gfp
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Posts posted by gfp
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Easy peasy, all it takes is complete trust and the ability to send tens of billions of dollars in equity on a week's notice plus unmatched access to credit markets
No wonder, he likes 3G, he provides some funding and his reputation, and they do all the work. It's a great arrangement for the old fool, who would not like such a deal and the folks that make it possible?
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Sounds like Star Furniture CEO was fired by the parent company. NFM grandson added to the board for oversight that Warren trusts -
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Article citing rumor that 3G is looking at potentially trying to outbid JAB on Panera. Seems unlikely given Buffett's friendship with Byron Trott, who likely put the JAB deal together for that family. But who knows
- article also mentions that JAB and 3G principals invest in each others' deals, making a topping bid that much more unlikely
Sources have told CNBC that the reports of 3G interest are untrue:
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Bloomberg has an article on the growing importance of the credit-card / miles portion of the major airlines' businesses -
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-31/airlines-make-more-money-selling-miles-than-seats
as an aside, I haven't paid cash for an airline ticket for myself or my family in several years. someone is paying, I guess it's the banks?
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I don't have what you are looking for, but you may be able to use this document as a starting place to search for what you want. It contains a list of the bond issues that you could search for individually - plus it contains certain financial data for the years you are interested in. You may already have this one, it is the 10-K for the year ending 12/31/1993:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/83612/0000950112-94-000477.txt
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Small update on Ajit's reorganization of General Re (from Insurance Insider):
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Gen Re shakes up international P&C leadership
Adam McNestrie and Catrin Shi
Gen Re has appointed new regional heads for its international P&C operations as part of a wider revamp of the reinsurer initiated by Berkshire Hathaway's Ajit Jain, The Insurance Insider understands.
Gen Re had previously divided its P&C reinsurance business into treaty and facultative arms, as well as underwriting and marketing operations, creating a plethora of senior roles in each region. The P&C business in each region will now have a single leader.
Achim Bosch, previously regional treaty marketing head, has been made P&C head for Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and Benelux - which together form the largest part of Gen Re's international operations.
It is further understood that Gen Re's Spanish and Portuguese P&C operations will be headed by Adolfo Martinez, who was previously chief underwriter for treaty in the region.
Emmanuel Brouquier, regional manager for Europe excluding the UK and Germany, has taken on the role of P&C head for France, Scandinavia and the Middle East.
Andrew Flitcroft, previously treaty marketing head for Asia Pacific outside of Japan, is now P&C head for Australia and New Zealand. Rainer Schurmann, formerly treaty marketing head for Asia, has become P&C head for Asia, excluding Japan.
It is understood that a small number of senior staff have chosen to retire as part of the restructure, although most have remained in place under different roles, suggesting there may be further streamlining of management to come from Gen Re.
The restructure has only affected the P&C operations, with Gen Re's international life management structure remaining the same.
Berkshire Hathaway reinsurance chief Jain has set about restructuring Gen Re since the carrier fell under his remit when CEO Tad Montross retired last year.
Jain appointed Kara Raiguel as CEO, and has moved to simplify the complicated management structure of Gen Re in a bid to take out layers and speed up decision-making.
An initial reorganisation of the UK and Italian leadership in October last year, as revealed by this publication at the time, saw Faraday CEO Pietro Toffanello named P&C head for both countries.
Steve Michael, previously CEO of one of Berkshire Hathaway's legacy units, then moved across to lead Gen Re's Lloyd's arm Faraday.
Gen Re did not respond to a request for comment.
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So your attorney friends just went without any form of health insurance? What if they ended up in the hospital? $100k+ could add up quickly (especially without the negotiated rates) while they tried to quickly enroll in a new health insurance plan
Hey all:
I am surprised there is not more of a "rebellion" against Obama Care or whatever it's replacement will be.
Every single attorney (mainly very late 20's or early mid 30's) that I worked with and would discuss it, was paying the penalty. NOBODY that I worked with bought insurance.
The premiums were so expensive and the DEDUCTIBLE so high, you could make a plausible argument that it was not really insurance at all. Simply moving wealth from one group to another.
If Trump is not careful, he is going to have a problem with this.
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I didn't notice him slurring, but I did think his front teeth looked different. Anyways, always glad to see him sharp and energetic.
After watching one out of the many short videos (on valuing banks - dodged it by quoting Aesop), I was stuck by how much he's slurring. He sounds like I've heard other older people sound after getting new teeth. Is this new? I don't watch videos as much as I read transcripts, so maybe I've missed this.
