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Following up here, this insider signal in APPS ended up being a good one, up 72% since the August 19th filing, which was also the closing low. KW, in the post above, is also outperforming the market and pennies from new highs. We should probably add ATCO to the insider buying list since the largest shareholder purchased over $38 million worth of additional stock in the open market from 8/26-9/21. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1206860/000119312521279436/d183300dsc13da.htm edit: I guess Fairfax is actually the largest shareholder of Atlas. This was Washington family entities. Here is another recent insider buy in a company covered on this board, Hamilton Thorne: https://www.canadianinsider.com/node/7?menu_tickersearch=HTL+|+Hamilton+Thorne 153,700 shares at $1.65. Trade date October 6th, filing date October 8th.

I don't think it is in Berkshire's long term interest to see Greg Abel have a large personal stake in an individual Berkshire subsidiary once he is running the entire conglomerate. I think it is likely that once Greg takes the CEO job he would convert the BHE stock he holds into BRK.A shares. He may even elect to do that before he becomes CEO. In the past, as the Walter Scott entities wanted liquidity, Berkshire Hathaway Energy would repurchase shares, which increases both Berkshire's and Abel's interest in BHE. They may continue to do that over time or maybe Berkshire will buy large blocks of the Scott family shares over time. I don't think the Scott estate shares end up owned by Greg Abel.

There was a similar recent thread here - I thought I remembered Wabuffo recommending a service he subscribes to but it must have been in another thread. Maybe he can share that service name again.

Sonic Automotive just announced this large acquisition - I wonder if Berkshire Hathaway Automotive group even got a look at the deal. I'm surprised they haven't done more bolt-on deals through that group. Maybe the Texas situation with Berkshire owning Forest River makes it difficult for BHA to bid on dealer groups with a presence in Texas. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210922005256/en/Sonic-Automotive-Adds-3.2-Billion-in-Annualized-Revenues-with-Acquisition-of-RFJ-Auto-Partners-a-Top-15-U.S.-Dealer-Group

Aviation is pretty tasty. And to bring it full circle on the message board, Aviation was owned by Fairfax and David Sokol's family until being sold to Diageo. Ryan Reynolds is the actor who has a continuing minority interest and is the face of the brand. We drink a lot of Gin and Tonic in this household, but we are Schweppes purists. And only in tiny glass bottles. Never diet tonic. We have fever-tree in the fridge and it just sits there. Always fresh lime from our tree though. And while we have a wide selection of really great gins including a local one made in New Orleans - the gin that gets put in the G&T's most often around here is Gilbey's. Not a ton of Gilbey's fans out there but we actually love it for G&Ts.

Seems like the share price weakness is Ida-related. Meanwhile Apple continues to do very well. Will Berkshire make more on Apple in the past week than they lose in Ida-related claims? Probably.

Yes I think only 9 people have died in Louisiana so far? Unfortunately a few more will die from carbon monoxide, heat, etc. New Orleans is ahead of the curve on flood prevention now - levees, floodgates and pumps. If only they could get some power to those pumps reliably... They run on some ancient power standard.

Just checking in here after the storm. The hurricane took a little jog eastward near New Orleans, which brought the higher winds a lot closer to the metro area than many expected. It was certainly intense! We lost some shingles and need a new roof (thanks USAA), not too bad overall. Rental properties fared OK but some enormous Sycamore trees came down on a 5-plex we own in the 7th ward. Smashed out a few windows, glass and water everywhere inside that apartment. Tree punctured through the siding clear through the kitchen counter backsplash. Sheared the power meter right off the house. But no structural damage. A fence I built supported the weight of half the sycamore tree without budging so I'm pretty proud of that fence. A few days of chainsaw-ing, emptying out tenant fridge/freezers, covering roofs and patching windows and we are pretty much squared away now. Most of the city has no power but it is coming back little by little. Gasoline is hard to come by but available here and there if you are willing to wait in super long lines (I am not). The New Orleans federal levee system performed well and the drainage pumps continued functioning on generator power despite loss of almost all their power feeds. No flooding in most of the city. Looking around I would assume there will be quite a few wind/homeowners/business claims. Lots of warehouses ripped up, many - maybe most? - roofs need replacing. Structural damage of residences is not widespread. Collapsed structures are mostly blighted homes or a bad luck tree/power pole take-out. Crazy to see that 3 days over land later and that storm was still fucking shit up in the northeast. Yikes! Anyway - not too bad here in New Orleans but as always this will be a lot tougher on the poorest residents of our city. pro tip - if you live in an area that has frequent disasters get Verizon. Every other company was useless and Verizon was rock solid through the entire thing. (or don't live in an area with frequent disasters but that's no fun).

