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  • Notes On The 2011 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report, Part 3 (On Acquisitions) [View article]
    There are TV commercials on the financial news channels that use the word "Aquire" and the the word "Gold". Think of how that compares with aquiring Lubrizol, IBM, or Burlington Northern Santa Fe. The aquiring gold commercial really bothers me because they should be saying purchasing or buying not aquiring. When Carlos Slim purcahse millions of onces of silver maybe that was an aquisition?
    May 6 05:46 AM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Berkshire Hathaway Is Not Mispriced [View article]
    It may not be mispriced for today but it could be for tomorrow. Cash Flow is something that evolves over time. Estimates out in the future can give you a range of prices with a range of returns on the purchase of shares. Mispriced buying is in relationship to alternative investments available at the same time.
    May 6 05:41 AM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Berkshire Hathaway Is Not Mispriced [View article]
    It may not be mispriced as you say for today but it maybe for tomorrow.
    May 6 05:36 AM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Why I'd Avoid Buying Berkshire Hathaway Now [View article]

    There is more calculus required to figure out how the dividends of underlying companies verse buying Brk shares directly benefit the owners. One is that dividends are taxable and the brk shares are one of the most tax advantaged "mutual funds" you can find because the company neither distributes capital gains nor dividends or interest to common shareholders. If you believe the shares are under valued it also may not make much difference except then you might be right to avoid them because they will remain undervalued relative to component parts of the company that independently trade on the markets. There is no other way to buy shares of BNSF but you can buy the competition which is Union Pacific instead. Where I live in the columbia gorge there is one of each rail road on either side of the columbia running east and west and I wouldl not bet against either of those two. There were people invested in BNSF long before Berkshire Hathaway became intersested at lower prices per share maybe on an aboslute value basis as at one time the shares came with large land holding that became i think Plum Creek the reit and a big gold mining outfit and a big oil and gas outfit. Warren Buffet missed out on those goodies being a late comer. The company profile is more preditable now with a solid transportation focus and less difficult to quantify assets. Maybe I am incorrect and the sum of the parts is lower today because of inflation than it seems and Buffet did a longer term analysis but that is not his style when it comes to looking at return on capital and basis fundimental valuation. Confused at what interest rates are to base a fundimental valuation on now? It is tricky because inflation of commodity prices and even the US dollar overseas and on this continent too could be masking deflation based on different ways of measuring it.. Warren Buffet might have bought BNSF based on a 3 to 5 % current interest rate environment which gives his original investment x number of years to compound to an expected level of appreciation which has to run out at least 5 years if not 20. That means that the BNSF purchase might not even be reflected in the share price of Brk shares certainly not at the present market quote but given time they will float the share value higher and probably do so effortlessly like magic boyancy.
    Mar 11 08:29 AM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Why I'd Avoid Buying Berkshire Hathaway Now [View article]
    Berrkshire Hathaway is a mature company. Apparently Warren Buffet has his own private portfolios outside of Berkshire Hathaway as he does not tend to buy his own shares and he does not have much of a record of building castles or places with real moats like Larry Elison types do. When he gets his money back from investments outside of his Berkshire Hathaway holdings he is not usually buying shares on a personal basis. Clearly he as the right to some diversifaction too. Apparently he did buy back some shares in the last market dip but in that case it was I think Berkshire Hathaway buying back it's own shares or just a few of them . Maybe it was an over hang of sellers getting rid of the B shares since so many got issued with the purchase of Burlington Northern? One can see from this that maybe the company might be better off spit up into sections with smaller capital pools to invest from and some limited independence. Management after Buffet will certainly consider all options as time goes by. These is also evidence that Warren has creates some investment pools that are separate. Geico , Mid America, and the Reinsurnance units all have semi independent investment portfolios and more recently the people he has been considering for future management possitions maybe running his own separate portfolio or parts of the Berkshire Empire on what internally might look like a separate investment portfolio for each. If you want to hire someone who has a record of investing that is one thing but then to bring them on , you don't want to give them independence but try them out first. Berkshire Hathaway is not going to collapse and disaapear anytime in the near future. When you think about how big Standard Oil would have been had it not been broken up you can just put together all the separate pieces most of which have grown ever since the break up and you find the whole is larger than at the time of the break up. That appears to be true when you start putting Ma Bell back together too. You just add Verizon and ATT and thats much larger than large cap right there without adding the other parts . That maybe a cause ot analyze companies that broke up into smaller units because maybe the whole of Berkshire Hathaway is instantly worth a lot more than the whole that way although some components of the company broken off would have a much faster growth rate than say the Utilities parts including the railroad. That depends on whether the railroad business does become a growth area. When The former denver owner of BNSF sold out he figured that the company had totally matured and went into the entertainment business among others instead. That left it open to a Buffet aquisition and who would have expected that He wanted the whole thing. The reason is it may transform into a growth company with low cost co generation nantural gas powering it on the rails instead of diesel and trucking going from being interstate to local and rail with trucks also becoiming hybrid electric gas generated power vechicles. There is also an issue of Chinese exportation of coal and other resources that mean rails like those that hit pacific ports don't have to send as many empty train cars back to the coast after they deliver the chinese goods to the heartland and no wider panama canal is going to change those facts although there is the issue of the erie canal and if it is for sale cheap again.