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Thanks for posting the transcript. I was asleep for the first part and it was interesting to hear him describe his shorting DOW common in anticipation of their conversion. He ended up timing it perfectly, with a net zero position the day after they sent him 72 million shares -
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"Quick: The reason I ask-- that question just now is because Dow Chemical preferred shares-- they called those the preferred shares on December 30th. And from what I read it said that it should've translated into about 6 percent of the shares outstanding of the company—
Buffett: 70, 72 million shares, yeah.
Quick: But I did not notice Dow Chemical on the 13-F in this most recent filing. Would have--
Buffett: We timed our sales so that once it got above the conversion price-- we timed our sales-- we tried to time 'em—because 72 million shares would be a lot of shares to get and we did not want to own the common stock we don't own any common stocks of any chemical companies so and as the stock when higher we sold it more aggressively because we wanted to get 72 million shares done by the day which was becoming more probable all the time that they would call it and they called it exactly when we thought they would call it. And I think our last shares were sold the day before, the day after, the same day we timed it to be out of 72 million shares when we received those shares.
Quick: So I was going to say you didn't sell 72 million shares on December 30 and 31st
Buffett: No we didn't want to be in that position.
Quick: but you had been timing those shares all along and preparing for it.
Buffett: exactly and it became you were in a very strong market and as Dow kept moving up we would get more aggressive so towards the end we might have been selling a couple million shares a day when it got up to 56 or some price like that. We were hoping to get out of it, out of the common by the time they sold the common and like I said it worked out to the day we were kind of lucky on that we could have ended up with 10 million shares but we were going to quit obviously when we got to the amount that was going to be handed to us.
Quick: Why don't you like Dow or the other chemical shares?
Buffett: We've never owned chemical shares. We own a specialty chemical company Ebersol a chemical common stock we own we bought the preferred stock of Dow because we wanted a preferred position and we held it. It was kind of interesting we bought that stock in July of 2008, the preferred and they were going to acquire, Dow was going to acquire Rohm & Haas and they needed money for it and then the world fell apart in the fall and Dow wanted to get out of the contract, they sued Rohm & Haas to get out of the contract but it was held that they had to stick with it. So we closed the deal to buy the preferred stock in April of 2009 by which time the market had totally disintegrated the time we closed that we bought $3 billion worth it probably wasn't worth tops more than
60 cents on the dollar so we showed up with $3 billion for something that was worth $1.8 billion at the time which is one reason why people offer us deals they know we will be around at the closing. We showed up for the Wrigley closing too that was on October 4 or something but during that whole period we had commitments and that kept me from doing some other things we might have done at that time. The fact that we had this $3 billion going out the door
Quick: What did you ultimately end up making on Dow Chemical shares.
Buffett: we ended up making about a billion dollars and plus we had an 8.5 percent coupon those years.
Quick: You made a billion even before the preferred dividend that was paid?
Buffett: We had a billion dollar of capital gain very roughly, and then we had $255 million a year dividends during the time we owned it."
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They just corrected it. I copied and pasted the above from their site.
I looked up another company and the balance sheet was all wonky. The problem with many of these type of sites is unclean data. That's why people use bloomberg, and I assume now Capital IQ, the data is pretty clean either through human editing or a much better computerized data gathering system.
edit - I wonder how the data is at this outfit:
Market cap is listed as $419 B. Looks right: http://www.rocketfinancial.com/Overview.aspx?fID=1058&pw=34872
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Rocketfinancial loses a lot of credibility when the first thing I type in is Berkshire Hathaway (one of the largest large cap stocks in the world) and it lists market cap as:
Market cap: $328761 B
That is the real price from what I've heard, and CapIQ does usually want at least $40k per year before they bother with an account, so that sounds accurate as well.
Take a look at http://www.rocketfinancial.com if you're looking for a free alternative.
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does anyone have the link to the American Airlines presentation that CEO Doug Parker gave that apparently convinced Tedd Weschler to invest?
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One thing I enjoyed in Charlie's extra comments following the Daily Journal meeting was his description of reading barron's for 50 years and getting one investment idea from it. Asked for details he mentions that he made $80 million dollars on the idea - a tiny auto parts company - whoever owned the monroe shocks brand at the time [Tenneco, TEN]. He bought the 11 3/8% junk bonds at 35% of par and they were called at 107 or thereabouts. And he bought the stock at $1 and it went to $40 (he sold at $15 in about 2 years time). Asked by the crowd what the article in Barron's said, he replied "that it was a cheap stock".
He then slips in that he gave that $80 million dollars to Li Liu who turned it into "4 or 5 hundred million dollars"...
