How to Increase Berkshire Share Price?

[DooDiligence]

In my opinion they positioned themselves well to be able to ignore calls for them to act now and to ignore people on the sidelines shouting Swing You Bum!

 

The OXY preferred and warrants deal was a decent use of cash, but there's plenty of cash left.

 

In my opinion the float liability offsets the cash balance almost exactly when the market is fairly high like now, so there's no real cash drag, they're just earning the return on their non-cash assets, and I'm happy for them to wait. And when the market falls seriously, maybe it a year or two, and prospective returns improve, there will be opportunities for some greatly value-enhancing deals like the OXY one and possibly even some large acquisitions, which would then be leveraged by the use of float-funded capital. I'm happy for them to keep waiting for the fat pitch and I'm happy for them to limit my downside risk so well while producing something around 10% compound growth in IV.

 

I think many many others simply see the cash as a wasted opportunity, but I'm happy for them to be patient and just drip-feed it into suitable stocks while waiting for the fat pitches. I'm probably in the minority.

 

You are not alone.

[SwedishValue]

What we haven’t seen much of during the first 50 years however, is Buffett having a security available at a price he likes, and pulling out the peashooter instead of his elephant gun - like the way he’s done with share repurchases so far.

[xo 1]

What we haven’t seen much of during the first 50 years however, is Buffett having a security available at a price he likes, and pulling out the peashooter instead of his elephant gun - like the way he’s done with share repurchases so far.

For all the "explanations" about wanting to treat shareholders as partners and not as counterparties and wanting to be certain that a shareholder contemplating selling has all the information that the shareholder needs, I concur.  Over the past decade, I have spent more time trying to understand this aspect of BRK than any other.  The retrospectively silly pegs to BV; the nibbling; the continued affirmations that they will act aggressively.  I just don't get it.  Still, I like the increase in runrate.  If BRK will repurchase $1.7 billion of shares a quarter, this will start to become material very quickly.  It was 2X the Amazon purchase.  Annualized, that's approximately 50% of each of Ted and Todd's pool, it is equal to Charlie's entire stake, it is a large portion of cash earned from operating businesses in the quarter, etc., so while it is well below what I'd like to see, it is moving in the right direction and, for last quarter only, may be reaching the point where any more aggressive purchasing could start to impact share price.