    Mar 11 08:11 AM | 1 Like Like |Link to Comment
  • Why You Don't Want To Compete Against A Berkshire Company [View article]
    A "mote" is a euphamism for a 'natural monopoly'. Carlos Slim winks at Warren Buffet knowing that he has the passion for the same sort of companies with unbreachable motes . What is interesting is the types of companies that have monopolies in Mexico because of government protectionism mainly might not be companies with natural monopolies in the US. There is a difference between Mexican telephone business and the greater competition seen in the US. One has to wonder just how long Slim's concentrated telephone monopoly power would exist in Mexico if there was free competition the way there is in the US. In Mexico and other countries that mainly have a single national phone company , companies don't have to immediately plow more capital into new systems just to compete and they don't have to compete as much on price. Companies with natural monopolies irrespective of the government in Mexico are easy to pick out including beer manufacturing, soft drinks, and cement distribution and manufacturing which via Cemex even has some natural monoply powers across the border here. Government controlled Pemex is no natural monopoly in oil and gas there which includes the Mexican gulf drilling areas. Pemex is an inefficent subsidized industry that should have been broken up for the benefit of Mexican financial progress. The interesting thing about Pemex is that either Slim or Buffet could buy it and turn it into a cash cow in a way the government there can't the way the Russian billionaires made out like bandits buying ex soviet collective industries for pennies on the dollar. There are all sorts of American companies that have natural monopolies powers but not necessarily an inexpensive price tag to purchase ownership of these. Burlington Northern Santa Fe is one such natural monopoly that was priced at fair value when Buffet made his offer to buy it . It was fair value based on the companies contemporary numbers not it's future value based on speculative assumptions about the future. It is a lot cheaper to put good on a train car than on a truck bed maybe even so after trucks come out with hybrid engines the way the train locomotives work converting diesel and now natural gas to electric current that more efficently turns the wheels. The future of the rails especially giants like BNSF might be public loading terminals where smaller cargo trailers the size of uhaul vechilces can be loaded on trains to move people cross country as one example of something that does not happen to offen yet but may. i can imagine starting a new cargo business with much smaller cargo boxes that snap together on top of each other and then on train bed cars. I could even imagine RVs and homes being created that could be moved whole. The rails have the right away and just watch how hard it is to get a right of way for a pipeline from canada these days.
    Mar 8 11:01 PM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Regulators are taking the fizz out of a report from a consumer group finding that Coca-Cola (KO -0.7%) and Pepsi (PEP -0.8%) contain a chemical that causes cancer in animals when given in large doses. The FDA disputes the conclusion that the sodas pose a health risk.  [View news story]
    Congress should take a hard look at the asbestos trust created to aid victims because it appears that there are far fewer victims than estimated and the funds left should be returned to the shareholders of the companies the attornies bankrupted. There is a chemical in Alcohol that will kill a mouse if put a mouse in a bottle of vodca or rum. Now a days sugar alone is being considered as a dangerous addictive drug by the same idiots who keep pumping this stuff out in the media. Now that the miso asbestos commericals are coming on the air every moment of every day saying that asbestos lung cancer is essentially the same thing as lung cancer we know that attorneys are just crooks trying to get their share of the miso funds. The air is dangerous , the water is dangerous and an asteroid with coke and pepsi advertised on it is heading toward earth. Yeah right just like peak oil which turned out to be a total crock.
