| Buffett's 2023 letter to investors |
| 02/25/24 | | Buffett |
"With that focus, and with our present mix of businesses, Berkshire should do a bit better than the average American corporation and, more important, should also operate with materially less risk of permanent loss of capital. Anything beyond 'slightly better,' though, is wishful thinking"
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| Warren Buffett's canvas |
| 09/03/23 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire is likely to continue returning capital to shareholders via repurchases in the years to come, but I suspect that if Mr. Buffett keeps at it for several years, the painting will continue to evolve. The evolution will be subtle from year to year but could be striking in a decade." (when he'll be 103)
|
| A strange public offering |
| 08/13/23 | | Buffett |
"Let me also put our thoughts about valuation more baldly: Berkshire is selling at a price at which Charlie and I would not consider buying it."
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| Value of float |
| 07/09/23 | | Buffett |
"So, reasonably or unreasonably, I am going to assume that 5% is the point Buffett won't go below for long term rates."
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| The 2023 Warren and Charlie show |
| 05/07/23 | | Buffett |
"the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting is a gathering of the company's shareholders presided over by Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger. The Omaha, Nebraska, event gives shareholders a chance to hear Buffett and Munger discuss investing, their economic outlook and life, as well as ask the legendary pair questions." [video]
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| Buffett's letter |
| 02/25/23 | | Buffett |
"In August 1994 - yes, 1994 - Berkshire completed its seven-year purchase of the 400 million shares of Coca-Cola we now own. The total cost was $1.3 billion - then a very meaningful sum at Berkshire. The cash dividend we received from Coke in 1994 was $75 million. By 2022, the dividend had increased to $704 million. Growth occurred every year, just as certain as birthdays. All Charlie and I were required to do was cash Coke's quarterly dividend checks. We expect that those checks are highly likely to grow."
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| More important than getting rich |
| 12/31/22 | | Buffett |
"While there is an overspill of advice regarding the 92-year-old legend's investment strategy, I believe the virtues that he lives by are pieces of his success that are often overlooked."
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| A few stories |
| 11/12/22 | | Buffett |
"Focusing on what's never going to change is more important than trying to anticipate how something might change."
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| Buffett's pension |
| 07/22/22 | | Buffett |
"All the credit goes to Katharine Graham and the wisdom she had to ask Warren Buffett for his advice, and take it, back in 1978. Mr. Buffett recommended that we invest our pension assets in equities and hire smart advisors to manage those funds - and that is exactly what Mrs. Graham did."
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| Berkshire AGM |
| 04/30/22 | | Buffett |
"Nicknamed 'Woodstock for Capitalists,' the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting is a gathering of the company's shareholders presided over by Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger. The Omaha, Nebraska, event gives shareholders a chance to hear Buffett and Munger discuss investing, their economic outlook and life, as well as ask the legendary pair questions."
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| Warren Buffett getting the last laugh |
| 03/27/22 | | Buffett |
"it has been an almost infallible rule during my career as a financial journalist that you should just go out and buy stock in Berkshire Hathaway whenever people start to say that Buffett has passed his prime."
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| What Buffett sees in Alleghany |
| 03/27/22 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire is getting $12.9 billion of float for Mr. Buffett to deploy, a very profitable specialty insurance business, and a reinsurance business that, while volatile, could improve with Berkshire.s additional capital backing. Additionally, Berkshire adds eight non-insurance subsidiaries with good returns on invested capital."
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| Buffett's annual letter |
| 02/26/22 | | Buffett |
"After my initial plunge, I always kept at least 80% of my net worth in equities. My favored status throughout that period was 100% - and still is. Berkshire's current 80%-or-so position in businesses is a consequence of my failure to find entire companies or small portions thereof (that is, marketable stocks) which meet our criteria for long-term holding."
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| An obsession with money |
| 10/07/21 | | Buffett |
"Shelby Davis isn't a household name like Buffett but his investing track record is almost as impressive. Davis quit his job at age 38 in the late-1940s to become a full-time investor. His timing was impeccable as the stock market was about to enter one of the great bull markets of all-time. His timing was fortuitous but Davis was also a fantastic stock picker. Sticking mainly to insurance stocks, Davis managed to turn $50,000 in 1947 into $900 million by the time he passed away in 1994."
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| Ted Weschler's $264 million retirement account |
| 08/29/21 | | Buffett |
"Weschler, who operates out of a two-person shop located above a bookstore, has been one of Warren Buffett's deputies at Berkshire Hathaway since 2012, where he manages billions of Berkshire bucks."
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| Buffett's evolution into a great manager |
| 08/02/21 | | Buffett |
"One of the most interesting aspects of Cunningham's work with and about Buffett is the revelation that there are really two Buffetts, one the great investor that we all know about, and two, his later evolution into a great manager. We'll focus on what we can learn from Buffett, the manager in this week's show." [video]
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| Berkshire Hathaway vs. the stock exchange |
| 05/09/21 | | Buffett |
"It's the stock-market version of the Y2K bug. And it's becoming an increasingly urgent issue as shares of Warren Buffett's company have risen more than 20% this year"
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| Warren Buffett's 2020 letter |
| 02/27/21 | | Buffett |
"In 1958, Phil Fisher wrote a superb book on investing. In it, he analogized running a public company to managing a restaurant. If you are seeking diners, he said, you can attract a clientele and prosper featuring either hamburgers served with a Coke or a French cuisine accompanied by exotic wines. But you must not, Fisher warned,capriciously switch from one to the other: Your message to potential customers must be consistent with what they will find upon entering your premises."
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| Why Buffett bought Japanese stocks |
| 09/18/20 | | Buffett |
"Japan is one of the few value investments available in today's global developed markets. Large caps in the United States have gotten dramatically more expensive compared to Japan in the last 10 years."
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| When Buffett was a quant |
| 05/03/20 | | Buffett |
"From 1957 to 1969, deep-value stocks went from trading at 3x price-to-cash-flow to over 7x price-to-cash flow, nearing the all-time peak valuation for value stocks. Buffett's return of 24.5% per year in his first decade was a virtually identical result to simply buying the cheapest 10% of stocks in the market (for context, during that decade, this decile of the market was about 75 stocks that averaged about $75 million in market cap)."
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| Berkshire Hathaway AGM |
| 05/03/20 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett shares his unscripted views on the company, the markets, the economy, corporate governance, and a lot more." [video]
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| The American tailwind |
| 04/24/20 | | Buffett |
"I don't think we'll have a long-lasting Great Depression. I think government will be so active that we won't have one like that. But we may have a different kind of a mess. All this money-printing may start bothering us."
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| Letter from Ernest Buffett |
| 03/22/20 | | Buffett |
"For a good many years your grandfather kept a certain amount of money where he could put his hands on it in very short notice. For a number of years I have made it a point to keep a reserve, should some occasion come up where I would need money quickly, without disturbing the money that I have in my business. There have been a couple occasions when I found it very convenient to go to this fund. Thus, I feel that everyone should have a reserve."
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| 2 hours of Buffett |
| 02/28/20 | | Buffett |
"CNBC's full interview with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett"
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| Berkshire Hathaway letter |
| 02/21/20 | | Buffett |
"Over time, we want Berkshire's share count to go down. If the price-to-value discount (as we estimate it) widens, we will likely become more aggressive in purchasing shares. We will not, however, prop the stock at any level." [pdf]
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| The wager revisited |
| 02/07/20 | | Buffett |
"The best yardstick for success isn't whether you beat a benchmark, or your neighbor, or your brother-in-law. Instead, the best measure of success is whether you meet your financial goals - while also sleeping at night."
