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Yahoo finance has been releasing dribs and drabs of an interview that Andy Serwer did recently with Warren in anticipation of the annual meeting. The first one was him commenting on negative interest rates and the lack of historical precedent for current conditions. The most recent release (so far) has his comments on Elon Musk's conduct. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-on-negative-interest-rates-and-low-inflation-144529579.html https://finance.yahoo.com/video/warren-buffett-says-elon-musks-110000649.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/warren-buffett-sees-most-newspapers-as-toast-after-ad-decline?srnd=premium

Your link shows them managing $ 1,256,354,000 They own 3% of 257.57 million AVM Ranger USNT BVI ($7.7 million) They own 20% of 159.667 million AVM Ranger ($31.9 million) They own 2% of 352.735 million AVM Ranger Qualified ($7 million) They own 1% of 203 million AVC BJMP ($2 million) all approximate. that's just a few of their vehicles. Its all in your linked filing

Small bolt-on at Marmon: https://easttexasreview.com/joyce-crane-acquired-in-expansion/

You would think your subscription would be tax deductible

Basically no, the business is finished. But there are various excerpts available online if you search around. Old stuff. https://www.scribd.com/document/136379211/Seth-Klarman-Oid-Interview-March-2009 http://basehitinvesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Bruce-Berkowitz-WFC-1992-OID-Interview.pdf Probably more stuff on Scribd, or filetype:pdf searches through google

I believe it is BYD Lots of interesting information in there, thanks. Anyone know which brand of batteries Invenergy uses in their storage systems for Midamerican ?

Yo Doo - I live in the city!

This is the most recent (late March) presentation from Berkshire Hathaway Energy - might be interesting to some: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/71180/000108131619000007/ic2019.htm (from a fixed income conference)

Yeah, John answered you but I would add that it is not reportable unless the selling shareholder is a reporting insider. So if First Manhattan sells a block of stock back to Berkshire, they would have to file a Form 4 within 3 business days because Sandy Gottesman is on the board of directors. If Charlie personally sold a block back to BRK, same deal. If Charlie's kids sell a block back to BRK, no filing. We find out the total repurchase in the 10Q. Any more detail is at the discretion of management (correction - Sandy is no longer required to report sales from First Manhattan, only his personal shares which are far fewer as seen in his recent Form 4 gifts of A shares)

Hey John- The Gates foundation only files periodically, when they rise above or below the 5% threshold. The most recent filing was when they fell back below the 5% threshold and the link you referenced was an exhibit to that filing - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/902012/000110465918059501/a18-36147_1sc13da.htm Basically, they are required to sell shares to "facilitate compliance with federal excise tax rules limiting excess business holdings by private foundations" - and when Warren gives them a big block of stock they cross above the 5% level, then as they sell they have been falling back below. ---------- A little bit of detail on why the Gates Foundation is required to sell BRK.B shares: A private foundation is not permitted to control a business. It is also not permitted to own over 20% of a business (in most cases, including this one). Seems like no problem, but you are required to add to the Foundation's stake the stakes of any "disqualified persons," which includes both Warren and Bill Gates. And Warren currently controls 31.4% of the vote and 16.5% of the economic interest of Berkshire. And Bill owns some personally through Cascade as well. So they are required to sell to "facilitate compliance" and they are allowed to violate the rules as long as they are selling to work towards compliance. ------------- One last thing John - that filing you referenced was the most recent filing (when they passed below 5% of the class of B shares, not the company as a whole). But the proxy statement has an update. On September 28, 2018, the date of the linked filing, the foundation held 62 million shares of BRK.B. On 3/6/2019, the foundation held 55,277,174 shares of BRK.B. I have tried to reverse engineer the URL to find those filings for later periods, unfortunately so far to no avail for me. So, how do I look them up at the SEC website? - Thank you in advance.

I think that the Gates Foundation has an interest in selling BRK.B shares as slowly as they are allowed to. They have special permission to sell BRK.B shares as slowly as they are currently. And remember, Warren can't really make use of the tax deduction from donating his shares - so it's hard to spin the whole 'Billionaire transfers controlling stake to foundation, takes multi-billion dollar tax deduction, then repurchases the foundation shares with corporate money' angle as untoward. When he decides to repurchase material amounts of BRK shares, daily purchases in the open market should be enough over time. I assume he has started doing that after the annual letter came out. But who knows, maybe he wants to drill it down one more time at the annual meeting to clear his conscience. Or maybe they buy something enormous this Sunday..

Another article about the lawsuits challenging Applied Underwriters' EquityComp product - https://nypost.com/2019/04/05/ny-state-probing-berkshire-hathaway-owned-insurance-firm/ But we swear its just a coincidence that this is the only sub we have ever put up for sale...

Interesting facility, thanks. Maybe the Schaefer Group / SSI SHAEFER will be offered to Berkshire someday...