    Mar 7 01:57 AM | 1 Like Like |Link to Comment
  • Is the Fed's zero-interest-rate policy causing Warren Buffett to lose his edge? Bill Gross suggests as much in his monthly letter, noting Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) has long benefited from its ability to borrow for free from its insurance float. But in today's environment, "almost any large business or wealthy individual can borrow or lever up with minimal interest expense," Gross observes. (earlier)  [View news story]
    Maybe so. Low interest rates can fuel a lot of things including a bubble in energy resources. The news that Peak Oil is a complete sham and US oil and natural gas reserves now exceed Saudi Arabia's reserves is party what lead to the price collapse of natural gas. Easy Money is not going to stop that from happening and it actually should put more gas on line than ever would have been thought possible in the future which does not bode well for market prices or necessary viable returns on the investment. It is pretty amazing to see a report that the State of Pennsylvania took in something like 325 million dollars in oil and gas royalties in some recent time reporting period! Low interest rates will help to collaspe OPEC permanently but are hardly the only factor as Fracking and other new technology such as horizonal drilling spreads over seas and gets compounded with Tar Oil Sand technology that can make that reserve almost as cheap as sweet crude drilling. Buffet will maintain his advantage owning virtual monopolies where supply is unlikely to exceed demand as in the case of a lot of places cheap to free capital is flowing. People are not thinking out things very well backing all the commodity reserves development going on. It is probably better owning the gas pipe lines and the railways and not to own what technology is obviously creating one of the largest glutts in history we have ever seen for black gold and real gold, and methane gas. The history of the development of the reserves has come so fast it could have blindsided you. It sure did blindside the peak oil proponents. I was laughing at them at the time because it was obviously nonsense. I had even read about what Occidental petroleum was quietly doing with old supposedly spent wells in California. What this all means is the reserves are almost unlimited or will soon become so enormous that US oil and natural gas companies will be crying for some new OPEC Type organization to protect them. It will be a few years yet so you don't have to sell out of oil, natural gas yet but just beware that this thing is extrapolating itself in a way that will pay geometric returns in inexepensive nearly inexaustable energy resources. Another big worry there is Chinese propensity to hoard resources. If supplies grow beware that is a bad idea for the chinese ..Even if copper is rare, low cost energy makes it possible to mine lower quality mines around the world at a more reasonable price for wasting the land to get a pound out of the ground for every ten tons as a possible example of that kind of capital outlay is . The strangest thing is how chinese energy consumption is seen as competitive with US energy consumption when the energy they use does so much of our manufacturing these days. There are big problems with deflation when it comes to things related to cheap energy. So yes Buffet will have competition for capital when its so cheap and easy but it won't mean that all that capital will be deployed as thoughtfully. The build out of the commodities markets with the hoarders in gold and everything else makes me really uneasy. There is some connection between low interest rates and gold prices being high. It makes no sense just as it makes no sense for gold to go up in price fanatically when interest rates are unusually high because high interest rates may be more risky but they actually pay off better than gold will. Imagine being able to compound 12 percent interest rates for 20 years or more starting in the 1980s instead of having to bother with stocks. Most of the guru stock investors have not exceeded a 12 percent compound rate of return and of course they did take more risk supposedly.
