carl777

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carl777 posted to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 11:22 AM

Doug Kass Was a Bust

After all his and the media's pre-meeting hype, it seems to me Doug Kass was less than mediocre. The first quarter's numbers speak for themselves, with nothing really troublesome. He did not even seem to have read the report. His questions were so [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 11:33 AM

Re: Morningstar article

"If book value for financial companies really is reflective of market value, I'm having trouble understanding why one would ever be priced below BV?
It would seem that you could make a lot of money by just buying a portfolio full of [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 3:47 PM

Re: How Well Individual Investors Perform

"I didn't read all 50 pages, so apologies if the paper answers this.
1.Is the disposition effect bad?
2.Winners are likely to be overvalued and losers undervalued, so quite apart from behavioral traits like loss aversion and regret [more]

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carl777 posted to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 12:09 PM

How Well Individual Investors Perform

I came across an interesting paper by 2 well known behavioral economists studying how well individual investors perform. The results are not surprising--in the aggregate they perform poorly as John Bogle and others have said. But, what is nice is [more]

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carl777 posted to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 5:57 PM

GS/GE Implication

Irrespective of the reasons WEB had for doing the GS and GE deal, we now know the $8B potential outlay will not happen. Thus, even after accounting for the $12B going into the Heinz deal and the $20B WEB likes to keep aside, BRK will still have about [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 11:47 AM

Re: Poll: Berkshire's impact on portfolio

"So what is the point of all of this? I like to keep things real and the fact is that Berkshire has underperformed the broad market over the past four years. This is not necessarily surprising given that Berkshire's book value progress is going [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 11:18 AM

Re: Goldman Sachs warrants reworked

"Unless he buys more shares of GS on the open market, it certainly does seem like the end result will be a smaller GS position than I anticipated. My impression from prior statements Buffett has made on the issue was that Berkshire would be [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 11:32 AM

Re: OT: Egg on Face

"Quite a collection of bad advice here."

ET-This is a great collection, many of which are from some very smart people. It only proves that broad market levels, technicals, and economy fundamentals are not sufficient to anticipating [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 11:41 AM

Re: Conservative IV

"Carl, regarding the $20 billion minimum currently held in cash, I agree that this is a drag on investment income in today's environment but that won't always be true. So I'm not sure that excluding it fully makes sense but I see the point [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 8:18 PM

Re: Conservative IV

Hi Rational--You said: "I then add cash and investments of $176,331 million which excludes cash and investments of the rail, utility, and finance businesses. I believe that Buffett now includes those items, however, based on the annual [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 7:54 PM

Re: Ask Warren...

"What he is really weak on is science, a subject he studied in school I believe. "

About 5 or 6 years ago, before I gave up CNBC, I emailed Joe and criticized something he had said in an interview of a guest which I thought [more]

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carl777 replied to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 12:01 PM

Re: FT: Buffett brand has more beans than Heinz

Many of the comments in this thread point to the elements of this deal that seem to give additional benefit to BRK, over and above the obvious 9% and 50% common stake. Some of these are:
"The leverage – which is very real for all the other [more]

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carl777 posted to the Berkshire Hathaway board. 5:02 PM

GS and GE Warrants

Later this year the $5B and $3B strike price warrants on GS and GE expire. Assuming the stock prices are where they are currently or higher, BRK seems to me to have 4 options:
1. Exercise and keep the shares
2. Exercise and sell the shares [more]