Sanjeev - definitely do not buy a Defender. They are horrible.

I don’t think Berkshire would be on the hook for 5-8% of a gulf super cat today. They are way smaller in that business now. Also, if levees break it causes a flood, which would be largely a federal flood insurance / FEMA loss. If this storm can weaken over less populated areas and move on out it may be less costly than Katrina. But, yes, the Federal Government spent a fortune improving the levees and flood gates that protect New Orleans since Katrina.

Another big Toyota fan here (I drive a 200 series Land Cruiser and a Tacoma). However, it should be noted that Toyota has a lot of models out currently that are very old and about to be replaced with much newer platforms. I think the Highlander and Rav4 are fairly recent tech though. I certainly would not buy a Sequoia, Tundra or Lexus LX570 until next model year. Hyundai/Kia are putting out some very good SUVs as well.

Thanks DD. Definitely one to keep an eye on for insurance investors as well. And Generac shareholders of course... We're in Nola. The storm looks to be headed west of us but we'll see how it works out. I like to keep an eye on these things over at the wxdisco.com forums. Lots of great Meteorology nerds over there - https://wxdisco.com/forums/topic/2311-2021-cat-1-hurricane-ida-winds-85-mph-984-mb-nw-16-rapid-intensification/page/26/ I'll post an update on Sunday / Monday if anything interesting transpires. If you see an incredibly handsome gray haired fella with a standard poodle paddle by in a canoe on CNN, that's me.

The part about him flying to Omaha regularly for work on his own dime on NetJets was pretty impressive. Berkshire is very lucky to have 4 independently wealthy principled people who are extremely talented, devoted to Berkshire and like to keep a low profile.

