Buffett/Berkshire - general news

[DooDiligence]

3 hours ago, UK said:

Yes, oil bet is big and definately Buffett's. PARA I would guess is not his bet. Also it is possible, that USB was bought by WB and also later by one of T. If TSM was bought by WB himself, it would be quite a surprise, but it is almost to large for T or T, but maybe their allocations of BRK portfolio were increased?

 

PARA (nice set of properties), but no DIS 

[Spekulatius]

13 hours ago, UK said:

Yes, oil bet is big and definately Buffett's. PARA I would guess is not his bet. Also it is possible, that USB was bought by WB and also later by one of T. If TSM was bought by WB himself, it would be quite a surprise, but it is almost to large for T or T, but maybe their allocations of BRK portfolio were increased?

I think TSM is  a WEB buy not T&T. I think he dumped USB and swapped it for TSM basically (seeling USB is still in progress  I think).

 

TSM is probably for WEB an "inevitable" company/business and he may have learned how important they are through Apple / Tim Cook.

 

I hope he is right about buying TSM and wrong about selling USB , since I bought both recently.

Edited November 16, 2022 by Spekulatius

[UK]

13 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

I think TSM is  WEB buy not T&T. I think he dumped USB and swapped it for TSM basically (seeling USB is still in prrogress I think).

 

TSM is probably for WEB an "inevitable" company/business and he may have learned how important they are through Apple / Tim Cook.

 

I hope he is right about buying TSM and wrong about selling USB , since I bought both recently.

 

I was just guessing, but also thought that maybe it was T or T, who sold his share of USB and bougth TSM. Now, if WB bought TSM himself it would be a great news, since it is cheap and very strong business, but also it would mean, that his circle of competence has increased quite substantially! To make decisions about all thes extreme ultraviolet things is quite something comparing to water and sugar. So interesting and great news anyway!

[Spekulatius]

10 minutes ago, UK said:

 

I was just guessing, but also thought that maybe it was T or T, who sold his share of USB and bougth TSM. Now, if WB bought TSM himself it would be a great news, since it is cheap and very strong business, but also it would mean, that his circle of competence has increased quite substantially! To make decisions about all thes extreme ultraviolet things is quite something comparing to water and sugar. So interesting and great news anyway!

You don't need to understand EUV tech to invest in TSM. You just need to understand how important this tech is and how hard it would be to duplicate what TSM has done.

 

The financial statements talk for themselves. There is no issue there. the political risk is harder to quantify. I don't think WEB really has an edge there.

[CorpRaider]

I conjecture that he's dumping USB because of the reported bad activity that to me was basically identical to the WFC stuff.  Cockroaches and all that. 

 

All things being equal, I think he would prefer Para over DIS because of capital allocation/ownership alignment.  DIS just had to put out a presser....about forming a committee.....to look at cost cuts in streaming...LOL for fooks sake.  Shari and co tried to sell publishing and sold real estate/HQ and they've also been more rational and less reactionary to wall street wishes about theatre business and arms dealing to Amazon and NFLX imop.  They also blew up Hwang and those guys with the timely prefs issuance.  Financially sharp, he likes all else being similar.  It's also waaaaaaay cheaper and he says a lot of BS but usually he buys stuff pretty damn cheap.  Also, it might be Ted.

Edited November 15, 2022 by CorpRaider

[gfp]

Yeah I doubt PARA is a Warren Buffett pick.  USB was, and he went right up to 10% and kept it just below for years.  When Warren starts to sell he usually sells it all, so it could disappear next quarter.

[CorpRaider]

Oh yeah would be shocked if he's not totally bailing on USB.  Not as shocked as I would be if BAC isn't doing much more horrible stuff on a larger scale at this very moment than USB and WFC, particularly in Merrill, but very shocked.

Edited November 15, 2022 by CorpRaider

[Spekulatius]

20 minutes ago, CorpRaider said:

I conjecture that he's dumping USB because of the reported bad activity that to me was basically identical to the WFC stuff.  Cockroaches and all that. 

