor over those years. (The switch decision was made easier by having it in a tax exempt account) The earnings increase on HLMA was about 2.5-fold over 14.35 years or so (6.7% annualized). My total capital gain was almost 6-fold. And growing dividends added about 83% of my original purchase price. Having realised 6.75x the purchase price in total cash returns, that annualizes to about 14.2% which is a worthwhile difference to me, over about the 8.5% total return from earnings growth plus dividends if I'd sold at a similar multiple to where if bought, especially in an environment of low inflation and modest growth. Also if I needed the money, even at a low multiple like where I bought I'd have made a 8.5% annualized return and made about 3.25x my initial investment The difference in multiple between buying and selling added about 5.7% to my annualized returns over 14.35 years. In finding good companies like Halma in 2001 rather than incredible companies like Berkshire in 1965, I'm very glad to have bought at a price that gave me margin of safety and doubled my ultimate return. No doubt I could have sold Halma earlier and bagged a much greater annualized return by investing in something else at a bigger discount to really aim for way above market returns, but I'm still happy that the bigger the discount, the greater the return (unless you require such a big discount that you never buy). So aside from the semantics of how we define IV, buying at a discount to a conservative estimate of IV without rosy assumptions about the future makes sense.

I agree with you about IV in retrospect clearly being enormously higher than BV in the early years. What I guess he means is that his and Charlie's estimates of IV at the time using the figures available to them at the time would have been closer to BV. It might be interesting to take an old annual report and run some numbers. One certainly wouldn't value it on the assumption of such enormous returns on the stock portfolio as a sensible value investor at the time.

OK, I understand both points of view and actually agree, and I'm not averse to selling overvalued positions to buy something cheaper too - I do actually like volatility as a means of providing me with opportunities to profit from market madness. Any constant multiple of IV (even above IV) would deliver returns consistent with gains in IV in the hypothetical example. It's only when a dividend gets paid that it's better to buy below IV. Low volatility is still what keeps speculators away, which is a desire of Buffett. I originally bought BRK.B in about 2003 when mega-catastrophe reinsurance was a big thing, and hoped for volatility and viewed mega-cats as buying opportunities which actually strengthed BRK.B's position and caused firming of insurance premiums in the near future, allowing BRK.B to write a higher volume of sensible business. From the point of view of being happy for it to remain undervalued (either at irregular intervals or permanently) until we retire, we aim to keep investing. We will get more intrinsic value for our money if we purchase significantly below IV. Just like Buffett's analogy from some years ago of being a regular buyer of hamburgers. You should rejoice when the price is low, not when it's high if you're a regular buyer. I intend to keep investing until I retire, so low prices will help me. I would agree that volatility is helpful to the skilled investor/trader who understands intrinsic value and can sell high to buy something else low, and its effect is larger at boosting returns than the effect of buying consistently as less than IV and holding forever.

+1 I completely agree. If the amount of undervaluation is exactly consistent (e.g. no volatility and always selling at 80% of Intrinsic Value), the long-term investor is rewarded in exact proportion to the increase in IV of the company. In practice there is volatility, but the smaller it is, the closer the long-term investor's returns will match the proportionate increase in IV. The other bonus is that a modest volatility tends to keep short-term speculators away and retain a shareholder constituency mostly of long-term value-oriented investors. This reduces pressures to juice the stock price and keeps it all about increasing IV.

Once you've read it and decided for yourself, Blomberg's link to an Annotated version may be an interesting read. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-02-27/warren-buffett-s-2015-shareholder-letter-annotated There's also a mobile or tablet version where the comments are listed separately and having read the letter first, I could make sense of almost all of the annotations without clicking to find the underlined text they referred to.

If you want a good idea of the expected publication date of Annual Reports and quarterly figures ahead of time, you might like to check Google Finance. On the lower right column of the Berkshire Hathaway page (on a desktop computer) there's a calendar which has shown Saturday 27th Feb (estimated) for at least a month, I think. That gave me confidence recently to wait for a decent combination of high price on the stock I was selling and low price for buying BRK and still trade before the next financials are released. Despite its foibles, I've found Google Finance pretty useful lately as many of its features like EPS can be accessed from Google Sheets and I use a Sheets spreadsheet to track my portfolio and watchlist and give an quick and dirty indication of what's selling cheaply or expensively at any time.