The simple tricks that turned an ordinary investor’s $70,000 retirement account into a $264 million fortune Ted Weschler says that starting early and taking full advantage of his employer’s match were key to his success. By Allan Sloan Columnist Today at 9:26 a.m. EDT Ted Weschler pose for a photo on July 30 in Charlottesville. Weschler is a former hedge fund manager and current investment manager at Berkshire Hathaway. (Eze Amos/For The Washington Post) You can sometimes find fascinating information in footnotes — and that’s where I discovered the amazing investment returns of Ted Weschler, 60, a relatively low-profile money manager based in Charlottesville whose retirement account has outperformed the S&P 500 by hundreds to 1. Weschler, who operates out of a two-person shop located above a bookstore, has been one of Warren Buffett’s deputies at Berkshire Hathaway since 2012, where he manages billions of Berkshire bucks. Even so, Weschler managed to keep a pretty low profile until his name turned up in a ProPublica story that showed how zillionaire Peter Thiel, one of PayPal’s founders, had amassed a $5 billion account in a tax-sheltered Roth individual retirement account, a program intended to help people of modest needs. Story continues below advertisement ProPublica revealed that Thiel’s Roth had profited immensely by buying PayPal founders’ stock in 1999 at 0.1 cent a share — which by my math was less than 1/20,000th of what eBay paid for PayPal three years later. Thiel’s special deal was not available to the general public. I stumbled across Weschler’s investment acumen by reading the email that he sent ProPublica in response to questions about his Roth account, which was worth $264.4 million at year-end 2018, according to IRS information that ProPublica obtained. By reading the ProPublica story, parsing Weschler’s email and doing about 15 minutes of research, I realized that unless my calculator was having a meltdown, his IRA had outperformed Berkshire stock by about 120 to 1 from 1989 through 2012, and by almost 90 to 1 from 1989 through 2018. His IRA outperformed Vanguard’s low-cost S&P 500 index fund, a standard investment benchmark, by even wider margins. I wanted to know how on earth Weschler had done what he did. So, I sent him a brief email telling him that I wanted to understand how he’d made all that money. Much to my surprise, Weschler responded quickly and positively. It quickly became clear that Weschler wanted to show that even though his initial IRA stake grew more than 300,000 percent from 1989 to 2018, unlike Peter Thiel he hadn’t played any insider games by having his IRA pay mega-cheap prices for securities that regular people couldn’t buy. Weschler said he had put up his numbers by investing in only publicly available securities. I also realized that Weschler wanted to encourage young people to do what he did to accumulate his nine-digit net worth: save and invest, early and often, and take advantage of any retirement account benefits offered by their employer. “In a perfect world, nobody would know about this account,” he said. “But now that the number is out there, I’m hopeful that some good can come of it by serving as a motivation for new workforce entrants to start saving and investing early.” Normally, you never see investors’ private numbers, such as the size of Weschler’s account when he converted his regular IRA to a Roth IRA in 2012 or the size of his Roth at year-end 2018, the last date for which ProPublica had data.(Weschler declined to update his IRA numbers or to discuss how the money he’s managed for Berkshire has performed). Weschler has put up his amazing numbers despite suffering a 52 percent loss in his IRA in 1990, which makes his record even more impressive. What happened? To give you the short version, he had a trading profit early in 1990 but then watched his fund’s holdings — Continental Health Affiliates stock and Intelogic Trace bonds — end the year down 67 and 55 percent, respectively, from what he paid for them. Weschler said that he kept swinging for the fences despite that whopping loss because, “One of my personal investment mantras is that there’s no such thing as a loss, it’s just an unmonetized lesson.” Weschler converted what had become a nine-digit IRA into a Roth in 2012, even though that required him to pay $29 million of federal income tax (which he did by reaching into other accounts to come up with the necessary cash). Here’s why he did the conversion. With a regular IRA, the money going in is tax-deductible, but withdrawals are taxable. And you have to start taking annual withdrawals when you turn 72. With a Roth, the money going in isn’t deductible, but the withdrawals aren’t taxable. So, if you think — as Wechsler did — that you can save enough on future taxes to justify paying taxes today, it makes sense to convert a regular IRA to a Roth. Provided, of course, that you’ve got enough money to cover the tax bill. Such transactions weren’t available to high-income people like Weschler until 2010 when legislation (intended in part to pay for prolonging some of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts) waived