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My impression is that he has continued to sell Apple shares after quarter-end since he seemed very confident that the $182 cash figure would be $200 billion at June 30.

"Warren sold Apple shares in the quarter because they didn't have a compelling story to tell on generative AI in the period!"

Nice of Warren to call Tim Cook yesterday and let him know the big headline was going to be (almost) $20 Billion AAPL share sales in the quarter.

Just call it a "bond portfolio" and debate his decision on duration instead. If he put half of it in 2 year notes nobody would complain.

$189 B if you count all the subsidiary cash A decent chunk of the "bond portfolio" was so short dated that it crossed into "cash and cash equivalents" just through the passage of time.

Interestingly there was only $19.972 Billion of equity security sales in the quarter, so they didn't get a very high price for the AAPL stock sold in the quarter (or maybe there is enough rounding error in the estimated number of shares sold that my math is off)

Certainly appears that the share count of the AAPL position went from 905,560,000 to something like 789,596,454 (plenty of rounding error in this number)

Berkshire's Q1 results are out. Float is down ~$1 Billion from $169 -> $168 Billion. (edit: this was the effect of rounding, Float was only down a couple hundred million dollars during q1) Repurchases were $2.6 billion in the quarter. Operating earnings $11.222 Billion in Q1. Only Class A stock was repurchased in the quarter

I assume we are not talking about hourly jobs here. This isn't time-clock type stuff.

I had never heard of this (sounds like my personal nightmare! Sign me up for "unemployment" please) but a close friend was explaining the temptation over drinks at the bar. Obviously everyone working remotely is what really enabled this movement. I would think something like a LinkedIn profile would become a problem? My friend was promoted from sales to sales management and had no problem finishing "the work" in the new position in a matter of hours. Two full time comp packages were really tempting. I have heard this 2-full-time-jobs thing is popular with the Indian-American community.

It was great to hear Wade do the investment overview. Did everyone else hear average duration of 2.8 years on the fixed income portfolio? I heard yield of 5% as well. If I heard correctly on duration it seems like they tactically shortened again. edit: I also heard duration of about 3 at the end of the call. 2.8, if I heard correctly might include cash and bills and 3 might be just the "bond portfolio."

Conference call just started

What do you mean by this bolded section above?

The full quarterly report is out now in case it hasn't already been posted here: https://www.fairfax.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024_05_May_02-FFH-2024-Q1-Interim-Report-Final.pdf

Press release for Fairfax India https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/05/02/2874791/0/en/Fairfax-India-Holdings-Corporation-First-Quarter-Financial-Results.html This PDF is better: https://www.fairfaxindia.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024_05_May_02-PRFIH-Q1-2024-Press-Release-Final.pdf

Nice, so they repurchased 240,734 shares during the quarter - $260.3 million worth. 3/31 share count is 22,831,173 shares

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/05/02/2874789/0/en/Fairfax-India-Holdings-Corporation-Financial-Results-for-the-First-Quarter.html Press release pdf: https://www.fairfax.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024_05_May_02-PRFFH-Q1-2024-Press-Release-Final.pdf

Seems like FFH share repurchases should come in around $195 million in the quarter but I may be double counting some shares. We'll see how far off I am later. https://ceo.ca/api/sedi/?symbol=ffh&amount=&transaction=&insider=Fairfax

It's funny, with Fairfax, nobody points to the bond portfolio and panics over the idle cash. They get busy calculating the spread between 95% combined ratio cost of capital and +4.5% investment yield. At Berkshire it sits in 3 month and 6 month bills and it's some huge problem. If Warren moved $150 billion to 3 and 5 year treasury notes would everybody stop worrying about the "cash problem" and call him a genius like Brian Bradstreet? Can we just call most of Berkshire's cash the "bond portfolio" and be done with the 'big cash problem' talk?

pdf of the article. Go ahead and remove it if an opinion section excerpt is some kind of copyright issue. Why Fairfax Financial.pdf

So it's kind of a bullshit article because they don't know which investors bought which stocks. Several of their guesses appear to be incorrect. These are likely wrong: Aon: Buffett Capital One: Buffett Celanese: Combs/Weschler (not sure) General Motors: Combs/Weschler (not sure) Lee Enerprises: Combs/Weschler PNC Financial: Buffett S&P 500 ETF: Buffett VeriSign: Combs/Weschler Verisk Analytics: Combs/Weschler (they also don't do enough research to figure out the actual buy and sell prices to calculate the returns, using 13F quarter-end data instead)

Thanks for posting - nice to see they got the green light to stream the annual movie on CNBC - I'm sure there will be some great stuff in there this year.

pretty sneaky how you subliminally inserted the nutrition information of the Tim Hortons menu into your post

I don't think Q1 will be that bad. Partly because of the offsetting IFRS discount effect but primarily because the real meat of the bond sell-off started the day after the quarter ended. Q1 was pretty tame. We'll see how Q2 and the rest of the year unfolds but I'm not expecting 2-7 year treasuries to stick around with a 5-handle on the yield for more than a few days. There is a lot of demand for those securities at 5%. I know I'm a broken record on that but watch the 2 year - at 5% buyers come flooding back in, which is unsurprising.