    Feb 28 10:55 PM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Warren Buffett: Out Of Proportion To Reality? [View article]
    The reason why Buffet brings up gold in his analysis is because gold is competing with stocks for capital. He does not bring up the illequitity of gold in terms of the spread between ask and buy even on the spot market. There certainly is a cult of buffet and now a cult of Donald Trump and Oprah too if that makes any sense at all. Maybe we need a Warren Buffet Financial Channel on cable with Buffet 24/7 broadcasting from Omaha., the navel of the earth studios, Ever owned gold when the price crashes? It does not look so good then and gold mines stop mining at some point because they lose money doing it. There is a lot of gold out there more than anyone needs especially as the price is strastospheric. There are lots of substitutes like copper as a conductor. gold may be better and non corrosive but the trade off for copper is way worthwhile. Now if you wanted to pave the path to your home with gold bricks there are also great alternatives like concrete blocks or flag stone and those alternative cost so much less there is no demand for gold bricks not even in hollywood where when they need gold bricks they spray paint strofoam. There was a time when Platinum cost less than gold like 1/10 less than gold and then came the california requirment for catalytic converters in cars. One of those ruined my car at the time, That changed the whole market dynamic for platinum until soon when the corning ceramic catalytic converter comes out and then industrial uses for platinum may not be the greatest. The dream of gold bugs is for gold to be re-monitized because there can't be enough just for the US Federal Government to do business alone let alone the rest of the world. If governments had to buy gold to do that the price could skyrocket not to 5000 dollars an once but 40,000 dollars an once before governments just started confiscating the stuff FDR style. Gold could become so expensive that just looking at it would be worth $1. People could go to gold parlors and pay to look at gold....like the serentity gold chamber in Los Angeles , a solid gold think tank , that costs $400 an hour to mediate in side. Thankfully it is shaped like an egyptian pyramid so there is also free pyramid power included in the price. Right now a lot of gold nuts would pay as much as people pay to go up in space with the Russians to the space station just to get a look inside fort Knox. That would be a great way for the US government to make money honestly with $50,000 tours of Fort Knox. Buffet is telling people or at least hinting unlike george soros, that gold is in a super bubble at the moment. An indian temple was recently discovered to have billions of dollars worth of gold oranments burried in vaults there. If India put that gold on the market or monitized it would would affect mining companies and world gold prices. There is some trip line price where most of the nible holders of gold are prepared to sell in advance which means the bubble will pop instantly. You are not going to see anything like that with PG or IBM or Coke or Burlington Northern. Book value at Berkshire Hathaway is an indicator that only applies to berkshire hathway and is not quoted by valueline or s&p in the same way. It is not a subjective measurement but probably is an estimation like a lot of other things in life. There is always the chance that buffet could be an even bigger version of Bernie Madoff but not likely. The US congress certainly is savvy financially in a Bernie Madoff way and people still vote for them. The problem with gold is that it has to revert to the mean like everything else does and it does not reproduce or have growth like better companies do. It sits there and looks pretty. Maybe it even looks devine to a lot of people. What gold really does as it reverts to the mean over time is maintain a realtively constant value . This could really change if there were some new industrial use. It is possible in the future that a lot of gold might be needed for solar collectors that will make a moon base or mars base functional and then all that gold would be exported from the planet and people would be screaming that the aliens were getting away with our gold. Aliens may actually come to earth and steal all the gold and then whats left in the ground will be worht billions per once.
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    Feb 27 08:43 PM | 1 Like Like |Link to Comment
  • Buffett Bought IBM For A Good Reason [View article]
    One can just buy Berkshire Hathaway shares to get adequate exposure to IBM shares and maybe at a lower net price than buying those shares outright because of the mix of assets owned by Berkshire that act as a value counterbalance at any given time. It is quite possible IBM shares are over priced at the moment with buffet in the bathtub buying it raises the water level in the bath even as he swallows as much water as he can. Archemedies discovered this long ago. The bath tub level measures mass no mater what. Right now the buffet premium is too high maybe to buy shares of IBM unless the shares were really depressed more than realized in the recession and are still becoming more boyant over the surface of the water. One can probably wait and see the shares fall 10 percent or more and then you will see both buffet buying more shares and ibm repurchasing its own shares. A good time for you to do it. An investment in Berkshire instead gives you more diversifited after recession upside with out all that risk that might have a 5 year turn around. When Ibm swoons the Wells Fargo shares may become the market cats pajamas so you could see a brk.B share go to 130 dollars (with the markets) Maybe Ibm shares go to $400 a share but it should take 5-10 years for that to happen. maybe 12.
    Feb 25 05:43 PM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Buffett Bought IBM For A Good Reason [View article]
    Buffet owns other companies that pays for IBM cloud computing resources annually and must see the bills go up year after year without too many other options. It used to be that IBM, big blue, would sell you a main frame and back in the day it came with those amazingly primative magnetic tape reals and before that punch cards. IBM never had the explosive growth of companies like Intel and Cisco. It would have been a much different company if it did a different deal with
    Bill Gates or just kept intel shares it once owned. I know an OS2 programmer who was an IBM believer much longer than Buffet is. Buffet waited until IBM had a longer track record of cloud services success. It is pretty amazing that IBM is still a major player after the internet computer explosion. Management has been careful most of the time to buy back shares when it makes sense to do so over the years and cultivate the businesses they own that really have no competition. I am not really aware of what if any cash hoard they have or will accummulate but I would think that the company has the ability to buy up other cloud computing resources or other computer nitches when they find opportunities. When that happens and billions are getting spent the share prices swoons as Buffet says as value is enhanced. I think Buffet know the company is ship shape compared to others on a financial basis. A company like Oracle maybe just as great but it is harder to read the finances there. One thing about Oracle is that it still has a strong owner as manager with substantial interest in the financial outcomes of the company success. Compare that to HP where the founding families have very dilute interests in the company. Back when HP was unstoppable the founders families treated the company like their baby. IBM services are wrold wide and serve companies from finance to transportation. IBM does not lose clients to the competition. what competition?