the income limits on IRA- to- Roth conversions. Converting to a Roth from a regular IRA cost Weschler serious money on his 2012 taxes — but he won’t have to pay the IRS anything when he takes money out of his Roth. This means that down the road, he’ll save lots more tax than he paid nine years ago. And in his email to ProPublica he acknowledges the policy challenges that presents. “Although I have been an enormous beneficiary of the IRA mechanism, I personally do not feel the tax shield afforded me by my IRA is necessarily good tax policy,” he wrote. “To this end, I am openly supportive of modifying the benefit afforded to retirement accounts once they exceed a certain threshold.” How does someone like Weschler, the youngest of five children in a family of modest means in Erie, Pa. get to have the kind of money that he’s got? And how does he get to have a job that lets him sit at Buffett’s right hand? Let’s begin at the beginning. Weschler started as a junior employee at W.R. Grace, a New York City-based conglomerate, in 1983 after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He began maxing out his contributions to the Grace 401(k) plan a year after he joined, when he was first allowed to participate. By the time he left in late 1989, his account was up to $70,384. (Of this, $34,353 was his contribution, $12,328 was Grace matching money, the rest was from investment gains). By year-end 2018, that $70,384 had grown to $221.6 million. The other $42.8 million in his Roth came from accounts he set up after leaving Grace. In 1990, Weschler left New York and relocated to Charlottesville to start a leveraged buyout fund with Grace vice chairman Terry Daniels, who was also leaving the company. Weschler and Daniels picked Charlottesville because Daniels went to the University of Virginia and owned a house there. Weschler says that he and Daniels left New York both to avoid “groupthink” and to be able to afford nice homes for their families while he and Daniels spent four or five days a week on the road. After about 10 years with Daniels, Weschler went off on his own to start what turned out to be a very successful hedge fund. He said that it produced more than 22 percent of after-fee compounded annual returns for investors during its run, from Jan. 14, 2000 through Dec. 9, 2011. A terrific record. In 2010, Weschler, a long time Buffett admirer, entered and won the annual auction run by the Glide Memorial Church of San Francisco to have a lunch with Buffett by making a $2,626,311 donation. He also won the 2011 auction by bidding $100 more. Ted Weschler's incredible IRA return. Rather than join Buffett for high-profile lunches in New York City, Weschler flew to Buffett’s hometown of Omaha to dine at a since-closed steakhouse called Picolo’s. These two lunches, which Weschler says lasted about four hours each, resulted in Buffett offering Weschler a job. Because Weschler’s family wanted to stay in Charlottesville, he bought a condo near Berkshire’s headquarters and regularly flies to Omaha (on flights by NetJets, a Berkshire subsidiary) at his own expense (and with no employee discount) to spend time with Buffett and colleagues. For Berkshire, he looks for investments that can absorb a minimum of $500 million without giving Berkshire a stake of 10 percent or more. For his personal investments, he’s got the rest of the universe. Weschler says that he used to buy beaten-down bonds of companies that were in less dire straits than they seemed to be, and stocks of little-known companies that he determined were in much better shape than the market thought they were. Although Weschler’s overall IRA returns since 1989 are astronomical, his percentage gains from 2013 through 2018 — since joining Berkshire — are below both Berkshire stock and the Vanguard S&P 500 fund. “I think it is safe to say that my retirement account got a lot less attention after I joined Berkshire,” Weschler said. “For the prior 22 years, there was a direct overlap between things I was looking at for my day job and potential investment opportunities for my retirement account. Once I joined Berkshire, that simply wasn’t the case.” Weschler spends a lot of his time reading and thinking, and studying companies and industries to find things that the financial markets don’t seem to be seeing. “For people who can’t do that, index funds are the answer,” he says. Even though index funds can’t begin to match Weschler’s long-term performance, they can make you a lot of money if you stick around. Weschler, extrapolating from numbers that I sent him, said that if you’d put the $70,535 that he had in his IRA at year-end 1989 into Vanguard’s S&P index fund, you’d have had more than $1.6 million as of June 30. (The exact number, Vanguard confirmed, was $1,636,238.) “That $1.6 million,” he says, “drives some very simple advice: start early, maximize the (employer) match, invest 100 percent in equities, and ignore all the other noise.” To which I would add: make sure to pay attention to small details like Weschler’s email to ProPublica. You never know what you can learn by studying a footnote and reaching out to the person who wrote it.

