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Berkshire director Meryl Witmer buying shares in the market - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/000091957420003765/xslF345X03/ownership.xml ( ~ $2.2 million worth )

Speaking of Mercury - the elderly chairman and others have been buying shares almost daily in a pretty big way. Mercury is mostly auto, not much commercial multiple peril. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?action=getissuer&CIK=0000064996 https://www.dataroma.com/m/stock.php?sym=MCY

Yeah at this point the utility scale solar+battery installations are going to have huge cost/scale benefits. It also greatly depends on how policies on net-metering evolve in the future. Many utilities have already tightened the terms on net metering. My local utility, Entergy New Orleans, gives us a ridiculously good arrangement - which doesn't seem good for them and I would be surprised if it lasts. We have over 14kW of solar on our roof - enough to power our entire house including central air conditioning. We do not have batteries. We are able to sell our excess power back into the grid at the retail price. This is such a bad deal for Entergy. Basically we have the worlds most efficient battery. For free. And our utility, which shouldn't be in the business of buying power at their retail rate is doing just that. We give them excess power all day long (especially in the summer) - then use the credits at night and in the winter months. It results in just about net zero power bill, but we still pay them for a basic service hookup and our natural gas usage.

Yes - the above is exactly what I was referring to. That made me feel pretty good about Berkshire's prospects and ability to use this as an opportunity to grow the Insurance biz. Time will tell. Its not a bunch of dummies running the place, thank god

I found it interesting that during the annual meeting the only thing he sounded extremely confident in was Berkshire's insurance reserving. Perhaps next quarter shows a different result, but I don't think Buffett expects Berkshire to have huge losses from Covid-related business interruption. I'm sure there will still be plenty of claims, event cancellation, etc... Companies that were willing to insure against pandemic risks (like Berkshire) ought to be less likely to have been inadvertently covering it without compensation. Still have to pay for the litigation of course. Berkshire can write a lot more business if this creates a hard market - and its hard to see how this doesn't finally get us the mythical hard market conditions. Having a huge insurance business that basically re-insurers the past and not the present offers a nice diversifier when comparing Berkshire's size / risk from Covid claims to other big insurers who don't write enormous retroactive policies.

Thanks Dynamic. Yes the AAL stake was mostly Ted Weschler so could have been sold with different timing than the Buffett airline positions.

LGND raised their 2020 guidance (their product Captisol is used in Remdesivir) Stock sold off on the news, haven't read through the Q yet https://www.ligand.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/412/

ATCO, KNOP

I got an antibody blood test at Quest Diagnostics for $130 without a prescription. (negative result btw - I have not been exposed to Covid according to the test)

Interesting that they are valuing their OXY warrants at $2 million now, and the $10 Billion face value of OXY preferred at $5.54 Billion (page 19). They mentioned "the effects of subordination in liquidation" as a factor in their fair value calculation.

My academic friend has a great current reply - "I'm on unpaid leave." I told him that was my new favorite term for unemployed. I agree with the sentiment about not telling strangers you invest for a living. I usually tell strangers I'm a carpenter (which I am).

Thats been an ongoing thing from the Walter Scott entities. Another increase in ownership will come when Greg Abel converts his stake to Berkshire common shares. https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/27/the-big-berkshire-hathaway-buyback-no-one-is-talki.aspx

This - exactly!

Good catch - I see that now. Sold $6.1 Billion net of purchases for the month of April.

He didn't sell any more Wells - 345 million shares (aprox) at quarter end. Doubt he touched coke either but haven't checked yet (edit: KO unchanged at 400m shares). Apple shares basically unchanged for the quarter as well. Previous to Q1, he had been selling Wells voluntarily - not due to 10% reasons. But he stopped. thepupil has it right - added $4 B and sold $2.1. and plenty of profitable lots along with the tax loss selling. It does not appear that Berkshire expects to record a large insurance loss due to COVID Repurchases totaled $1.7 B worth, but we already knew about $1 Billion worth from the proxy statement share count.

Not to get this topic off track, but this announcement is a big negative for Berkshire's USP subsidiary. USP and Simpson are imbedded in basically all building codes - at least in this country. But Berkshire's USP was available at Lowe's while Home Depot carried Simpson. Looks like USP has lost that relationship. USP is a subsidiary of MiTek. https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/lowes-to-expand-pro-offering-with-simpson-strong-tie-products-2020-04-29?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts&tesla=y

For me it is good sushi from the restaurant (dine-in). Take-out sushi / delivery is just not the same experience.

Pure & utterly nonsence to me. something can't be utterly nonsense. utterly is an adverb, utter is an adjective and therefor grammatical. so, utter nonsense, yes, but only if you spell it correctly. just wait till you see my Danish spelling and grammar - that’ll really bug you

I trust the Quest Diagnostics test better than some mail-order kit but I'm not going to drastically change my behavior either way. Its more of a curiosity thing I've been wanting to do for a while and finally was able to get one scheduled. It's around $130 where I am going. I've got plenty of free time LOL ( ** update on this - my test came back negative, indicating I have not been previously infected with covid-19 )

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/quest-diagnostics-rolls-out-direct-to-consumer-coronavirus-antibody-tests.html So I actually signed up for this yesterday without a doctors prescription and it let me schedule the test for today at 1:45pm (at Quest). Many people in New Orleans suspect that COVID was widespread here by the time of Mardi Gras (MG ended 2/25 this year and is several weeks long) and most of us were really sick for a while after Mardi Gras - which isn't abnormal - but it was awfully bad this year. If I had to guess, I would say I have probably already had COVID with only mild symptoms, but I've been looking forward to taking this antibody test to see what it says.

I thought Berkshire owned 149,497,786 shares of USB as of August 2019 Which went up slightly to 150,088,061 since the 1st of the year. (The event that caused the Form 3 was USB's earnings press release & cc presentation on 4/15/2020 which showed an updated share count of 1,506,000,000)

That should be accounted for by using "a share equivalents" or "b share equivalents"

Looks right. Of course it cost them more than $1.03 Billion to buy because they were buying between those dates and it appears you used todays price to estimate the dollar amount. More than $1.2 Billion worth in three weeks - so a decent rate but they may have stopped buying in the dip just because that's how he seems to do things...

Charlie in WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/charlie-munger-the-phone-is-not-ringing-off-the-hook-11587132006?mod=hp_lead_pos11 Charlie_Munger:_‘The_Phone_Is_Not_Ringing_Off_the_Hook’_-_WSJ.pdf

yikes - a dud acquisition that PCP did a while ago: https://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20200415/NEWS06/912334059/Berkshire-Hathaway-unit-Precision-Castparts-Corp-wins-$700-million-award-over-fr