Buffett/Berkshire - general news

[gfp]

11 minutes ago, sleepydragon said:

If I remember correctly, someday after 3/8 I was looking at A shares’s volume, and noticed its ADV was higher than its historical ADV. 

 

The reported volumes have been rising, but it is hard to tell what is real volume since the advent of fractional share trading.  A-share volumes are actually a tiny fraction of what gets reported as volume.  I think Berkshire and their order execution partners (probably Wallachbeth capital, who they seem to use for almost everything) have a good handle on what the actual daily volumes are on A-shares.

[Blugolds]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-18/warren-buffett-in-contact-with-biden-officials-on-banking-crisis?leadSource=uverify wall

[Blugolds]

If you are unable to view due to paywall

 

Link here works:

 

https://archive.ph/W35zj

[RadMan24]

Interesting thread on twitter on CS; out of my playbook but thought I'd share (click on each thread to get translate option):

 

 

[crs223]

How good does it feel to own the company that POTUS and the banks are going to for salvation?  Bonus: CEO puts his shareholders first and will only swing at fat pitches.  Double-bonus: stock is cheap enough that WEB is buying right now.  Sold the last of my ATCO yesterday and bought BRK.

[yesman182]

Yeah, his rationality, understanding of financial history and patience is second to none. His story of trying to get an extra tenth of a point in interest rates has jumped out at me recently. At some point at an annual meeting he said he doesn’t understand why people take risk with short term money, because if you get an extra tenth of a point and earned it since the mayflower landed you would have almost doubled your money. The point to me was don’t reach for a few extra basis points. I am not a banking expert and I don’t know what hedges BAC might have, but in hindsight it seems like going long when rates were near historic lows, was reaching for the 1/10th of a point WEB talked about in his story. I am happy WEB stuck with the Tbills, hopefully he continues to out them to work. Finally, I hope he answers a lot of questions at the annual meeting and doesn’t spend 2 hours going down memory lane, but either way I will be tuned in. 

[LC]

How do you reconcile that with Berkshire owning a held-to-maturity’s worth of BAC?

[james22]

6 hours ago, crs223 said:

How good does it feel to own the company that POTUS and the banks are going to for salvation?  Bonus: CEO puts his shareholders first and will only swing at fat pitches.  Double-bonus: stock is cheap enough that WEB is buying right now.  Sold the last of my ATCO yesterday and bought BRK.

 

Great.

 

Just hoping Buffett remembers BRK is his legacy, not "saving" the banking system (again).

 

I'll add Mon morning if there's no announcement before then.

[yesman182]

6 hours ago, LC said:

How do you reconcile that with Berkshire owning a held-to-maturity’s worth of BAC?

I prefer the the held to maturity bonds vs a bunch of crypto or VC loans, so it could be worse! 

[LearningMachine]

9 hours ago, LC said:

How do you reconcile that with Berkshire owning a held-to-maturity’s worth of BAC?

 

What if you owned the income from those held-to-maturity's worth of BAC, and you had purchased those held-to-maturities at 1/10th the cost (because of bank's own leverage), and the purchase of those was really funded by millions of customers' money needed to clear their rent/mortgage/credit card check spread across 1000s of branches across the country, and it is a lot of friction for those customers to go change their paystub deposit accounts with their employers and autopay settings with their rent/mortgage/credit card companies, and now they are hearing stories about smaller banks going bust, and feeling that their money is safe. 

 

And, you had the patience for those held-to-maturities to get deployed to higher earning loans/securities as they mature, just like Buffett had the patience that the building he bought in NYC will get rented out at higher rates over time. 

Edited March 19, 2023 by LearningMachine

[ASTA]

This week, however, Mr. Munger struck a much more serious tone when he told me: “I’d prefer to live in a world where nobody did anything undisciplined or stupid and so forth, but we don’t live in that kind of a world. And therefore the decisions have to be made for the way the world is, not the way we’d like it to be.”

 

He added: “The way the world is, the government had no alternative but to back all deposits. Or we would have had the biggest goddamn bunch of bank runs you ever saw.” 