    Feb 25 05:35 PM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • PepsiCo Dividend Is More Controversial Than You Think [View article]
    So what if the dividend is "at risk" it won't hurt pepsi investors not to receive the "evil unearned income" and be taxed on it. There is something else you have to look at. That is interest rates being almost as low as they can go. Companies borrowing, maybe PEP, among others can borrow money and pay the dividends at almost no cost. It may not be the best idea to use capital for dividends . Some companies like Pepsi can spin out lots of cash because they don't have any ongoing capital expenditures. The same old doritos factories can keep churning out chips without having to be rebuilt all the time the way cell phone companies have to keep replacing equipment to go from g1 to g2 to g3 and now to g4. That gives Pepsi an advantage in low recapitalization expenses just like KO.

    Apparently Warren Buffet has done a similar analysis of IBM showing it will not need to blow money on capital expenses allowing the gravy to flow. I think IBM is harder to analyze than Pepsi and clearly Pepsi does not have the same price range that Buffet is plowing money into it instead of into IBM. It might have something to do with shares of KO in the portfolio. I have seen Pepsi do pretty darn well over the years . Not just in the USA. It is huge in Mexico as just one example with drinks and snacks too. It spun off YUM to shareholders which is not something people should forget considering the doritos could get spun off. Giants like Buffet and Nestle would consider buying either part of the company if the price was right so the dividend is just a sign that they probably have the cash to pay it.
    Feb 23 11:17 PM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Is Buffett Serious About Liberty And Justice For All? [View article]
    I thought those two securities were a bit mysterious too for the Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio. We assume thoseo possitions are attributed to Berkshire Hathaway and not one of the subsidiaries and there are new investment managers at Berkshire that have not been there before with new ideas. Maybe Carlos Slim is becoming a bit of a role model with telecommunications entering the picture? DTV appeared on value screens for some time. It does have a nitch and satalite assets. Maybe the liberty media spin off does too especially if it owns sirus. So it could even be just something Buffet learned he is forced to pay for owning Burlington Northern. He learned about Hydrolic fluid and lubrizol probably from owning large industrial companies that have to buy what ever that is seeing it on the cost accounting data time period after time period. It could be that the railroad could use a satalite chanel of it's own at transponders across the system, do you know how big burlington northern is? Its not as big as the Chinese rail system or even Union pacific but in real terms its bigger than all the main line east coast rails put together and bigger than the european system for freight. That is a lot of communications that is necessary and if ADT can monitor home alarms with cable well something quite similar goes on with DTV and liberty. by the way living on the union pacific tracks i saw cable fiber optics go in along the tracks some time ago.
    Feb 22 03:39 PM | 1 Like Like |Link to Comment
  • Follow Buffett For All-Weather Stocks In Uncertain Times [View article]
    i would skip the hedges in treasuries and gold anything at present market valuations and look at Berkshire Hathaway shares as a cross section of the market that skims off some percentage of the cream. The real main concern with Berkshire might turn out to be the insurance factor of possible unsustainable losses. Following the great quake of Japan last year there should be a bit of concern not that earthquake damage is necessarily covered by reinsurance underwriting by Berkshire. I kind of wish that the insurance side of the company had some kind of fire wall between it and the conglomerate companies as an insurance policy.
    Feb 8 02:47 AM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
  • Downside Greatest At Coca-Cola Vs. PepsiCo, Dr. Pepper [View article]
    Coke is a different animal than Pepsi. Not sure about dr Pepper which could be closer to the coke model of business than Pepsi. The lower dividend and financials are a plus for Coke as a long term holding. Coke and Pepsi may actually be small enough to become a part of a larger conglomerate at some point. Coke is not just one of those phenomenal businesses that sell high priced water they are a business that pumps air into things they sell. Right now companies like Nestle are selling high priced water but not pumping as much air into the product as they could.
    Jan 30 09:33 PM | Likes Like |Link to Comment
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