Buffett/Berkshire - general news

[John Hjorth]

Posted by James [ @james22 ] in the topic about the war in Ukraine, about Mr. Tilson :

 

https://assets.empirefinancialresearch.com/uploads/2023/03/My-trip-to-Ukraine-last-week-Whitney-Tilson-3-13-23-1.pdf

 

Some interesting stuff is mentioned on p. 43 about the Howard Buffett Foundation, mentioned here for those who not read the topic about the war.

Edited March 16, 2023 by John Hjorth

[ValueMaven]

Added to BRKB in my Roth IRA (retirement account here in the US) at $297 ... personally, anything below $300 on the B's is very attractive to me.  

[throw123]

11 minutes ago, ValueMaven said:

Added to BRKB in my Roth IRA (retirement account here in the US) at $297 ... personally, anything below $300 on the B's is very attractive to me.  

agree

[CassiusKing1]

Same strategy here.  All new money goes to BRK when it's under $300.

[nwoodman]

FWIW

 

[yesman182]

From the Proxy:

 

As of the close of business on March 8, 2023, the record date for the Annual Meeting, the Corporation had outstanding and entitled to vote 590,238 shares of Class A Common Stock (hereinafter called “Class A Stock”) and 1,298,190,161 shares of Class B Common Stock (hereinafter called “Class B Stock”).

 

From the annual report: 

 

Indicate the number of shares outstanding of each of the Registrant’s classes of common stock: February 13, 2023—Class A common stock, $5 par value 590,835 shares February 13, 2023—Class B common stock, $0.0033 par value 1,301,100,243 shares

 

So if my math and understanding is correct they repurchased 597 class A shares and 2,910,082 class b shares between  feb 13th and march 8th. That would mean WEB spent around 1.1 Billion in 20 trading days and Berkshire has only gotten cheaper since March 8th. Hopefully WEB is still buying back shares.  

[Monsieur_dee]

Thanks for the update. Seems to be buying at prices he was passing or slowing down on last year. 

[John Hjorth]

Thank you, @yesman182,

 

Good one. Thanks for sharing the calculation. Yes, let's hope Berkshire really starts shovelling shares in while the stock is following the market downwards, in periods of time even below 300 for the B.

 

And your post also informing us the proxy is here.

[gfp]

9 hours ago, yesman182 said:

From the Proxy:

 

As of the close of business on March 8, 2023, the record date for the Annual Meeting, the Corporation had outstanding and entitled to vote 590,238 shares of Class A Common Stock (hereinafter called “Class A Stock”) and 1,298,190,161 shares of Class B Common Stock (hereinafter called “Class B Stock”).

 

From the annual report: 

 

Indicate the number of shares outstanding of each of the Registrant’s classes of common stock: February 13, 2023—Class A common stock, $5 par value 590,835 shares February 13, 2023—Class B common stock, $0.0033 par value 1,301,100,243 shares

 

So if my math and understanding is correct they repurchased 597 class A shares and 2,910,082 class b shares between  feb 13th and march 8th. That would mean WEB spent around 1.1 Billion in 20 trading days and Berkshire has only gotten cheaper since March 8th. Hopefully WEB is still buying back shares.  

 

Yep, that is right - about $1.16 Billion worth between 2/13 and 3/8 if you use $305/B-share as a guess on avg. cost.

 

Similarly, about $1.845 Billion worth of repurchases since 12/31 if you use $305/B-share as an avg. cost.

 

3/8 share count is 2.183547 Billion B-share equivalents ($641 Billion market cap)

3/8 share count is 1,455,698 A-share equivalents.

[sleepydragon]

10 hours ago, yesman182 said:

From the Proxy:

 

As of the close of business on March 8, 2023, the record date for the Annual Meeting, the Corporation had outstanding and entitled to vote 590,238 shares of Class A Common Stock (hereinafter called “Class A Stock”) and 1,298,190,161 shares of Class B Common Stock (hereinafter called “Class B Stock”).

 

From the annual report: 

 

Indicate the number of shares outstanding of each of the Registrant’s classes of common stock: February 13, 2023—Class A common stock, $5 par value 590,835 shares February 13, 2023—Class B common stock, $0.0033 par value 1,301,100,243 shares

 

So if my math and understanding is correct they repurchased 597 class A shares and 2,910,082 class b shares between  feb 13th and march 8th. That would mean WEB spent around 1.1 Billion in 20 trading days and Berkshire has only gotten cheaper since March 8th. Hopefully WEB is still buying back shares.  

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. 

[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