This is a ChatGPT-free Zone
So, Buffett’s response (at the 2015 annual meeting) to questions regarding the valuation of the stock market was interesting. He used to just say it’s in a “zone of reasonableness”, but this time said that if interest rates stay at current low levels, the stock market is cheap, and if interest rates normalize, it is…
New Book?! OK, so there isn’t really a book with this title. I was just having some fun. Don’t waste your time Googling or Amazoning it. It doesn’t exist. In this day and age, you can’t always believe what you see. But you know, this is exactly what I was thinking as I was reading…
This is a post I wrote up a while back and never published as Kraft/Heinz and other things happened. Anyway, here it is: In December 2011, Leucadia (LUK) bought 79% of National Beef. They explained the purchase as a play on the rising consumption of protein around the world as incomes rise in emerging economies…
The Loews 2014 annual report is out (OK, well, it’s been out a while). I was wondering how they would present their historical returns as they haven’t looked good recently. I’ve talked about how they have changed what they show in their annual reports for performance over time, and there was a discussion in the…
The 2014 JPM annual report was finally released last week and it’s a great read as usual. Dimon takes his time to talk about the goods and the bads, industry trends, competitive threats and all kinds of things. It’s one of those letters (like Buffett’s) that you learn about all sorts of things reading…
By the way, there is a lot of talk now again about zero-based budgeting because of the Kraft-Heinz merger. Some view cost-cutters as people who just come in and blow-torch the place, take out short-term profits and destroy the business. Maybe this was done in the 1980’s. But there is a lot more to it…
So 3G/BRK made their move and Kraft it is. Buffett was on CNBC this morning and he said that BRK paid $4.25 billion for common stock in Heinz initially and will pay another $5.2 billion to get this deal done for a total common equity investment of around $9.5 billion. After this deal…
So the question was raised about MKL management’s use of EBITDA to evaluate Markel Ventures (MV). I wondered about that too, but had totally forgotten that this issue was addressed back in 2010 in the letter to shareholders (thanks to someone pointing it out in the comments section of my previous post). I figured clarifying…
The Markel (MKL) annual report is up on the website and as usual it’s a really good read. Markel seems to be on fire, doing really well. They grew BPS +14% in 2014 versus +13.7% for the S&P 500 index (total return) and +8.3% for BRK (BPS). The equity portfolio also did really well,…
Alleghany (Y) also just published their annual report for 2014. As usual, it’s a really good read. A long time ago, Dorothy Boyd said to Jerry McGuire, “You had me at ‘hello’”. Well, Alleghany had me with this: BPS grew +12.7% in 2014 compared to +13.7% for the S&P 500 index. Y noted that the…