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Great post @longterminvestor - thanks as always for the classroom time

Bets on whether BRK closes up on the day today?

I know when I'm panicking on the stock market a newly cashed-up Berkshire and a leveraged government bond portfolio in Fairfax are the first sell buttons I smash!

Question for the board - with Canadian stock markets being closed today, does anybody remember if US OTC ticker FRFHF trades today?

Hopefully everyone realizes that 1) of course they can do it, and 2) it won't help and never has so we should just shelve the whole QE / QT tool. Let's ask Japanese bankers how amazing it works.

Well don't get too worked up on the VIX - the market hasn't even opened yet. I'm buying in SPY shorts at 510 this morning. Huge drops like this are not how bear markets get started. Bear markets are more like boiling frog nobody notices we are getting so far from the highs. 5% drops are more like the end of bear markets. I just think it's funny that people think the Fed cutting interest rates is going to help. I have a commercial RE loan coming up for rate reset in May 2025 so I'm perfectly happy if they cut like crazy all of a sudden - but what the market has gone and priced in (multiple 50 bps cuts and inter-meeting cuts and all out panic) seems a bit of an over-reaction.

I was looking up BRK's taxable realized gains for the first six months and it was $73.7 Billion. Pencil in a 20% effective tax rate and it's around $15 Billion they will send in to the Treasury. T-bill interest on $300 Billion gets sent back over to BRK... $15 Billion (pre-tax, I know). Just liked the symmetry of it

Don't worry, y'all - Goolsbee's got your six

What on earth in the Fed's toolkit would have made any difference at all in the type of inflation we experienced?

NYT has an article by Das out this morning about the Gates-Buffett relationship that I suppose is an excerpt from this book. Reading it now but don't have a link to send. I'm sure it is on the NYT website

All of my favorites are the biographies and autobiographies. Basically the case study method. Usually pretty entertaining.

Don't think it is a sign of a top in Berkshire

Well it was 2.5% of Apple in a quarter. And I'll bet it corresponded with the period Apple went sideways for a long time. Then he probably stopped, at an even 400m shares (same as Coke!). And Apple was unburdened to break higher. Plus he told us ahead of time he was selling and would be selling some more and would have over $200 B in cash on the books. He probably already had the $200 B when he said that.

There isn't any disclosure on BYD in the Berkshire Hathaway 10Q but we have more recent disclosures out of HK that show BHE owning 54.2 million HK:1211 shares as of 7/16/2024. These shares would be worth around $1.52 Billion USD at current prices. There won't be any more disclosure updates from the Hong Kong exchange because BHE has passed below 5% of the Hong Kong listed share class. BHE will file a 10Q on Monday but it won't be more up to date than the 7/16 disclosure. Long way of saying: we won't know if the position is fully sold until Berkshire Hathaway Energy files a future 10Q showing it gone. BHE has settlements to pay and large growth capex plans so they may want the capital.

I mis-remembered - it was 5.44%. I suppose that is some type of treasury sweep account but it is also their ready cash "checking" account so not a bad deal.

Berkshire operating results were pretty good. GEICO is back to strong profits and the rest of insurance was also profitable on underwriting. Most of the operating businesses were around flat. Squishmallows are selling well. Railroad is flat. BHE is doing better than it appears because they continue to accrue wildfire liabilities. BHE will surprise to the upside once the wildfire stuff stops flowing through. Union tank car had some softness after a very long good period. PCC had some growth, still below their long term expectations. And interest income is exploding as you might imagine. Fun fact, Wells Fargo even pays Berkshire 5.2% interest on their regular operating bank account at NICO. Somehow my local bank's checking offering isn't quite measuring up.

I love how Warren and Marc won't total up the weighted average interest rate on their borrowings. No need to be gaudy edit: (it would say 2.786%)

If my envelope math is correct he is down to about 400m AAPL shares at quarter end (from 789.37m AAPL shares at Q1 quarter end) Looks like CVX is down to ~ 118.9m shares from 122.98m, another trim there Obviously BYD was being sold in the quarter. Subsequent to quarter-end we have the BAC sales. Seems possible he stopped selling AAPL after quarter-end but we'll see next Q. Tax rate is ~ 20% on these sales. US. Treasury is about to get some big checks from Omaha next two quarters.

10Q is out. Cash and T-bills higher than expected! https://berkshirehathaway.com/qtrly/2ndqtr24.pdf Press release here: https://berkshirehathaway.com/news/aug0324.pdf Share repurchases down to $345m in the quarter. Float up $1 Billion from Q1. Buffett at AGM: "I'm not afraid to pay taxes on realized gains" (or something like that) Proceeds to sell $77 Billion of equities in Q2 - over $25 Billion per month

Thanks for posting - that is interesting. One of my cousins runs a sewer and water business and whenever he asks me about PVC pricing (primarily 20 ft. lengths of schedule 40 PVC pipe in 4" and 6" diameters) I can never figure out why his prices are going up or down while the raw commodity PVC is doing the opposite. Without looking into it further I figured transportation cost of the pipes must be a major component of their cost for end-users but this article doesn't surprise me. Prices for fittings are even crazier. Lately he has been using more HDPE pipes - like you see in large municipal water mains. They fuse them together by melting the edges and clamping them together.

This quarter was helped by a large block purchase of Prem's shares. I wouldn't expect this to be the new open market run-rate for repurchases. It's not a super liquid stock. I'm happy they are being more aggressive now that the dividends are flowing down to the holdco. I didn't hear them mention plans for buying in minority interests in subsidiaries on the call - did anyone catch anything on that or did it go unmentioned?

Thanks - I guess bloomberg was reporting what the Toronto Stock Exchange calls "consolidated volume" - which is now over 84k shares https://money.tmx.com/en/quote/FFH

That is combined volume for both listings. TSE volume was over 50k shares last I checked edit: bloomberg is showing TSE volume over 74k shares presently

What? I don't understand any of that. Volume is approaching 60,000 shares for Fairfax at mid-day. There is a buyer like me for every seller. Far more than $1.2 million worth of stock is changing hands

It's possible that is the reason. Also possible he just wants the privacy of being below 10%. Berkshire has regulator approval to own up to 25% of BAC but things can change I suppose. If I had to guess, he just wants to sell the stock.