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| BAC blocks Buffett's call |
| 10/11/19 | | Buffett |
"In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Bank of America Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan recalled how Buffett initially tried to reach his company with a proposal eight years ago. The legendary investor called a public phone line and was rebuffed."
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| Buffett is buying banks |
| 08/19/19 | | Buffett |
"Warren E. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has been building its position in banks over the past year. It is now among the five biggest shareholders in Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, U.S. Bancorp and Bank of New York and owns big stakes in others. Its latest disclosure of its holdings showed that the firm had added to its positions in some of those companies in the second quarter."
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| Berkshire Hathaway AGM |
| 05/08/19 | | Buffett |
"Video of the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting" [video]
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| Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Bill Gates |
| 05/08/19 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Bill Gates sit down with Becky Quick to discuss a variety of topics including the markets, the state of the economy, the China trade talks and the state of health care around the world." [video]
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| Factor exposure of Berkshire Hathaway |
| 04/16/19 | | Buffett |
"BRK.A had positive exposure to the Value, Size, Low Volatility, and Quality factors as well as negative exposure to Growth and Dividend Yield"
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| Buffett interview |
| 02/25/19 | | Buffett |
"CNBC's Becky Quick sits down with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. The billionaire investor weighs in on Kraft Heinz, Apple, the financial sector and his own investment strategy." [video]
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| Buffett's 2018 letter |
| 02/23/19 | | Buffett |
"Long-time readers of our annual reports will have spotted the different way in which I opened this letter. Fornearly three decades, the initial paragraph featured the percentage change in Berkshire's per-share book value. It's now time to abandon that practice."
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| Ajit Jain buys |
| 12/26/18 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway's Ajit Jain bought about $20 million of stock on Dec. 18, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday."
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| What Warren sends at Christmas |
| 12/26/18 | | Buffett |
"And on the left is Buffett's 2018 card, for which he dressed down, at age 88, to a tee shirt and saluted Munger, who turns 95 on January 1."
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| Why BRK? |
| 11/26/18 | | Buffett |
"This is why you get equity-like returns on BRK despite BRK having so much cash/cash equivalents on the balance sheet. This is hardly the balance sheet of a bearish CEO."
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| Buffett's underrated investment attribute |
| 11/12/18 | | Buffett |
"The main point of this post has nothing to do with Freddie Mac or Sears specifically, but rather the remarkable ability Buffett has to change his mind when he realizes he is wrong."
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| Berkshire's repurchase |
| 11/05/18 | | Buffett |
"the average price paid of $312,807/A and $207.09/B is pretty typical for that range of dates."
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| Has Buffett lost it? |
| 11/05/18 | | Buffett |
"The bull and bear argument has been the same for years, so I don't want to get into it again here, but I feel like AAPL has sort of been chasing the crowd lately rather than leading it or disrupting it like they used to during the Jobs years. But again, this would get the AAPL fans all fired up and angry, so maybe I'll leave it at that. I'll just say that moving up to higher end products to make up for declining growth momentum reminds me of retailers/restaurants that hid declining traffic/unit volumes by moving up-market or raising prices. It works for a while until people finally say, no mas, and will no longer pay high prices. Sort of reminds me of J. Crew, P&G etc."
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| Why Warren Buffett said no to Lehman |
| 09/17/18 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is famous on Wall Street for having the cash to make deals happen, even during a crisis. But in 2008, he turned down both Lehman Brothers and AIG when they asked for help. In an interview with WSJ, he explains why." [video]
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| When Oracles Err |
| 07/30/18 | | Buffett |
"Mark Twain was a literary giant - but a horrible investor. John Maynard Keynes was one of history's greatest economists, but his genius for economics was less helpful to his own investment choices than his mental flexibility. Warren Buffett's investment track record is almost without equal, but he once made a $6 billion mistake." [audio]
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| Warren and Bill visit a candy store |
| 06/19/18 | | Buffett |
"So when we got together in Omaha during this year's Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, we decided to check out a real candy store."
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| Berkshire Hathaway 2018 AGM |
| 05/07/18 | | Buffett |
"Investors and non-investors alike can witness history, live, as Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and his right-hand man Charlie Munger share their unscripted views on the company, the markets, the economy, corporate governance, and a lot more." [video]
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| The Warren Buffett Archive |
| 05/07/18 | | Buffett |
"The Warren Buffett Archive is the world's largest collection of Buffett speaking about business, investing, money and life."
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| Warren Buffett speech |
| 04/02/18 | | Buffett |
"One day, Warren Buffet came to campus to speak to the College of Business. I didn't think much of this speech at the time but I saved it for some reason. 15 years later, as a founder of my own company, I watch and listen to this particular speech every year to remind myself of the fundamentals and values Mr. Buffett looks for." [video]
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| The billionaire whisperer |
| 03/27/18 | | Buffett |
"For Bezos, Dimon, and Buffett, it was another splashy headline in careers that have pushed boundaries. Behind the scenes, though, Combs largely spearheaded the effort, according to a person familiar with the matter. For months, Combs shuttled among the CEOs to get them to commit to doing something about a problem they.d discussed informally for years, the person says."
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| Warren Buffett: Advice for entrepreneurs |
| 03/05/18 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway CEO , talked about his personal experience in business and gave advice to small business owners." [video]
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| Buffett talks to Becky Quick |
| 02/26/18 | | Buffett |
"Ajit has bought every share of that, come on, you know, in the open market and he buys it just like anybody else. If it goes down, he suffers. I mean, we do not have one way things. We don't grant the directors restricted shares or anything of the sort. We want our directors to stand in the shoes of the shareholders. We don't have directors and officers insurance liability. I think maybe one other company on the New York Stock Exchange does it. If we do something really dumb and they lose - a company loses a lot of money, they lose money and it's real money to them. It isn't just something that was given to them."
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| Buffett's annual letter |
| 02/24/18 | | Buffett |
"The bet illuminated another important investment lesson: Though markets are generally rational, they occasionally do crazy things. Seizing the opportunities then offered does not require great intelligence, a degree in economics or a familiarity with Wall Street jargon such as alpha and beta. What investors then need instead is an ability to both disregard mob fears or enthusiasms and to focus on a few simple fundamentals. A willingness to look unimaginative for a sustained period - or even to look foolish - is also essential."
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| Buffett's investments in encyclopedias |
| 12/04/17 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett has eclectic taste in companies. Along with large, thriving businesses such as Geico and the BNSF Railway, he's accumulated a collection of head-scratchers. There's a bowling shoe brand, a maker of vacuum cleaner bags, almost three dozen newspapers, and the manufacturer of Ginsu knives. Then there's World Book."
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| Warren Buffett interview |
| 10/07/17 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO, speaks with CNBC's Becky Quick about his outlook on markets, tax reform and his new investment in Pilot Flying J." [video]
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| Warren's pension |
| 10/01/17 | | Buffett |
"We're all equities....We don't have any bonds in our pension funds"
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| I negotiated with Buffett |
| 09/23/17 | | Buffett |
"I realized that he wasn't focused on how much I was paying. All he really cared about is that I love baseball. He wasn.t trying to squeeze out every last dollar, he just wanted the right custodian of his hometown team."