To clarify, the Robert Cialdini book's title is "Influence: The Science of Persuasion" - also mentioned frequently in the 1995 Harvard Law School speech on 24 Common Causes of Human Misjudgement. I have an audio recording of that speech and a transcript I made, but it's also in Poor Charlie's Almanack.

I bought a new batch of BRK.B on 3rd Feb at about $124.26 (not completely sure, as I bought in British pounds at £85.121 GBP for my tax-exempt Individual Savings Account and estimated the USD price using the exchange rate a few minutes later). That's a P/BV of about 1.234 using 3Q2015's BV. My purchase decision was both that BRK's price was attractive and that I was fund it by selling a fully-valued position without having to pay tax on my gains on it over the last 14 years. By my estimation, at a P/E of 28.8 when I sold, it had ~10% per annum long-term upside, the highest P/E in recent years was about 34 last year, so limited short-term upside, and it had plenty of short-term downside risk, despite being a fundamentally good company. Having both of these in my favor made my decision easier. I figure that once BV is announced for the year ended 31 December 2015 (announcement due around 25th Feb), it could well be higher BV so my price could well be below 1.2 anyway. I'm not sure if Berkshire's authorised buyback at P/B <= 1.2 is based on current book value as it varies day by day or the last SEC-reported book value (which would seem fairer as it uses only publicly disclosed data). That fact that everyone knows about the buyback option probably will stop it from regularly getting that low as for most it provides a fairly good 'floor' below the price that provides a feeling of safety to many investors, myself included. I think enough people use it as an approximate buy price target that short of major adverse world events creating near-term fear and panic, it's likely to remain a pretty good downside buffer. The new UK tax-year starts on 6th April and I'll then be able to invest more within this tax-free account, so I'm hoping the price will remain close to 1.2x BV for some time. My wife's own account isn't fully funded this year, so we'll be considering adding within her account before then.

Another highlight you reminded me of is that many of the utilities brought into MidAmerican Energy Holdings became significantly better operators, such as Northern Natural Gas pipeline, dead last when purchased, now second only to our other pipeline, Kern River. Likewise, in electricity, MidAmerican's utilities ranked second among 60 groups surveyed, a great improvement since the time of acquisition of these groups. It's nice to have regular evidence that we remain an efficient operator providing good services to our customers. I dare say that competitors who run out of capital to fund required investments by paying out most of their profits will become available for acquisition from time to time and MidAmerican can likely expand opportunistically over the decades to come and compound its retained earnings where capital can be employed for good returns with room to improve operational efficiency too.

@meiroy: The previous two or three posts express my opinion well. Opinions do differ regarding dividends among long-term holders, and the views of BRK owners are often markedly different to rules of thumb among the investing public at large, but I believe the majority of us are happy for BRK to reinvest our share of profits so long as the gain in IV can be expected to remain in excess of what that share of earnings would have made in the S&P500 or similar index over suitably long periods of time. Most of us recognize that Berkshire's best investment opportunities may occur sporadically and involve large commitments rather than happen uniformly over time in a range of smaller less enticing commitments. This lumpy, focused, opportunistic investment approach should deliver better returns in the long run with less risk of permanent loss of capital. Anyone who wants a return of capital for income, say (which will cease compounding inside Berkshire however they receive it), can simply convert to BRK.B if necessary and sell a proportion of those shares from time to time. The tax rate may vary and there may be brokerage costs, but under US tax laws as far as my outsider's knowledge goes, it seems likely that the loss on the way to your pocket could actually be lower that way. I'd suggest you read the Owner's Manual on BerkshireHathaway.com to see if this unusual company actually suits your investment philosophy. I suspect from what I've read that it doesn't. If you want to hop on for the short term, there's nothing to stop you, but it's run for the benefit of long-term holders with no view to influencing short-term stock market valuation unlike a lot of quoted companies.

Very late to answer, but I'm based in East Sussex. Guess you're about 60 miles north of me in London, then?