Also in this clip, he reminisces about the opportunity that used to exist "for 60 years" in "jewish treasury bonds" - event arbitrage / merger arbitrage. He said for 60 years he, warren, graham-newman and goldman sachs would make 20% per annum in event arbitrage, primarily because there was a lot less capital / competition in the space, and because stock brokers worked on commission and would call their clients up to suggest selling the stock after the 'pop'. Dumb selling as Charlie called it - selling at 95 on a cash $100 deal, etc...
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". Looking at the numbers for a relatively long time, it has not done better that the general market levels. "
One point I would disagree with is that Berkshire has had growth in operating earnings that far exceed the averages and the economy in general. Berkshire will sell stocks if they are needed to fund a large acquisition of an operating company. So far, the model is working at this size and Berkshire has continued to find large acquisitions to maintain their growth in operating earning power. If they go a few years without a 30 billion plus deal, people will start questioning if the company is too mature to continue the model. If investors' perception changes and becomes more negative on Berkshire, Berkshire will buy huge amounts of stock back at 1.2x book value and below. One way or another - the current model looks to continue to deliver above-average growth in per-share earning power.
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Definitely sounds like they are done adding shares of the Airlines. They don't want to go over 10% and have share repurchases to factor in.
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This thread has some of them - I'm sure you can find more if you keep looking. A good academic business school library might have a bunch if you are near a good university.
Look around that thread and you will find 1955 - 1985 plus a few others.
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"Why 44 cents? He doesn't spell it out here, but that works out to just over $300 million in annual dividend proceeds. The preferred stock Berkshire now owns pays a chunky 6% annual dividend that also works out to $300 million a year. The preferreds have little downside, so long as Bank of America stays solvent, but they have no upside either. Mr. Buffett is saying he'd rather enjoy the upside on the common stock, about as clear a buy signal as you'll get from the famed stockpicker."
I guess you are copying and pasting someone's article on the matter? Obviously Warren has been participating in the upside of the common since his "buy signal" at $7.xx / share when he made the deal. The reason he would convert early is due to the increased investment income he would receive. The last sentence above is strange.
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One thing I noticed is that all of the Dow Chemical common stock had been sold as of 12/31/2016. Seems like he actually had shorted against that conversion or at least arranged one hell of a large, quick block trade. BRK got 72.6 million DOW shares in December and held zero at the end of the month
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He mentioned in a recent interview that he did not want to expound on what had changed in his mind to make him bullish on Airlines. The implication in his tone was that he was still buying shares and had no interest in adding to a 'Buffett Premium' halo-effect around airline stock prices. As Charlie has confirmed, it is a lot like the Freight Rail business - over time, through consolidation, a "rationalization" occurs when you get an oligopoly. A bad business can turn OK when it consolidates into a rational oligopoly. Warren may still be buying airline equity - and it may ultimately turn out like the Freight Rail basket, with Berkshire owning 100% of one the the major US airlines and selling the rest of the basket to satisfy merger conditions / help pay for the acquisition. Less likely than the BNSF deal, but not all that crazy.
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He has finally moved his cash to Treasury bills. There is finally some yield there -
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=IRX&insttype=&freq=2&show=&time=12
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Marlin, I know you are quite knowledgeable about Buffett and his family. But you are wrong on this one. Warren and Susie even made comments to the Wall St. Journal in connection with the listing. They owned more than 1 property in the neighborhood.
http://www.villarealestate.com/listing/lg16746519-27-emerald-bay-laguna-beach-ca-92651/
i looked again
i see there is an article and says sold in 2005.
but the current article about selling at 11 million today not true by Buffett.
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We don't know Schloss's net worth at it's high, but I don't think he was close to Charlie. Charlie had billions of dollars - plural - Schloss had millions of dollars. Maybe several hundred million, but nothing close to Charlie to my knowledge.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0211/048.html
Very true. They do tailor to different audiences and question specifics. I should've noted that as well. I wouldn't even call in contradicting themselves as much as speaking to the speaking question/scenario/audience.
It's similar to the debt thing with Warren. He always says not to use it but he will. People have to be smart and think through all aspects. When he says no or little debt he means for the consumer or highly/over leveraged business that can't support that model. Really common sense.
Regarding Schloss, my understanding is Walter died with more net worth than Munger will. Not a dick measuring contest, but I wanted to point out that variations of the same strategy can make you just as rich.
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They owned two properties adjacent to each other. The one sold previously is the neighboring property.
thats fake news
the house was sold in 2011
if it is sold again not Buffetts
I'm confused - is this fake news? I just found this article that states the home was sold in 2005 for 5.45 mil
http://la.curbed.com/2011/10/10/10435130/laguna-beach-buyers-selling-warren-buffett-house-at-a-loss
Lemann (3G) and Buffett at Harvard Business School 2017
in Berkshire Hathaway
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Thank you for posting this - what a rare treat to hear Jorge Paulo speak