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| Warren Buffett on Harvey |
| 09/02/17 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, speaks with CNBC's Becky Quick about Hurricane Harvey, the U.S. economy and his stock holdings." [video]
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| 3G's wiener |
| 08/07/17 | | Buffett |
"Why the hatchet men of 3G spent $10 Million on a better Oscar Mayer wiener"
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| Buffett PBS interview 1 |
| 07/02/17 | | Buffett |
"Dubbed the "Oracle of Omaha," Warren Buffett is an investment rock star. What's his take on the state of the economy? He recently sat down with Judy Woodruff for a wide-ranging, two-part interview on inequality, the Paris climate agreement, health care reform and much more." [video]
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| Buffett PBS interview 2 |
| 07/02/17 | | Buffett |
"What does billionaire Warren Buffett think of Republican health care bills that would roll back taxes for wealthy Americans like him? Buffett discusses everything from how he's giving away billions in philanthropy to how much sleep he gets to what's on his personal income taxes in the second part of Judy Woodruff's exclusive interview." [video]
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| Testing mattresses with Buffett |
| 06/11/17 | | Buffett |
"This year, Warren took me on a tour of Nebraska Furniture Mart, a super-successful megastore owned by Berkshire. We tried out some lounge chairs, played with remote-controlled mattresses, and somehow managed to get lost. Take a look..." [video]
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| The bet with Buffett |
| 05/07/17 | | Buffett |
"Ted and I discuss the origins of the bet, the nuances beneath the headlines, and whether he'd make the bet again for the next ten years. Along the way, we cover many hot topics like hedge funds, alternatives, fees, and indexing." [audio]
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| Berkshire Hathaway AGM |
| 05/07/17 | | Buffett |
"Video of the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, NE." [video]
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| Warren talks Todd and Ted |
| 04/30/17 | | Buffett |
"I recently sat down with Buffett, Combs and Weschler in Omaha for a rare three-way interview. What emerges is that Combs and Weschler are actually a whole lot like Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger." [video]
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| Warren Buffett's letter |
| 02/25/17 | | Buffett |
"I'm certain that in almost all cases the managers at both levels were honest and intelligent people. But the results for their investors were dismal - really dismal. And, alas, the huge fixed fees charged by all of the funds and funds-of-funds involved - fees that were totally unwarranted by performance - were such that their managers were showered with compensation over the nine years that have passed. As Gordon Gekko might have put it: 'Fees never sleep.'"
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| How Warren taught us optimism |
| 02/19/17 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is one of the best loved people in the world -- and it's easy to see why. He's jovial and friendly. He's funny and wise. He makes people feel good about themselves. But he has one quality that fuels all the others: Warren is the most upbeat, optimistic person we know."
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| Gates and Buffet town hall |
| 01/28/17 | | Buffett |
"Bill Gates and Warren Buffet at Columbia University" [video]
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| Invest like Buffett |
| 12/11/16 | | Buffett |
"What do George Soros, Warren Buffett and a computer have in common? Turns out, a lot. At least that's the view of AQR Capital Management, the program-driven investment firm whose founders made their names finding the math behind investment success."
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| The quality brand Mittelstand |
| 11/27/16 | | Buffett |
"If you had asked me back then which of the two companies would go the distance, I don't doubt for a second I would have answered the Washington Post. And as late as 1988, when The Powers that Be became the first grownup book I ever read, I still thought of it as a colossus. Yet as events transpired, the Post has come quite a way down in the world, while humble See's is still, in Buffett's words, a 'dream business.'"
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| Buffett talks to UofM students |
| 11/27/16 | | Buffett |
"Today, with $1 million, he and Charlie would probably invest in four stocks."
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| Learning from See's Candies |
| 11/27/16 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire's purchase of a boxed candy business founded by the See family in California fundamentally changed the investing world because it changed the way Buffett and Munger thought about investing. While you may never have the chance to own a business like See's Candies, by better understanding the nature of a dream business you can more easily find a business to invest in that shares some of its positive attributes."
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| The 17 year bet |
| 11/27/16 | | Buffett |
"But the record shows that the period's gross returns are anemic enough to confirm Buffett's general accuracy. From mid-November, 1999, to last Friday's trading day, the annualized total return to investors from the Dow Industrials was 5.9%."
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| Warren Buffett is an artful influencer |
| 10/09/16 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter is an opportunity for him to exercise influence. The letter's tone is friendly and homespun, but Buffett takes it even further. He gives Berkshire shareholders the impression that he is actively looking out for their welfare."
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| Buffett vs. Vanguard |
| 10/02/16 | | Buffett |
"He noted that retirement portfolios heavily skewed to equities have traditionally been viewed as risky because of their volatility. But for retirees, there are perhaps two greater risks: that the investor will outlive the portfolio; and that the portfolio's value may not be maximized if passing on wealth is the objective."
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| Take-downs of Warren Buffett |
| 08/28/16 | | Buffett |
"Buffett achieved that record without embracing the tightrope-walking risks, the ethical shortcuts, or the death-by-slow-obsolescence that have undone so many big corporations (of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average when Buffett took the helm at Berkshire, only three remain.)"
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| Ted Weschler makes his mark |
| 07/24/16 | | Buffett |
"He honed his skills at Peninsula Capital Advisors, the hedge fund firm he launched in 2000 above a bookstore in a Charlottesville mall. Peninsula's $2 billion fund returned 1,236 percent before he shuttered it in 2011, versus 146 percent for Berkshire during the same period."
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| Bexit |
| 06/25/16 | | Buffett |
"Shareholder activism spares no one, no matter how high their pedestal. Berkshire Hathaway is a public company, and as far as we know, Buffett has not chosen to entrench his successors with new supervoting shares or anything of that sort. How long will his life's work survive in an era of pervasive shareholding activism? It seems almost inevitable that Buffett's company, like the public vehicles of so many other successful investors, will become a target. It will be up to Berkshire's shareholders to defend it."
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| Mohnish Pabrai at UCI |
| 06/05/16 | | Buffett |
"Mohnish Pabrai lecture at The University of California, Irvine: Mental Models Used for the Coca-Cola Investment by Berkshire Hathaway"
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| We haven't cracked the code yet |
| 05/29/16 | | Buffett |
"In most cases there are some years left to crack the code. But we haven't done it. Maybe (the industry) started too late."
|
| Key moments from BRK meeting |
| 05/01/16 | | Buffett |
"When Buffett and Munger speak, the world listens. Their comments on the economy, the markets, politics, and Berkshire Hathaway are as closely parsed as Federal Reserve statements. But Fed Chair Janet Yellen didn't secure a place in this year's commentary by either Buffett or Munger. Instead, the Oracle of Omaha and his right-hand man focused on business and why shareholders should continue to bet on Berkshire."
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| The lost art of reading |
| 04/03/16 | | Buffett |
"Mr. Abbott has read roughly 1,500 letters so far. Only 16 jumped out as outstanding. 'I've been flabbergasted at how low the average quality is,' he said."
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| Buffett on the media |
| 03/27/16 | | Buffett |
"Twenty years ago, investor Warren Buffett accepted an Omaha Press Club Education Committee invitation to spend an hour talking about media."