try this one: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi2tc2KvNHyAhUpm2oFHYdoCFsQxfQBMAN6BAgIEAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fbusiness%2F2021%2F08%2F27%2Fretirement-fund-millionaire%2F&usg=AOvVaw3iPs4f1c2-o9dGyq-InrlG

Another good (and rare) interview with Ted Weschler. This one by the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/27/retirement-fund-millionaire/

Buffett has talked about it a bit back in 2015-2016. Lubrizol had/has a fine core business but a few years after Berkshire bought them they made a bad bolt-on acquisition. I don't remember which one it was, but it wasn't the Phillips 66 spin-out, which is called Liquidpower specialty and might be technically under Lubrizol's management. Whatever the bad acquisition was, Buffett/Lubrizol sold it within a few years and took a $365 million loss. Then, of course, this year we had a contractor on a scissor lift bust a mineral oil pipe in the ceiling of the Chemtool plant in Rockton Illinois and it created a huge mess when it ignited. (Chemtool is a grease subsidiary of Lubrizol). I don't know what lead to Abel making a change at the top, but it could be the way the Chemtool disaster was handled or it could just be general underperformance form Lubrizol over a long period of time. Abel has a lot of the Sokol school in him - continuous improvement, "pleased but not satisfied..." You could say Lubrizol, Precision Castparts and Kraft were all mistakes he overpaid for and yet Berkshire as a whole has continued to do very well despite these very material screw-ups.

Greg Abel making a change - Lubrizol CEO out and the new CEO comes from BHE Infrastructure Group. Will add a link once I find one without a paywall. "Brown joins Lubrizol from BHE Infrastructure Group, which, like Lubrizol, is a company in Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio. Brown served as president and CEO at BHE Infrastructure. Prior to that, he was president for North American sales and service operations for wind turbine supplier Vestas and chief operating officer for the city of Detroit." In case anyone is curious what BHE Infrastructure actually is, there is a description on this website. They were also the division of BHE that was responsible for proposing the emergency power plan to the state of Texas following the winter storm. Of course that plan has not been adopted by Texas. https://www.brkenergy.com/about-us/leadership/chris-brown.aspx

DISCK, PSTH, CBRL, MKTW

Here is another one that might be interesting - this is a company that has gone down a fair bit recently and has insider buying at the current price. Digital Turbine, ticker: APPS. So far, this is 3 directors buying shares in the open market in a cluster. Not huge numbers, between $72,750 and $152,730 in value - at prices ranging from 48.50-50.91 / share. I saw this company written up in a fund letter and had never heard of them. I still can't understand exactly what they do or how they make their money, but they are profitable and growing quickly. They just completed 2 large acquisitions that should increase revenue considerably while only diluting share count by 15% or so. Directors have bought in the past at much lower prices and done very well on those purchases. Maybe this company isn't on my AT&T iPhone and that's why I can't figure out what it does / how it makes money. Who knows... But it's a standard setup on a volatile tech stock with a small cluster of open market purchases with directors' own money: http://openinsider.com/search?q=APPS

Here is a recent example - just filed. It has a connection with Fairfax and it is an open market purchase by the CEO. Also it is rare and usually a good sign when a CEO buys shares at a 52 week high: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/901819/000140810021000125/xslF345X03/wf-form4_162864041464230.xml

Outside of PCP, Berkshire’s MSR companies are mostly in the sweet spot in this economy. Trains are slammed, car dealerships, furniture, home building, building products - hell, even NetJets had to suspend new sales because they couldn’t keep up. Obviously year over year comps make it look even better.

It doesn't seem like the most important item to put in the headline, but he did slow the rate of share repurchases. $9 Billion -> $9 Billion -> $6.6 Billion -> $6 Billion

GEICO is certainly under-earning but that should be temporary. Life/Health Reinsurance is also putting up bad numbers. Berkshire has primary insurance subs and property casualty reinsurance shooting the lights out (especially on premium growth out of BH Specialty and MedPro), but Berkshire's insurance mix is much different from other insurers. You should expect to continue to see underwriting losses out of Retroactive and maybe also the periodic payment business. The AIG transaction alone is responsible for a lot of the retro losses that get reported. The long duration of that float is key.

I wonder how Buffett thinks about the value of this $142 Billion balance sheet liability that is growing at a 4-8% annual clip... Surely he doesn't value it at negative $142B.