 

All things being equal, I think he would prefer Para over DIS because of capital allocation/ownership alignment.  DIS just had to put out a presser....about forming a committee.....to look at cost cuts in streaming...LOL for fooks sake.  Shari and co tried to sell publishing and sold real estate/HQ and they've also been more rational and less reactionary to wall street wishes about theatre business and arms dealing to Amazon and NFLX imop.  They also blew up Hwang and those guys with the timely prefs issuance.  Financially sharp, he likes all else being similar.  It's also waaaaaaay cheaper and he says a lot of BS but usually he buys stuff pretty damn cheap.  Also, it might be Ted.

The problem with PARA is that they assets are subPAR if you compare it with DIS or even WBD, imo. I think if they go it alone, they will destroy the value of their equity. Finding a merger partner that actually can come through regularity hurdles is going to be hard.

 

If they wanted to sell out, they should not have merged CBS with Viacom.

[cubsfan]

3 hours ago, CorpRaider said:

Oh yeah would be shocked if he's not totally bailing on USB.  Not as shocked as I would be if BAC isn't doing much more horrible stuff on a larger scale at this very moment than USB and WFC, particularly in Merrill, but very shocked.

 

^ What's your take on what BAC is doing?  

 

Haven't been following the banks much and certainly was disappointed how it took WFC 

forever to clean themselves up - if they ever did..

[Ulti]

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/squawk-pod/id1480890290?i=1000586312375

 

full Charlie Munger podcast cnbc yesterday

[Monsieur_dee]

2 minutes ago, Ulti said:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/squawk-pod/id1480890290?i=1000586312375

 

full Charlie Munger podcast cnbc yesterday

Thank you. Was just looking for this. 

[thowed]

I don't know how many of you know Overlook - one of the great Asian Funds over 20+ years.  They are very straight Phil Fisher type investors.  They were early investors in TSM and have held it all the way through.  The founder of Overlook was so into it, he actually wrote a letter to Warren saying how he thought it was a great stock for him.  So WEB may well have been following it for a while waiting patiently...

[gfp]

This screenshot is from National Indemnity Q3 NAIC filing - showing purchases of stock inside National Indemnity only.  I thought it was interesting that Buffett was buying TSM as early as August 25th at around $88/share.  Makes it more likely he continued to buy the stock after quarter end but that is a guess.

 

(I should add that several of these entries are intercompany transfers and the rightmost column is price paid, second from the right is number of shares)

 

 

He bought another billion dollars worth of TSM at around $76.84 / sh. inside Columbia Insurance Company.

 

Edited November 16, 2022 by gfp

[UK]

5 hours ago, thowed said:

I don't know how many of you know Overlook - one of the great Asian Funds over 20+ years.  They are very straight Phil Fisher type investors.  They were early investors in TSM and have held it all the way through.  The founder of Overlook was so into it, he actually wrote a letter to Warren saying how he thought it was a great stock for him.  So WEB may well have been following it for a while waiting patiently...

 

Interesting, never heard about them. Do you know how their portfolio looks like or what are their top positions? Also foundthis one on them: https://youtu.be/Zs0ZDbmpIOk

[UK]

26 minutes ago, gfp said:

This screenshot is from National Indemnity Q3 NAIC filing - showing purchases of stock inside National Indemnity only.  I thought it was interesting that Buffett was buying TSM as early as August 25th at around $88/share.  Makes it more likely he continued to buy the stock after quarter end but that is a guess.

 

(I should add that several of these entries are intercompany transfers and the rightmost column is price paid, second from the right is number of shares)

 

 

He bought another billion dollars worth of TSM at around $76.84 / sh. inside Columbia Insurance Company.

 

 

Very interesting, thanks for finding this out. So how sure we could be, that purchase was made by WB? 99 per cent?, 50/50?

[gfp]

2 minutes ago, UK said:

 

Very interesting, thanks for finding this out. So how sure we could be, that purchase was made by WB? 99 per cent?, 50/50?

 

If you can't ask him you have to guess.  We'll see how big the position gets.  Personally I think this is Warren and Charlie and not Ted and Todd.  If it blows out to 8 or 9 billion by year end I think we can put high odds on it being Warren.

[maxthetrade]

9 hours ago, gfp said:

his screenshot is from National Indemnity Q3 NAIC filing - showing purchases of stock inside National Indemnity only.  I thought it was interesting that Buffett was buying TSM as early as August 25th at around $88/share.

 

Thanks for sharing!