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| Berkshire Hathaway 2015 letter |
| 02/27/16 | | Buffett |
"All families in my upper middle-class neighborhood regularly enjoy a living standard better than that achieved by John D. Rockefeller Sr. at the time of my birth. His unparalleled fortune couldn't buy what we now take for granted, whether the field is - to name just a few - transportation, entertainment, communication or medical services. Rockefeller certainly had power and fame; he could not, however, live as well as my neighbors now do"
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| Bill Gates and Warren Buffett |
| 05/23/15 | | Buffett |
"Bill Gates talks with his friend Warren Buffett about his rules for smart investing, how he learned to explain complicated financial dealings so clearly, and how he got Bill into bridge and golf."
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| The 2015 Berkshire Hathaway AGM |
| 05/02/15 | | Buffett |
"MoneyBeat live-blogged the all-day event from Mr. Buffett's first sip of cherry Coke to his last bite of See's candy. Here's how it all went down"
|
| I was wrong on interest rates |
| 05/02/15 | | Buffett |
"Buffett said that he wouldn't have predicted that interest rates could have stayed this low for this long without a problem. 'So far, I have been wrong on interest rates,' said Buffett. 'It is so hard for me to believe that you can drop money from a helicopter and not have inflation, but we haven't.'"
|
| Ivey students meet Buffett |
| 04/11/15 | | Buffett |
"One thing that Sam Walton and Mrs. B had in common is they had passion for the business. It isn't about the money, at all. It was about winning. Passion counts enormously; you have to really be doing it because you love the results, rather than the money. When we buy businesses, we are looking for people that will not lose an ounce of passion for the business even after their business is sold. And getting in bed with people like that is what it's all about."
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| Buffett can't find cheap stocks to buy |
| 04/04/15 | | Buffett |
"Legendary investor Warren Buffett is not ready to say stocks are in bubble territory, but he also thinks there are 'very few' cheap stocks out there."
|
| Kraft-Heinz |
| 03/28/15 | | Buffett |
"That sounds like a good deal to me. You get a nice premium, and you end up with a better stock than you owned previously. You were stuck with sort of a no-growth situation and suddenly there is hope. The new Kraft-Heinz (synergies are already priced into the above metrics) would not only have better margins, but also a much more interesting and promising growth profile than the current KRFT."
|
| Berkshire's 2014 Letter |
| 02/28/15 | | Buffett |
"Undeterred by my first mistake of committing much of BPL's resources to a dying business, I quickly compounded the error. Indeed, my second blunder was far more serious than the first, eventually becoming the most costly in my career."
|
| Buffett's stock pickers |
| 10/19/14 | | Buffett |
"So how have the Oracle's disciples done? Quite impressively, according to our estimates. Both have outpaced the S&P 500 in their time at Berkshire (their compensation is determined by how much they beat that index over three years). Combs has done the better of the two, generating a cumulative return of 116% over the past nearly four years-more than double the S&P's 55% over the same period. Weschler's portfolio is up 81%, but he's had only three years to prove himself. Combs' picks increased an incredible 51% last year alone. And Weschler is well ahead of the market this year."
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| Warren Buffet on investment strategy |
| 10/11/14 | | Buffett |
"The annual Fortune MPW interview with the world's most successful investor - Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway." [video]
|
| The wrath of Warren Buffett |
| 09/19/14 | | Buffett |
"But this was one time where Buffett's laissez-faire management style would fail him. Some years later, a Benjamin Moore CEO began pursuing a strategy that chipped away at Buffett's pledge. By 2012 the CEO was nearing a deal-an agreement to sell through Lowe's-that would have shattered the promise. Buffett got wind of the plan, intervened, and scotched the arrangement. But the damage was done: Dealers revolted and today, two years later, the company is still recovering from the tumult, still searching for ways to expand its sales, and still working to regain the trust of its 4,200 dealers."
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| 2014 Berkshire Hathaway meeting |
| 05/04/14 | | Buffett |
"Morningstar's on-the-spot meeting coverage."
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| Why I broke up with Warren Buffett |
| 04/27/14 | | Buffett |
"Even you now seem to doubt that Berkshire can keep beating the market. In your most recent annual report, you revealed that 90% of the money that will be left to your widow will be invested in an S&P 500 index fund. As usual, you're being realistic. I'll always treasure that about you. But it's time to go."
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| Buffett the market timer? |
| 03/23/14 | | Buffett |
"So yes, Buffett did retire in 1969 due to the lack of investment opportunity so in that sense it does sort of smell like market timing; he got out at the top. But does his retirement really mean that he lost faith in stocks as good long term investments at the then prices? His expectations suggest not."
|
| Berkshire Hathaway report for 2013 |
| 03/01/14 | | Buffett |
"Local and state financial problems are accelerating, in large part because public entities promised pensions they couldn't afford. Citizens and public officials typically under-appreciated the gigantic financial tapeworm that was born when promises were made that conflicted with a willingness to fund them. Unfortunately, pension mathematics today remain a mystery to most Americans."
|
| How to hold stocks: Buffett |
| 02/24/14 | | Buffett |
"In an exclusive excerpt from his upcoming shareholder letter, Warren Buffett looks back at a pair of real estate purchases and the lessons they offer for equity investors."
|
| Buffett smashed the EMH |
| 01/05/14 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's hero was Ben Graham and with good reason - the lessons of Graham and his writing partner Dodd made Buffett an extraordinarily good investor and a billionaire many times over. Although, to a believer in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Buffett's not supposed to even exist - a fact which both Buffett and Charlie Munger derive quite a bit of humor from."
|
| Warren Buffett talks to students |
| 12/15/13 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett (WB) met with 20 MBA students from each of eight universities, including the University of Maryland, on November 15, 2013. The MBA students asked 16 questions..."
|
| Berkshire billionaire with more than Gates |
| 09/22/13 | | Buffett |
"There are probably other Berkshire billionaires to be uncovered. In a June 2010 Fortune magazine article, Buffett said that he knew of two Berkshire shareholders who qualify for the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, and weren.t on it."
|
| The 1975 Buffett memo that saved WaPo's pension |
| 08/25/13 | | Buffett |
"The letter alone is quite amazing. In it, Buffett identifies the pension problems that others would key in on only a decade or so later. But he also lays out perhaps for the first time -- Buffett was 45 when he wrote it and years away from attaining the investment fame he has today -- his philosophy behind what it takes to be a successful investor. His main pieces of advice: Think like an owner, look for a discount, and be patient."
|
| A rising star at Berkshire |
| 06/16/13 | | Buffett |
"When Tracy Britt arrived in Omaha, Neb., in 2009 to meet with Warren Buffett, she brought a Harvard M.B.A., a glittering resume and a boatload of ambition. But she also brought the famed investor a gift to highlight their shared Midwestern roots: a bushel of corn and a batch of tomatoes."
|
| Doubt yourself |
| 05/05/13 | | Buffett |
"There was no big news at Berkshire Hathaway Inc..s annual meeting this past weekend, but there was one great lesson for investors: Perhaps the most important thing you can do when everything seems to be going right in your portfolio is to listen to somebody who insists you are wrong."
|
| Investors earn handsome paychecks |
| 05/05/13 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's decision to hire two investment lieutenants is paying off for Berkshire Hathaway, and it's paying off for the two younger money managers, too."