This article by Andrew Ross Sorkin is the sort of stuff we all know on these boards, and I for one would be saddened to see the Sokol Affair cause a straitjacket of corporate governance to tie the hands of Berkshire's excellent and largely trustworthy superstar managers. Anyhow, here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/weekinreview/24buffett.html

Hmm, got to agree. Perhaps this guy was reporting on the China conference of theirs and isn't in the know about Berkshire and just did some cursory research on Li Lu's background (not a lot of it is very public or recent) and Berkshire's succession planning and missed that Li Lu took himself out of the running for the CIO role.

Thanks for the confirmation, elltel. I agree it's fully priced now. At the lows of 150p/share in early 2009, it would probably have been a satisfactory buy, but any takeover bid would have required such a premium that it wouldn't have been such a good price, and any purchase over 3% would require Berkshire to register their intentions under UK listing rules and frankly <3% stake would barely move the needle at Berkshire.

On companies with the same model, a partial application of many of the same approaches is evident in little-known British-based global engineering specialist Halma plc (LSE:HLMA), which I've owned for 9 years. It's only a subset of the Berkshire model, in a narrow circle of competence and without any form of leverage (debt or float). They stick to one field - engineering - and stick to niche markets where performance and quality are the drivers, not price, and their product is only a small part of their customer's budget, and they're No 1 in most markets. Acquisitions are modest, fit the same model, and are done for cash and almost always enhance earnings from the start. The leader isn't a superstar like Warren, but succession has been handled well. While profits dropped during the recession, they remained profitable. Return on Tangible Invested Capital is well over 50%, and ROE, given the burden of goodwill, is mid-to-high teens. They have a very flat organisation with a lot of autonomy at the subsidiary level. They do encourage cross-selling and collaboration, however. They're debt averse, knowing it can blow up a company, and they pay a dividend, with 2x earnings cover at present. The dividend has over 30 years of risng more than 5%, and in inflationary times, much faster. In short you can sleep well ownng them. They don't hedge currency risk. They are geographically well spread They're boring, in a good, profitable way Net debt is about zero now, and when it rises the total is only a modest fraction of annual free cash flow. That's a key thing I'd watch for a shift in culture - if it gets higher to try and juice ROE I'll be looking for the exit. My model suggests around a 10% IRR for an investor in the long run simply taking dividends, but buying and reinvesting dividends at good 'coupon' when it's offered by Mr Market could boost it considerably (I reckon 12-14% just through waiting to reinvest dividends when the price is right every 5 years or so). Oh, and apparently some years ago a certain Mr Warren E Buffett sent them a letter applauding their structure and management, which is now framed on the wall of the boardroom.

Comments 3, 5 and 6 on this Seeking Alpha post pretty much clarify what Berkshire gets out of it (it's a good deal for which they waived part of the early-repayment penalty) and what Swiss Re gets out of it. Omitted the link originally: http://seekingalpha.com/article/234732-swiss-re-repays-berkshires-investment-after-buffett-eases-early-payment-terms

I use AVG Free security and it too advised of what I think was a redirect to a "potential attack site" which it blocked, IIRC, in the hours before the site went down for the second time. I suspect Firefox browser would also have warned me if AVG hadn't got there first. I don't think I actually clicked any links or banner ads before it reported the blocked redirect. It's possible that it's an attempt to get your readers to inadvertently vist another site, to install malware from that site, or to visit a phishing site that looks like yours where it asks them to enter their passwords, either with the aim of hacking their accounts or editing their posts here or hoping their passwords they use for other purposes are the same and gaining access to other resources they use. Hope you can avoid the hassle of this happening continually. My only advice is to change the passwords for the server that is running apache (as I think I noticed while the boards were down) and ensure you use a different password for administering the forums, and ensure there are no passwords or accounts left in a default state (e.g. a guest account that might be used for privilege-escalation attacks or a default admin account in the forum software) and if you have to log into the server remotely (rather than having direct access to the machine), try to ensure you only enter your password over an encrypted link (e.g. SSH as opposed to TelNet which sends passwords as plaintext) in case there's a packet sniffer installed between your machine and the server. Also, your personal computer or laptop from which you type the password might have been infected with a key-logger or packet sniffer that reports your passwords to an outside party in some way, so a virus scan or malware scan may help give you peace of mind. I'm not an expert on apache but I've learned just enough to keep safe and to know where to search in the event of thinking my PC is infected.