gfp

Is today the day? Or do rates shoot higher into the close? [chart is TLT]

I re-read last year's annual letter last night and, wow, I had forgotten just how downbeat it was. So much for tap-dancing to work!

A lot of people recommend Aswath Damodaran's books on valuation. It's been so long since I've read anything like that I don't honestly remember if those types of books are helpful or not. Different types of businesses get valued differently and it's best not to take somebody else's "price target" valuation. You have your return hurdles that you are looking to get - work backwards from the returns you want to get - that's what Warren does and that is a main reason he hasn't been able to do any major acquisitions in a while. He doesn't really budge much.

Looks like Markel to me! Put an arrow on there that says "dealraker sells all his stock here"

I'll go ahead and turn off my furnace now edit: IB says there is no UNG to short - heads up!

wow - naked or in a spread?

You missed my point or maybe you agreed with my point but misunderstood me

Insurance companies that have been built by a lot of recent M&A have book values that are marked closer to intrinsic value - Fairfax's book value gets updated upwards a lot more frequently than some other insurance companies (BRK included). Warren wouldn't hesitate to buy Progressive at 2x book value and he probably values Chubb at something higher than 1.5x book value even though it is a straight plain vanilla insurance company with a conventional insurance company investment portfolio. As an example, look at insurer RLI. They trade for 4x book value or somewhere around there. If they were acquired tomorrow for no acquisition premium by another insurance company, 4x book value would instantly become 1x book value in the accounting of the new firm.

It doesn't really matter what the price-to-book ratio is for repurchases - it matters what the price to intrinsic value is. If you care about the accounting effect of buying stock at a premium to book lowering reported BVPS you are already paying attention to the wrong thing. Some companies are undervalued at 2x book and some companies are overvalued at .8x book - it's just an accounting figure it isn't an end-all-be-all even at a financial company. If accretive repurchases have the side effect of lowering BVPS, it just further widens the gap between reported BV and intrinsic value for continuing shareholders. Book value is a historical record. It doesn't know the future.

They are whole loans so they don't get marked to market. They show up in level 3 assets. Of the original ~$2 Billion they hedged interest rates on $1.9 Billion (fixed interest rate) but haven't hedged rates on the new loans. The all in yields are very high and have pulled up average yields on their fixed maturity basket. Almost all of these first mortgage loans show up in the 1-3 year basket. They probably would have made a little bit of money on the fixed for floating swap over the ~2 years. The balance of this pool of whole loans at Fairfax had increased to $4.97 Billion at 9/30 through additional loan funding partially offset by repayments. The most detail on performance will be in Kennedy Wilson's filings https://ir.kennedywilson.com

Well that is probably the first article I have read that correctly adds up the cash for September 30, 2024. "It’s a good bet that Berkshire’s cash and equivalents, which hit a record $310 billion on Sept. 30, was higher at year-end due in part to the stock sales in the fourth quarter."

Ajit and Greg cost $40 million a year between them. 5 years costs $200 million. Yikes

But does Prem reimburse the company for half his salary for personal use of postage stamps every year? If not it's a deal breaker for me. Raised the dividend... greedy!

Sounds like @boilermaker75 territory

Buy Brunswick? Or not that kind of optimism?

Thank god for those hundreds of millions of dollars in annual dividends they probably pulled out of it along the way. It's tough out there

What happened to Blake Hampton? Did he buy a value line subscription and disappear burying his nose into undervalued stock after undervalued stock? Or has he disappeared from the forum entirely!? Has the unsustainable government finance situation claimed another victim?!

Thanks that is helpful

Does anyone think the mechanism / structure for Fairfax India investing larger sums (like the possible IDBI bank deal) is actually them ending FIH.U as a stand-alone entity and merging it with Fairfax Financial at a 'fair and friendly' exchange ratio? You create this vehicle and it trades for years at a deep discount while you charge fees and repurchase shares, removing capital from the vehicle. The opportunity set evolves into larger targets. Lots of shareholder overlap. Simplifies the structure, removes the bifurcation of "certain Indian investments are in Fairfax Financial because they were made earlier, certain Indian investments are in Fairfax Financial because they are in the insurance industry." etc.. I had assumed they would accomplish bigger deal sizes by using some convoluted LP structure or friendly preferred co-investors but it seems to me like merging FIH.U into FFH is the cleanest solution and there is plenty of capital at the mother ship going forward.

There might be some detail in the various NAIC filings for the Fairfax subs. I usually only pull Odyssey's filing since they each cost a few bucks but maybe I should start reading them for more of the big subsidiaries. Q4 NAIC filings aren't out yet

https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=BRK Goodbye Citi! (mostly) Held on to more BAC than most would have predicted. Didn't touch that round number AAPL holding.

You kinda hope they bought CVS over Christmas and blew it out yesterday but somehow I doubt it

Here is Francis's Q4 activity as disclosed on the 13F (so, no foreign info, OTC info, etc) https://www.dataroma.com/m/m_activity.php?m=ca&typ=a The Chou Associates portfolio (again, 13F) here https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=ca Sold completely out of Navient and Occidental

Here's some of the stock trading activity from the Fairfax 13F https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=FFH Sold completely out of GOOGL, INTC, QSR and TGNA

The employee count went up a ton over the last 10 years. I don't know exactly how much, but I'm seeing 44k in 2019 and 51k in 2023. ChatGPT says 26k in 2012 and 2014 From the 2023 report on the payroll deduction employee stock ownership plan: " If an employee earning $40,000 had participated fully in this program since its inception, he or she would have accumulated 4,000 shares of Fairfax worth Cdn$4.9 million at the end of 2023. I am happy to say we have many employees who have done exactly that! "