|
| Berkshire Hathaway meeting notes |
| 05/05/13 | | Buffett |
"MoneyBeat was live in Omaha's CenturyLink Center where more than 35,000 Buffett lovers crowded for some six hours while Buffett and sidekick Charlie Munger's dished out investment wisdom and wit. Read our recap"
|
| Buffett's annual letter |
| 03/01/13 | | Buffett |
"wishing makes dreams come true only in Disney movies; it's poison in business."
|
| A compilation of Buffett articles |
| 12/08/12 | | Buffett |
"If you have an hour or so and are interested in reading some of Mr. Buffett's works check out the following articles available online. And prepare to be amazed by a guy who has made some astonishingly prescient market calls despite claiming to have no idea where the markets are headed short-term."
|
| Charlie talks to Warren and Carol |
| 11/27/12 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett and Carol Loomis on the book 'Tap Dancing to Work'"
|
| Buffett on CNBC: Summary |
| 10/24/12 | | Buffett |
"Buffett was on CNBC this morning. Who has time to sit in front of the TV from 7:00 - 9:00 am? Only hardcore Buffett-heads would click through and watch all the videos or read the full transcript. So here are some notes."
|
| Inside Warren Buffett's private poker game |
| 08/31/12 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is a famously world-class bridge player, putting in 12 hours a week at the table, often with Bill Gates, and sponsoring the Buffett Cup, which mimics golf's Ryder Cup, except with cards. 'Every hand fascinates me,' he recently told me, in explaining this obsession. But relatively quietly, over the past seven years he's emerged as the host of one of the planet's most exclusive poker games."
|
| Buffett pledges $3 Billion more |
| 08/31/12 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire Warren Buffett has pledged an additional $3 billion of shares in his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to his three children's foundations."
|
| The secrets of See's Candies |
| 08/22/12 | | Buffett |
"Charles A. See, a salesman from Ontario, opened the first See's shop in 1921 in Los Angeles. With its now iconic black-and-white tiles, it was made to look like the kitchen of his widowed mother, Mary. Today the shops still offer the same experience: walk-in customers can sample any piece."
|
| Why Berkshire is killing it right now |
| 07/18/12 | | Buffett |
"The reason why the stock has gotten this burst of momentum is very simple - Berkshire is the single greatest play on the housing market resurgence extant. It's got the safety of a well-diversified business and it hits the housing market from virtually every angle - remodeling, re-mortgaging, recovering prices etc."
|
| Buffett speaks with Betty Liu |
| 07/13/12 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., talks about JPMorgan Chase and Co.'s $4.4 billion trading loss at its chief investment office and the U.S. banking industry. Buffett also discusses his investment strategy and holdings, the U.S. economy and housing market, and the outlook for the euro."
|
| Newspaper Work |
| 06/18/12 | | Buffett |
"Over the years, newspaper owners have built monuments to themselves in the form of giant buildings, statues and plaques commemorating their roles in their communities and the country at large. At the headquarters of The Buffalo News here, a sand-colored office building across the river from a fragrant Cheerios factory, the only visible sign of the owner is a small photograph hanging in the office of the publisher, Stanford Lipsey, signed, 'To the best in the business, Warren.'"
|
| Buffett's idiot challenge seized by Jain |
| 05/23/12 | | Buffett |
"Ajit Jain, who helped build Berkshire Hathaway Inc. into a $200 billion firm by underwriting risks that others shunned, is hunting for insurance-premium growth that his boss Warren Buffett says may be a thing of the past."
|
| Buffett deal secrecy |
| 05/23/12 | | Buffett |
"They hammered out the deal in a 20-minute telephone call on Sept. 23 in which Trott said he wanted Buffett to be the 'cornerstone' of the transaction. After they reached a tentative agreement, Buffett told Trott not to telephone until later that afternoon because he had an important appointment. 'He told me he promised his grandkids to take them to Dairy Queen, and he was not to be interrupted,' Trott said."
|
| Another Warren Buffett? |
| 05/05/12 | | Buffett |
"Buffett is a man of character, unequaled in the investment business. He folded his private partnership in 1969 because he didn't want his investors to be rocked by the bear market he saw coming."
|
| Buffett battles cancer |
| 04/17/12 | | Buffett |
"This is to let you know that I have been diagnosed with stage I prostate cancer. The good news is that I've been told by my doctors that my condition is not remotely lifethreatening or even debilitating in any meaningful way. I received my diagnosis last Wednesday. I then had a CAT scan and a bone scan on Thursday, followed by an MRI today. These tests showed no incidence of cancer elsewhere in my body."
|
| Warren Buffett's $50 Billion decision |
| 03/26/12 | | Buffett |
"The thing is, when I got out of college, I had $9,800, but by the end of 1955, I was up to $127,000. I thought, I'll go back to Omaha, take some college classes, and read a lot - I was going to retire! I figured we could live on $12,000 a year, and off my $127,000 asset base, I could easily make that. I told my wife, 'Compound interest guarantees I'm going to get rich.'"
|
| The Warren Buffett of.... |
| 03/08/12 | | Buffett |
"Our article on Paul Desmarais called him "The Warren Buffett of Canada," which made us start wondering how many "Warren Buffett ofs" there are. We decided to do a deep Google search to try and put together a comprehensive list ..."
|
| Warren Buffett Interview |
| 02/27/12 | | Buffett |
"If anybody is thinking about buying a home - five years ago they couldn't buy them fast enough because they thought they were going to go up, and now they don't buy them because they think they're going to go down. And interest are far lower. It's a way, in effect, to short the dollar because you can - you can take a 30-year mortgage and if it turns out your interest rate's too high, next week you refinance lower. And if it turns out it's too low, the other guy's stuck with it for 30 years. So it's a very attractive asset class now."
|
| Berkshire Hathaway 2011 |
| 02/25/12 | | Buffett |
"At our limit price of 110% of book value, repurchases clearly increase Berkshire's per-share intrinsic value. And the more and the cheaper we buy, the greater the gain for continuing shareholders. Therefore, if given the opportunity, we will likely repurchase stock aggressively at our price limit or lower. You should know, however, that we have no interest in supporting the stock and that our bids will fade in particularly weak markets. Nor will we buy shares if our cash-equivalent holdings are below $20 billion. At Berkshire, financial strength that is unquestionable takes precedence over all else."
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| Why stocks beat gold and bonds |
| 02/09/12 | | Buffett |
"Investing is often described as the process of laying out money now in the expectation of receiving more money in the future. At Berkshire Hathaway we take a more demanding approach, defining investing as the transfer to others of purchasing power now with the reasoned expectation of receiving more purchasing power -- after taxes have been paid on nominal gains -- in the future. More succinctly, investing is forgoing consumption now in order to have the ability to consume more at a later date."
|
| Warren Buffett Interview |
| 02/09/12 | | Buffett |
"Ted Williams described in his book, 'The Science of Hitting,' that the most important thing -- for a hitter -- is to wait for the right pitch. And that's -- exactly the philosophy I have about investing...Wait for the right pitch, yeah, and... wait for the right deal. And it will come... It's the key to investing."