[Luke]

14 hours ago, gfp said:

This screenshot is from National Indemnity Q3 NAIC filing - showing purchases of stock inside National Indemnity only.  I thought it was interesting that Buffett was buying TSM as early as August 25th at around $88/share.  Makes it more likely he continued to buy the stock after quarter end but that is a guess.

 

(I should add that several of these entries are intercompany transfers and the rightmost column is price paid, second from the right is number of shares)

 

 

He bought another billion dollars worth of TSM at around $76.84 / sh. inside Columbia Insurance Company.

 

What kind of filing is this? I dont understand how you were able to find this information. Columbia Insurance what? Would like to understand

[gfp]

These are from quarterly NAIC filings:  NAIC = National Association of Insurance Commissioners.  Columbia Insurance is a large insurance subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that goes all the way back to the Diversified Retailing days (it was a subsidiary of Diversified Retailing, the department store company).  National Indemnity even larger, as you would expect.  Other individual filers are General Re and Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance.  Some insurance subsidiaries don't file on their own because they are subsidiaries of other insurance companies.  These are screenshots because to find this information in the filing would take most people a lot of time.  Here are a few of the Q3 filings (attached) - edit: they are too big and taking too long to upload so here is one.

 

You can buy the individual filings at the naic website here https://insdata.naic.org

 

Another interesting thing you can see from these filings is the internal structure of Berkshire Hathaway through the multiple Org charts they include on what all the corporate entities are, which subsidiaries own what, etc.  Also it becomes very obvious that Berkshire went huge on affordable housing tax credits when it hired over the guy that build AIG's affordable housing business.

 

National Indemnity Q3 NAIC.pdf

Edited November 16, 2022 by gfp

[Luke]

30 minutes ago, gfp said:

These are from quarterly NAIC filings:  NAIC = National Association of Insurance Commissioners.  Columbia Insurance is a large insurance subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that goes all the way back to the Diversified Retailing days (it was a subsidiary of Diversified Retailing, the department store company).  National Indemnity even larger, as you would expect.  Other individual filers are General Re and Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance.  Some insurance subsidiaries don't file on their own because they are subsidiaries of other insurance companies.  These are screenshots because to find this information in the filing would take most people a lot of time.  Here are a few of the Q3 filings (attached) - edit: they are too big and taking too long to upload so here is one.

 

You can buy the individual filings at the naic website here https://insdata.naic.org

 

Another interesting thing you can see from these filings is the internal structure of Berkshire Hathaway through the multiple Org charts they include on what all the corporate entities are, which subsidiaries own what, etc.  Also it becomes very obvious that Berkshire went huge on affordable housing tax credits when it hired over the guy that build AIG's affordable housing business.

 

National Indemnity Q3 NAIC.pdf 37.28 MB · 1 download

Great, Thank you!!

[LC]

1 hour ago, gfp said:

Also it becomes very obvious that Berkshire went huge on affordable housing tax credits when it hired over the guy that build AIG's affordable housing business.

 

Wow - yeah they did.

 

Do you know the broad strokes of the underlying economics?

 

Is it just that they buying these tax credits for say 80cents and redeeming at par? 

Some brief research on Lihtc's indicate they are computed annually? based on the underlying property's performance (occupancy). So is BRK also making some underlying bet on affordable multi-unit housing? 

Edited November 16, 2022 by LC

[gfp]

[LC]

To my knowledge tax credits are purchased in advance by a bank (state street being the biggest at least as of a few years ago). The developer needs access to cash at day 0, not over the next ten years. So they sell the credits.

 

Now once State street or whomever owns the credits, they probably make a market on them. How those credits are bought/sold around in the secondary market, and how they are valued (and to whom they are most valuable) is more of my question. 

[gfp]

So Berkshire hired Michael Fowler to run this operation, who is the number one executive in the space.  He built a huge operation inside AIG that was called SunAmerica Affordable Housing Partners.  AIG sold it to Blackstone I think.  This is an in-house operation at Berkshire, not just a case of Berkshire buying tax credits from a bank because Berkshire has a big tax credit appetite.

 

Here is one article that mentions Berkshire's operation and Fowler -

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120412/NEWS03/120419922/oracle-of-omaha-invests-in-chicago-area-affordable-housing

[LC]

Thanks - appreciate the context. Looks like when WB mentioned a few years ago he’s be buying as many SFHs as possible….he went about it in a Berkshire-appropriate way.