Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.A)

Symbols:
Authors:

All Comments on BRK.A

  • commenter
    helplessobse
    rver
    Jul 04 11:06 AM
    Berkshire Hathaway: At a Good Buying Opportunity [view article]
    Thanks for the simple evaluation model. I own the B shares and they have dropped from about 5.0K to 3.8K so I was wondering when investors will come to their senses. For BRK this is feeding time, assets are at distressed prices, and Buffett knows how to evaluate them. He recently picked up some investments at 63 cents on the dollar. What LBO manager you know regularly does this for their shareholders? Reply
  • commenter
    Lisa
    Jul 04 07:11 AM
    Berkshire Hathaway: At a Good Buying Opportunity [view article]
    "You gain access to Warren Buffett's stock selection ability at a very low cost." The cost is priced in to the stock, and you're really paying up for it. Reply
  • commenter
    kotika98
    Jul 03 01:43 PM
    Tempting Buffett [view article]
    the rumor that he was buying AXP or about to make a bid for the whole thing were circulating when it was at 50 bucks. Where are the rumor mongers now at 39? Reply
  • commenter
    RogerScott
    Jul 03 11:30 AM
    My Website
    Tempting Buffett [view article]
    I think he is buying more of 2 or 3 of his big four. I think AXP is one of them. We will know soon.
    Reply
  • commenter
    Ishortyou
    Jul 03 10:37 AM
    Tempting Buffett [view article]
    time to buy some berkshire stock! Reply
  • commenter
    maz
    Jul 03 10:21 AM
    Tempting Buffett [view article]
    Agree that the comment on the stock being down 15% not being the kind of performance to be expected from Buffett is ludicrous. Anyone who has followed Berkshire for any length of time knows that the shares often go down quite a lot - just like any other stock!

    Now if you'd said "value" instead of "price" that would make more sense     Reply
  • commenter
    jimmysmith
    Jul 03 10:05 AM
    Tempting Buffett [view article]
    also, if you think Buffett will buy Lehman or Merrill you don't know Buffett very well. he was burned once and won't likely be back. he hates, HATES, Wall St.! Reply
  • commenter
    RogerDodger
    Jul 03 05:08 AM
    Tempting Buffett [view article]
    "The stock is down about 15% year to date—not the kind of performance one would ordinarily expect from a company run by Warren Buffett."

    The company could be doing great, that has nothing to do with the price of the stock.

    "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine." -Warren Buffet

    Reply
  • commenter
    UncleLongHai
    r
    Jul 02 04:03 PM
    What Mohnish Pabrai Didn't Know Hurt Him Badly [view article]
    The questions about Pabrai don't stop with Delta and Pinnacle though. Here is a list of some recent investments, and his returns since he reported them:

    HNR -13%
    FFH +36%
    CCRT -83%
    TX +25%
    CRYP -43%
    PNCL -83%
    MDC -23%
    SGU -41%
    USAP -6%
    LEA -62%
    SHLD -28%
    ATSG -88%
    DFC -99%

    BRKA/BRKB isn't listed here which he exited at a decent gain.

    So this isn't a case of one or two investments going bad, nor of them declining just a little. 4 out of 14 declined more than 80%. His motto is "heads I win, tails I lose a little", which clearly isn't panning out.

    Maybe these will all turn out to be TSO investments that rise from the ashes. It is probably too early to pass any judgments.     Reply
  • commenter
    onestep@atim
    e
    Jul 01 10:56 AM
    What Mohnish Pabrai Didn't Know Hurt Him Badly [view article]
    Pabrai professes a rigorous adherence to Buffet's basic approach. My biggest concern for Pabrai is that Buffet's two rules are, 1) don't lose money, and 2) never forget rule 1. Buffet has walked the talk and followed those rules closely. As I understand it, the DFC fiasco resulted in a permanent loss of the entire investment. How does that square eith Buffet's approach, and if not, how to fess up, what to learn to prevent a repeat? Reply
  • commenter
    buyitcheap
    Jun 30 02:25 PM
    Are Dividend Growth Investors Idiots? [view article]
    I enjoyed your article and I don't think we're in disagreement fundamentally, the distinction I was attempting to make,and I guess poorly, wasn't market timing. It's capital preservation.