|
| Warren Buffett's Bizarre Non-Sequitur |
| 01/12/12 | | Buffett |
"In other words, the entire Republican point is "We don't want to pay any more in taxes, if you think you aren't taxed enough, then you are free to pay more in taxes." Thus, calling out Mitch McConnell like this, while sure to grab headlines, and result in high fives and "Oh no you di'ints" amongst liberals, makes no sense"
|
| Buffett's BofA stake |
| 08/25/11 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett may have earned $1.3 billion in one day on his $5 billion investment in Bank of America Corp. (BAC)"
|
| An hour with Warren Buffett |
| 08/18/11 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett discusses his New York Times Op-Ed piece 'Stop Coddling the Super-Rich' which calls on Congress to increase taxes on the Super-Rich like himself"
|
| Stop coddling the super-rich |
| 08/15/11 | | Buffett |
"Last year my federal tax bill - the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf - was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income - and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent. If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine - most likely by a lot."
|
| The lower stocks go, the more I buy |
| 08/11/11 | | Buffett |
"U.S. Treasuries are still triple-A in that there is no question that we will repay the interest and the principal. Every contract will be repaid. So our bonds are triple-A. Our currency, the dollar, is not triple-A. Our bonds are."
|
| Get back to work Warren |
| 05/10/11 | | Buffett |
"Steve Carell's Office character, Michael Scott, left the show this season, and it looks like producers are pulling out all the stops to keep up the show's ratings. Guest appearances by Jim Carey, Ray Romano, James Spader, Catherine Tate, Ricky Gervais and Will Arnett have already been announced, but the addition of legendary capitalist Warren Buffett may blow them all out of the water."
|
| Berkshire Annual Meeting |
| 04/30/11 | | Buffett |
"It's time once again for Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting, the two-day frenzy of Warren Buffett aficionados who have descended here to listen to his latest musings. This year's meeting promises to be even more interesting than ever, given the controversy over David Sokol, whose resignation has cast a pall over the normally jovial proceedings."
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| Buffett's Profit on GE |
| 04/22/11 | | Buffett |
"In the financial crisis, Warren Buffett loaned out his halo of respectability to prop up sentiment about Goldman Sachs Group, Dow Chemical, General Electric and other blue-chip companies. Those bets came with some heavy costs for the companies, and produced handsome profits for the Oracle of Omaha."
|
| Five Tips From Warren Buffett |
| 03/02/11 | | Buffett |
"While the stock market overall has boomed, and it's a battle to find cheap stocks, one thing does stand out: Many of Warren Buffett's favorite stocks remain at, or around, the prices he paid for them. As Mr. Buffett only likes to buy stocks for a lot less than he thinks they are really worth, this suggests you can get a bargain or two"
|
| Berkshire Hathaway 2010 |
| 02/26/11 | | Buffett |
"Don't let that reality spook you. Throughout my lifetime, politicians and pundits have constantly moaned about terrifying problems facing America. Yet our citizens now live an astonishing six times better than when I was born. The prophets of doom have overlooked the all-important factor that is certain: Human potential is far from exhausted, and the American system for unleashing that potential - a system that has worked wonders for over two centuries despite frequent interruptions for recessions and even a Civil War - remains alive and effective. We are not natively smarter than we were when our country was founded nor do we work harder. But look around you and see a world beyond the dreams of any colonial citizen. Now, as in 1776, 1861, 1932 and 1941, America's best days lie ahead."
|
| Berkshire's $1.2 billion selling spree |
| 02/20/11 | | Buffett |
"In the you can't-have-too-much department, Berkshire Hathaway raised cash last year as it prepared for a rare change of the investing guard."
|
| Mr. Moneybags |
| 01/23/11 | | Buffett |
"A flush Berkshire Hathaway is in its best shape ever and piling up cash so quickly that it could be sitting on close to $50 billion at its core insurance operation alone by year end, and might even begin paying a dividend. Berkshire's profit recovery, aided by some smart acquisitions and investments by CEO Warren Buffett -- notably its purchase of the Burlington Northern railroad -- has gone largely unrecognized on Wall Street, where Berkshire's Class A shares, now trading around $121,000, haven't budged in nearly a year."
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| Buffett on Berkshire, Succession and America |
| 01/09/11 | | Buffett |
"Finally, he talked a little about why he was optimistic about the future of the United States: "We had four million people here in 1790," he tells Vanity Fair. "We're not more intelligent than people in China, which then had 290 million people, or Europe, which had 50 million. We didn't work harder, we didn't have a better climate, and we didn't have better resources. But we definitely had a system that unleashes potential. This system works. Since then, we've been through at least 15 recessions, a civil war, a Great Depression. ... All of these things happen. But this country has optimized human potential, and it's not over yet."
|
| Evan Davis meets Warren Buffett |
| 11/27/10 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time. His decisions about buying shares and companies have beaten the stock market year after year and made him the richest person in the world - thought to be worth 37 billion dollars. Yet Buffett lives modestly in his native Omaha, in America's mid-West, and runs his 150 billion dollar business with a staff of just twenty. Evan Davis meets him to find out about his unique investment strategy and his eccentric lifestyle. He talks to Buffett's family, friends and colleagues about the man they call the Sage of Omaha, and Buffett's friend Bill Gates praises his philosophy of life. As the greed of the super-wealthy is widely criticised in the current financial crisis, Davis asks whether Warren Buffett is the acceptable face of the filthy rich"
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| Dear Uncle Sucker |
| 11/17/10 | | Buffett |
"Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered a motherload of cash. Considering the dollar sums involved, your actions were remarkably ineffective. What was left over afterwards was a wildly over-leveraged consumer whose credit limits had been reached State and municipal budgets were heavily dependent upon that excess consumer spending, creating huge budget holes because of it. Net net: The resultant economy was in the worst recession since the Great Depression."
|
| Pretty Good for Government Work |
| 11/17/10 | | Buffett |
"You have been criticized, Uncle Sam, for some of the earlier decisions that got us in this mess - most prominently, for not battling the rot building up in the housing market. But then few of your critics saw matters clearly either. In truth, almost all of the country became possessed by the idea that home prices could never fall significantly. That was a mass delusion, reinforced by rapidly rising prices that discredited the few skeptics who warned of trouble. Delusions, whether about tulips or Internet stocks, produce bubbles. And when bubbles pop, they can generate waves of trouble that hit shores far from their origin. This bubble was a doozy and its pop was felt around the world. So, again, Uncle Sam, thanks to you and your aides. Often you are wasteful, and sometimes you are bullying. On occasion, you are downright maddening. But in this extraordinary emergency, you came through - and the world would look far different now if you had not."
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| Buffett: Combs is 'a 100% Fit' |
| 10/26/10 | | Buffett |
"Mr. Combs was one of hundreds of people who responded to an unconventional 'help wanted' request Mr. Buffett made in early 2007. But his initial inquiry didn't distinguish itself. Undaunted, the low-key father of three, who lives in Darien, Conn., recently sent another letter to Berkshire Vice Chairman Charles Munger asking for a meeting. Mr. Munger said in an interview that he gets 'hundreds' of such requests each year, but 'something in his request piqued my interest.' The two soon met for a lunch that extended well into the afternoon at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles. Mr. Munger later phoned Mr. Buffett and told him, 'this is a guy I am sure you are going to like,' Mr. Munger recalls."
|
| Forget gold, buy stocks |
| 10/19/10 | | Buffett |
"You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?"
|
| $200 Billion Blunder |
| 10/19/10 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett says Berkshire Hathaway is the 'dumbest' stock he ever bought. He calls his 1964 decision to buy the textile company a $200 billion dollar blunder, sparked by a spiteful urge to retaliate against the CEO who tried to 'chisel' Buffett out of an eighth of a point on a tender deal."
|
| Lou Simpson retiring from Geico |
| 08/22/10 | | Buffett |
"Lou Simpson, the Chicago-based investor with such a stellar track record he once was considered the successor to Warren Buffett, is retiring at the end of the year after decades managing Geico's investment portfolio."