 

WSJ on Munger.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-gets-lost-when-you-rescue-markets-d5e4bc32?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

Edited March 20, 2023 by ASTA

[John Hjorth]

Here is the link to a tweet containing an article by Max Olson about See's Candies from September 2007, which I don't recall to have seen before.

 

Max Olson is the guy who in 2015 made a compilation of the Berkshire Shareholder Letters with a foreword by Mr. Buffett. The compilation is still available on www.lulu.com here . Max is a CoBF member btw.

[Spooky]

13 hours ago, ASTA said:

This week, however, Mr. Munger struck a much more serious tone when he told me: “I’d prefer to live in a world where nobody did anything undisciplined or stupid and so forth, but we don’t live in that kind of a world. And therefore the decisions have to be made for the way the world is, not the way we’d like it to be.”

 

He added: “The way the world is, the government had no alternative but to back all deposits. Or we would have had the biggest goddamn bunch of bank runs you ever saw.” 

 

WSJ on Munger.

 

Got a source to the full article / interview?

[gfp]

Greg bought the dip again -

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1646348/000108131623000009/xslF345X04/wf-form4_167942916524621.xml

 

(55 A-shares, $24.6m)

Edited March 21, 2023 by gfp

[ValueMaven]

Love this guy ... he has about ~$100M worth of stock now ... wow ... all out of his own pocket 

[longlake95]

45 minutes ago, ValueMaven said:

Love this guy ... he has about ~$100M worth of stock now ... wow ... all out of his own pocket 

only 800M to go….

[yesman182]

Glad he read the proxy 

[longlake95]

36 minutes ago, yesman182 said:

Glad he read the proxy 

yup, I love Buffett still remains rational and looks to protect BRK (and the shareholders) in the future, by “nudging” the board to own more stock. Again, totally opposite to most boards where directors own little stock. I’d love too see everyone on the board REALLY scale up their holdings.

Edited March 22, 2023 by longlake95

[Spekulatius]

Haha - swingtrader Warren:

 

[spartansaver]

55 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

Haha - swingtrader Warren:

 

Cool find. 

 

I'd be curious to see this on a dollar basis. I would guess holding longer naturally makes the ones he's held longest the highest dollar basis. I also think it shows a strategy of buying and killing. As in start to buy something and then kill it so it leaves the portfolio quickly.  

[adesigar]

How many of those were Lou Simpson?

[DooDiligence]

2 hours ago, spartansaver said:

Cool find. 

 

I'd be curious to see this on a dollar basis. I would guess holding longer naturally makes the ones he's held longest the highest dollar basis. I also think it shows a strategy of buying and killing. As in start to buy something and then kill it so it leaves the portfolio quickly.  

 

So maybe the Oracle does a ton more DD after an initial purchase, just like a lot of people 

[spartansaver]

18 minutes ago, DooDiligence said:

 

So maybe the Oracle does a ton more DD after an initial purchase, just like a lot of people 

This is my strategy, nothing gets the mind working like real dollars at risk. 

[IceCreamMan]

23 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

swingtrader Warren

 

Does anyone else wonder if he sort of HAS to do this to prevent even more cloning that pushes prices up prohibitively? If all of his purchases were "forever" buys, then the initial price spikes on the news of him buying would be even higher, preventing him from accumulating as big a position as he might want. So maybe he needs to mix in some low conviction buys that he's likely to sell after a couple of quarters to dilute his overall signaling to the market.

[competitive-advantage]

We need to differentiate between Educational Buffett, 2023 Buffett, Turnaround Buffett, and Asset-based Buffett.

• Educational Buffett refers to Buffett sharing knowledge with followers who often have less than $1 million in investments.
• 2023 Buffett represents Buffett with significant cash reserves, which limits his investment opportunities due to the sheer size of the investments required.
• Turnaround Buffett focuses on companies in crisis with low prices compared to their true business value.
• Asset-based Buffett looks for businesses like oil companies with a high proportion of assets compared to their price.

Buffett evaluates the best opportunity, and if he had a smaller sum to invest in a single great company for the long term, he would likely do that, unless there were other major opportunities available.