WSJ article on Berkshire subsidiary cooperation - https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-berkshire-empire-is-quietly-collaborating-more-than-ever-11554370201?mod=hp_lead_pos3

Good advice all around to not blow your inheritance on 'stock market tuition.' A small portion should be enough to learn with. If your goal is to slowly move towards a Warren Buffett type approach with the individual companies you invest in, you could do worse than parking a portion in Berkshire at 200/share to take some of the 'index is at the end of a really long bull market run" risk out of your strategy. Since you mentioned that everything seems fully priced, and you are interested in the types of companies selected by Warren Buffett - take a look at the financials / presentations of BAC and DAL - both look "not overpriced" and are companies that caught WEB's eye for being attractively priced currently. I'm sick as a dog, so apologies if this post reads weird. Not sure what I got! --------------------- to benchmark this advice against the index, or -god forbid- "value funds": 3/29 closing prices BRK.B - 200.89 BAC - 27.59 DAL - 51.65 SPY - 282.48

Berkshire/3G romance on the rocks? McLane and Popeye's breaking up https://www.apnews.com/Business%20Wire/b754dd01c77a46deb4e269f1051a6f6f ;)

Proxy is out. Jain & Abel make $16 million each, plus $2m bonus. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/000119312519076915/d684203ddef14a.htm

Not really newsworthy, but it seems like there is a very odd volume spike on the B shares for today's open. Are others seeing a volume spike on the open this morning? edit: I suppose it is related to index rebalancing today. If so, would expect another market-on-close volume spike.

Hey guys - I was curious as well since I also couldn't reverse engineer the math behind the 24% figure. I asked Debbie Bosanek if it was truly a typo and she had Dan Jaksich, the Controller / VP / principal accounting officer of Berkshire get back to me. I would expect Dan to take over as CFO if Marc Hamburg retires. Anyway, what he said is this: "The 24% increase in pre-tax earnings referred to on page 8 includes the effects of a number of corporate items, such as interest expense on corporate debt, foreign exchange gains/losses on the Euro denominated debt, and purchase accounting amortization related to these businesses."

They come about through mergers and acquisitions primarily - Purchase accounting. When you pay a control premium to acquire a business, you are usually "over-paying" - especially in this highly competitive environment. You must assign the purchase price to the stuff you are acquiring and when you run out of real things to assign value to, you are left with intangibles: goodwill, brand names, customer relationships, yada yada yada. Since these intangibles are not amortized or depreciated regularly any more, they are "tested" periodically for impairment. When the market and the world and the earnings and pricing power dynamics tell you that you can no longer justify $XXX for Oscar Mayer or whatever, you take a non-cash charge to adjust the carrying value to a slightly more defensible value. Kraft was built through mergers and acquisitions and then the Heinz deal was consummated at a price that implied a pretty high value for Heinz (in terms of Kraft's share price). Every deal creates purchase accounting fluff potentially.

https://www.havenhealthcare.com

Probably small, but Berkadia has made an acquisition: https://www.housingwire.com/articles/48362-berkadia-launches-structured-capital-group-by-acquiring-central-park-capital-partners

It would certainly be surprising since they just acquired US Floors a couple years ago and Warren mentioned that it set up Shaw to be a meaningful contributor to Berkshire's earning power in the future. US Floors is a growing supplier of vinyl plank flooring that you can buy at Lowe's - SmartCore, SmartCore Ultra, etc.. I have a feeling that the HR manager in Franklin Tenn. isn't in the know about Shaw Inc level deals and might be trying to say that her facility in Franklin could be acquired. Who knows. Maybe Warren sells half the subs this year. First Applied Underwriters, then Shaw - is GEICO next?!

Yes there may be little truth to the rumor, being rehashed right at the end of the month and all. But if he were going to buy one of the airlines, it would probably be the one that has been profitable for 46 consecutive years. I do not think LUV was the elephant he was working on in Q4, and since he would sell the equity positions in the other 3, it wouldn’t require a ton of cash from the parent. Not like a GE, UPS, BUD or KO would. I guess we’ll just have to be patient

It is certainly possible that the decision to sell is, as they claim, unrelated to the EquityComp issues. Berkshire is pushing bigger and bigger into primary and they will be competing. But they've been competing between their various insurance and reinsurance subs for a long time. Now all of a sudden it's a problem. It could be that since the founders control something like 19% of Applied Underwriters, they were unhappy with the increased future competition (BRK Specialty, BRK GUARD, THREE, etc) and instigated the process. Applied has around a Billion in premiums and still features the Berkshire halo, so it aught to fetch a fancy price (not that it will be material to a half trillion dollar market value parent company) In other news... (hope springs eternal) - Southwest shares caught a bid earlier today when Bloomberg or someone started circulating a rumor that Berkshire wanted to buy the whole enchilada at $75 a share. https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/28/why-southwest-airlines-stock-just-popped.aspx I do love Southwest as a customer (although the flights are always free with points, I do pay for early bird check-in)