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| Warren Buffett's Mr. Fix-It |
| 08/02/10 | | Buffett |
"When investors think of Berkshire Hathaway, they of course think of Warren Buffett and his record as a hands-off, if highly attentive, CEO. He gives free rein to the heads of his large collection of companies, ranging from Geico to Dairy Queen to Benjamin Moore to the Buffalo News to NetJets. Yet even in Buffett's empire, sometimes a CEO blows it, and his business needs to be fixed or a deal needs to get done -- fast. When that happens, Buffett's go-to guy is David Sokol."
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| The most underrated part of Warren |
| 07/21/10 | | Buffett |
"What are the most underrated and overrated parts of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett's success?"
|
| Buffett's best advice |
| 07/08/10 | | Buffett |
"What's the best advice Warren Buffett has ever received? You might be surprised: It has nothing to do with money."
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| Live Buffett Blog |
| 05/01/10 | | Buffett |
"Part of the mystique of the meeting derives from the fact that Buffett doesn.t allow the event to be recorded, so the Wall Street Journal will blog the meeting in real time. It.s almost as good as being there."
|
| Lizard Ballad: Where's Warren? |
| 03/20/10 | | Buffett |
Buffett channeling Axl Rose
|
| Buffett casts a wary eye on bankers |
| 03/02/10 | | Buffett |
"Mr. Buffett's letter made a bold suggestion that isn't sitting well with the establishment. 'When stock is the currency being contemplated in an acquisition and when directors are hearing from an advisor, it appears to me that there is only one way to get a rational and balanced discussion,' he wrote. 'Directors should hire a second advisor to make the case against the proposed acquisition, with its fee contingent on the deal not going through.' Of course, acquirers often hire more than one banker to advise a board, to act as a check on the other. But all too often, both banks are given the incentive to recommend the deal."
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| Buffett in the boardroom |
| 02/27/10 | | Buffett |
"Who wouldn't love to pick up the phone and ask Warren Buffett for advice? People have spent more than $1 million just to have lunch with the man. He was voted the most admired corporate director in America by Directorship magazine in 2008. Chief executives of companies he has a stake in laud his patience, foresight, and ability to capture the essence of a complex financial situation in just a few words. They also like the fact that he usually leaves them alone as long as they're getting the job done. Sometimes Buffett emerges from behind his desk and shows a side of himself that's far less familiar. When he sees something he doesn't like in a company whose shares he owns, the famously passive investor can swing into action to protect his investment - jawboning behind the scenes, scolding, cutting opportunistic deals, even hiring and firing CEOs. For some of those on the receiving end of his activism, it can feel a bit like being attacked by Santa Claus."
|
| Berkshire Hathaway 2009 report |
| 02/27/10 | | Buffett |
"Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: 'All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.' That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled 'Invert, always invert' as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)"
|
| Buffett takes on Chicago chokepoint |
| 02/11/10 | | Buffett |
"Chicago, whose railroads made it hog butcher for the world a century ago, is a tangle of bottlenecks where a quarter of the nation's rail freight stalls while trying to navigate the city. 'We can't keep running trains from Los Angeles to Chicago in 55 hours and then take 36 hours to get a rail car from one side of Chicago to the next,' said Matt Rose, chief executive officer of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. 'We either need to fix Chicago or avoid it.'"
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| Buffett on farming superhighway |
| 02/06/10 | | Buffett |
"Buffett became the second-richest American by investing in businesses he expects to grow for decades. He's said his $26 billion takeover of railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., announced in November, will benefit Berkshire 'over the next century.' CTB, which Berkshire bought in 2002, may produce profits beyond the year 2200, Buffett, 79, said in the video."
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| Buffett gets Krafty |
| 01/06/10 | | Buffett |
"The billionaire's warning against a bid for Cadbury could actually help Kraft nab the chocolate maker."
|
| Kodak, Bill Gates and efficient markets |
| 12/30/09 | | Buffett |
"there is little question that if you understood the implications of digital photography in 1991 you were - at least on that item - the smartest guy in almost any room. And it did not help you make (much) money."
|
| Doing a Buffett, on the cheap |
| 12/27/09 | | Buffett |
"These Buffett-esque companies, identified in a recent report by Credit Suisse quants, have a minimum return on equity of 15%. Not one has a long-term debt/equity ratio of more than 50%, and all have gross and net profit margins that have improved over the past two years."
|
| A look inside Buffett's battery bet |
| 12/10/09 | | Buffett |
"When MidAmerican bought its BYD stake, the media jumped to the conclusion that Mr. Buffett was placing a bet on electric cars. Cannily, Mr. Buffett and MidAmerican executives made no effort to dispel this impression. But all evidence suggests their interests lay elsewhere. MidAmerican Energy Holdings runs power grids that generate more energy from renewable sources than any major American utility. MidAmerican's subsidiary in Oregon, PacifiCorp, recently erected a building the size of ten 40-foot storage containers that houses BYD batteries. Those batteries are being tested for the storage of wind-generated energy. BYD's real contribution to Mr. Buffett's portfolio will probably be low-cost, relatively low-tech batteries that store wind and solar power for use on days that are breezeless and cloudy."
|
| Keeping America great |
| 11/13/09 | | Buffett |
"We always keep enough cash around so I feel very comfortable and don't worry about sleeping at night. But it's not because I like cash as an investment. Cash is a bad investment over time. But you always want to have enough so that nobody else can determine your future essentially."
|
| What would Warren do? |
| 11/06/09 | | Buffett |
"There is no shortage of motives assigned to Buffett’s motivations for the deal. They include: anxiety about sitting on cash, a general economic play, a bet on another stimulus, a bet on coal, a bet on a turn in the rail economy, a desire to make Berkshire easier to run for a successor, or a desire to be a member of the S&P 500. Then again it might be as simple as the fact that Buffett thinks Burlington Northern is undervalued."
|
| Berkshire buys Burlington |
| 11/03/09 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. in the company's biggest takeover under Warren Buffett."
|
| Buffett selling means you shouldn't be buying |
| 10/08/09 | | Buffett |
"It's not often that Warren Buffett gives the investing public a reason to believe he's not on their side. Then again, it's not every day that Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shows up on the list of selling shareholders in another company's initial public offering."
|
| Buffett recalculating his bets |
| 09/08/09 | | Buffett |
"After counseling Washington to rescue the nation.s financial industry and publicly urging Americans to buy stocks as the markets reeled, in he swooped. Mr. Buffett positioned himself to profit from the market mayhem - as well as all those taxpayer-financed bailouts - and thus secure his legacy as one of the greatest investors of all time."
|
| Berkshire without Buffett |
| 08/28/09 | | Buffett |
"Few things are guaranteed in the investment universe, but here's one: Whoever takes over from 79-year-old Warren Buffett as the head of Berkshire Hathaway will have a hard time filling his shoes."
|
| The greenback effect |
| 08/19/09 | | Buffett |
"The United States economy is now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery. But enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects. For now, most of those effects are invisible and could indeed remain latent for a long time. Still, their threat may be as ominous as that posed by the financial crisis itself."