    By way of example, back in September, The dividend newsletter of Morningstar was touting CSE (Capital Source) around 23-35, nice dividend, etc. 5 months later, after its mess with bank buyout, it was at 10 and is still around 10. an 8% stop would've gotten you out around 21-22. If you believed in the company, after doing additional analysis still, you could have almost doubled your position with the same capital. That's the key here - you have your capital, you haven't risked new money, and you still have the opportunity to buy value and a good dividend. As you know the market is littered with good dividend payers (Lucent?) that went to zero. I just don't want to take that ride.

    I definitely buy into the dividend investing model, but I also very much like to protect against the permanent impairment/loss of capital.

    I look forward to future articles.

    Reply
  • commenter
    buyitcheap
    Jun 29 12:13 PM
    Are Dividend Growth Investors Idiots? [view article]
    Oh, now that's a little disingenuous. Lynch was a fund manager with a vested interest in managing your money. Buffett well, he's as much a private equity buyer as anything and had an enormous float cache from his insurance companies to buy from so he could act opportunistically whenever he felt like it. Interestingly, he wound up buying a bunch of companies I'd invested in Dairy Queen, Franchise Finance, Fruit of the Loom and a couple of others which robbed me of a good long term investment. :-)

    If you're buying, you should be buying after that 50% loss. The truth is, Peter Lynch as a fund manager could not have stayed in his post being brilliant if he either didn't trim losses quickly OR averaged down so much that he could help but show a gain a few months/years later. I don't know if I'm sold on averaging down, I'd rather dump out at 8% max and then if the thesis on the company is still solid but just had a one time "event" i.e. a strike or power failure at aplan or other such issue that gave me a better opportunity to buy cheaper, much cheaper with capital I've preserved. Best to all.


    On Jun 21 10:05 AM silverwolf wrote:

    > hi Lynn, I just wanted to point out what Peter Lynch and Warren
    > B. reminded investors in the past. If you can't watch your stock
    > fallling 50% of the value and have to sell it, then you can't be
    > a investor in stocks. If you hold a quality company and the stock
    > drops in price without serious flaws in business fundamentals then
    > you should hold on to the stock regardless price drop. Otherwise
    > you will continue to lose your capital. If you look at most high
    > quality stocks that kept going up in the past in the long term, most
    > of them fluctuate about 50% from year's highest to year's lowest
    > price. If you decide to sell because it dropped 8%, you are just
    > going to lose your capital on a really good stock, assuming you did
    > your homework in picking strong business fundamentals.     Reply
  • commenter
    Geoff
    Considine
    Jun 27 05:33 PM
    My Website
    Why Volatility and Beta Matter [view article]
    I wonder if The Motley Fool has published a retraction or a Mea Culpa?

    finance.yahoo.com/echa...;range=1y;compare=ivv+...

    Yes, Beta and volatility matter. Just ask people who invested in Morgan Stanley!     Reply
  • commenter
    Rohan
    Jun 27 12:49 PM
    What Mohnish Pabrai Didn't Know Hurt Him Badly [view article]
    I've been thinking the same thing for some time now about Buffett and macro. I love him to death but I have to say it's a little annoying that as much as he speaks to not paying attention to macro, he has an extremely good hold of the 30,000 foot view of the world. There are nitpicky things that aren't worth one's time, like whether GDP has a plus or minus sign in front of it for 3Q (bottom line is, things aren't well); but as FPA's Steve Romick said at the Value Investing Congress in May, while he almost never discusses macro, it would be putting his clients' capital at risk if he DIDN'T have a grasp of the situation now. His colleague Bob Rodriguez has clearly been all over it the past year, too.

    That said, I think Buffett et al's main thrust is to suggest to the individual investor that over the long haul, making oneself a bottom-up analyst will pay far more dividends than spending too much time on macro; engaging in the latter risks missing the forest for the trees.

    Meanwhile, by the way, I think it's very premature to say Mohnish is wrong about PNCL. Their original NW contract resulted in a big claim during bankruptcy. Not that they'd get 80c on the dollar for it this time, but it seems like it would take an extremely low-odds chain of events from here for PNCL to ultimately have less than $3 equity value (even in BK).

    Seeing as you've read MP's books, you must be familiar with his rollercoaster ride in TSO (from $7 to $1 and back), and I think Frontline followed a similar path. We'll see if this one goes the way of those or the way of DFC.     Reply
  • commenter
    weiwentg
    Jun 27 07:49 AM
    Fairholme Fund's Stock Picks: XTO, SHLD, BRK.A, WCG [view article]
    probably no one is going to read this article by now, but Bruce disposed of his holdings in Progressive. he's been buying more Saint Joe (JOE). Reply

Trading Center