|
| What would Warren do? |
| 08/16/09 | | Buffett |
"More like the early Christians in pagan Rome than the millions of Muslims thronging Mecca, Buffett's hard-core 'value investors' are few, and in many ways, their entire lives run against the grain of the dominant culture. Only here in Omaha, for one weekend a year, are they a majority. The meeting, with its quasi-ritual speeches, canonical stories and jokes, and the fellowship of other value investors, helps to brace them against a society that almost actively rejects their austere financial philosophy."
|
| Berkshire profit on Goldman |
| 07/26/09 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's option to buy shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., part of an agreement reached at the depths of the credit crisis, has earned a profit on paper of more than $2 billion, a return of about 44 percent."
|
| Buffett's $91,000 shares are a steal |
| 07/23/09 | | Buffett |
"Buffett sounded upbeat at Berkshire's annual meeting in May, saying he thought Berkshire stock could best the S&P 500 in the coming years. He noted that the stock hadn't kept pace with the growth in retained earnings in recent years. Asked whether Berkshire's competitive advantage would die with him, Buffett replied that Berkshire's strengths -- including a unique business mix and culture, long-term orientation and patient shareholder base -- will outlive him."
|
| U.S. economy in "shambles" |
| 06/24/09 | | Buffett |
"In a live interview on CNBC today, Warren Buffett said there has been little progress over the past few months in the "economic war" being fought by the country. "We haven't got the economy moving yet." While the economy is a "shambles" and likely to stay that way for some time, he remains optimistic there will eventually be a recovery over a period of years."
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| Buffett less bullish than you think |
| 06/04/09 | | Buffett |
"Somebody could have said: 'Your children and grandchildren will live better than you' in 1932, and that would have been reason to buy stocks, as well as reason to be nervous."
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| The master of money |
| 05/18/09 | | Buffett |
"There is now a long shelf of books about Warren Buffett, but this is the first time he has gone to any trouble to add to it. Reportedly Buffett now regrets his decision--he has apparently put some fresh distance between himself and his official biographer. If so, it's not hard to see why. Alice Schroeder is a former Morgan Stanley research analyst, able to understand and to explain Buffett's money-making, but she declined to confine herself to the business at hand. She has sought to describe Buffett's psychological landscape as clearly as his financial one. For the reader, the results are pretty terrific--there are not a lot of 838-page narratives that leave you wanting more--but for Buffett they are no doubt upsetting."
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| Back-to-basics with Warren Buffett |
| 05/05/09 | | Buffett |
"Most of what Mr. Buffett said was basic and obvious - and was roundly ignored during the period leading up to this mess. 'Leverage is what causes people real trouble in this world,' Mr. Buffett said. 'You don't want to be in a position where someone can pull the rug out from under you or, emotionally, where you pull it out from under yourself.'"
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| Woodstock for capitalists 2009 |
| 05/02/09 | | Buffett |
Live blog from the event.
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| Buffett fans set for 'capitalist Woodstock' |
| 05/01/09 | | Buffett |
"A record crowd of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders will hang on every word from Warren Buffett at this weekend's annual meeting in Omaha."
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| Berkshire's decline spurred by derivatives |
| 04/28/09 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders have a chance this year to do something that's rare among the Sage of Omaha's followers: count their losses. "
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| Buffett on Wells Fargo |
| 04/20/09 | | Buffett |
"In the end banking is a very good business unless you do dumb things. You get your money extraordinarily cheap and you don't have to do dumb things. But periodically banks do it, and they do it as a flock, like international loans in the 80s. You don't have to be a rocket scientist when your raw material cost is less than 1-1/2%. So I know that you can have a model that works fine and Wells has come closer to doing that right than any other big bank by some margin. They get their money cheaper than anybody else. We're the low-cost producer at Geico in auto insurance among big companies. And when you're the low-cost producer - whether it's copper, or in banking - it's huge."
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| Buffett penalized as Citigroup borrows for less |
| 04/02/09 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is being penalized in the bond market, paying more to borrow than bailed-out companies including Citigroup Inc. Buffett's firm paid more for its latest debt offering than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage lenders that lost a combined $108.8 billion last year. Bank of America Corp. is also paying lower interest on notes under a program in which the U.S. agrees to guarantee debt. The difference in borrowing costs illustrates how government aid is giving an advantage to companies that needed multiple helpings of U.S. rescue funds."
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| How the world ignored Warren Buffett |
| 03/29/09 | | Buffett |
"We read constantly that the current crisis is the worst in generations. That's true, but not for lack of trying. Read The Snowball and you can't help feeling the meltdown was not only inevitable but well deserved; that in fact Wall Street -- driven by a stunning combination of bottomless greed and chronic myopia -- has been striving to bring it about for decades, and has come close to succeeding on several previous occasions."
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| Buffett's takeover tests passed |
| 03/19/09 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett.s renewed focus on U.S. takeovers may lead him to Sysco Corp., VF Corp. or Danaher Corp., according to criteria the billionaire investor lists in his annual report."
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| Buffett is unusually silent on rating agencies |
| 03/19/09 | | Buffett |
"In his annual Berkshire Hathaway letter, Warren E. Buffett recently urged investors to pose tough questions at the shareholders meeting in May. Here is one on the mind of some Buffett watchers: When are you going to fix Moody's?"
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| Buffett's unmentionable bank solution |
| 03/11/09 | | Buffett |
"Now comes Warren Buffett, a big investor in Wells Fargo, M&T Bank and several other banks, who, during his marathon appearance on CNBC Monday, clearly called for suspension of mark-to-market accounting for regulatory capital purposes. We add the italics for the benefit of a House hearing tomorrow on this very issue. Mark-to-market accounting is fine for disclosure purposes, because investors are not required to take actions based on it. It's not so fine for regulatory purposes. It doesn't just inform but can dictate actions that make no sense in the circumstances. Banks can be forced to raise capital when capital is unavailable or unduly expensive; regulators can be forced to treat banks as insolvent though their assets continue to perform."
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| Economy has "fallen off a cliff" |
| 03/09/09 | | Buffett |
"Wishes he had written the New York Times "Buy American" piece a few months later, but stands by the basic argument that you'll do better over a ten-year period with stocks that you will with Treasuries. He said in the article he wasn't calling the bottom of the stock market, and he still isn't."
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| Berkshire Hathaway 2008 |
| 02/28/09 | | Buffett |
"Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails in the past. In the 20th Century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 21.5% prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15% and 25% for many years. America has had no shortage of challenges. Without fail, however, we've overcome them. In the face of those obstacles - and many others - the real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare the record of this period with the dozens of centuries during which humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America's best days lie ahead."
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| Buffett as lender of last resort |
| 02/27/09 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is having a bad year or two. The numbers for profit and book value he will disclose tomorrow in the 2008 annual report for Berkshire Hathaway Inc., his conglomerate and investment vehicle, will lack the sparkle of yesteryear. This year has been no better. Berkshire.s Class A shares touched a five-year low Monday and are down 19 percent so far for 2009. Yet Buffett, 78, still knows how to play."
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| Business buyer |
| 02/23/09 | | Buffett |
"Take a young business genius, apply a liberal dose of Ben Graham's tutelage and you have the richest man on Earth."
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| Berkshire reduces stakes |
| 02/17/09 | | Buffett |
"Known as the 'Oracle of Omaha,' Buffett, 78, has become a cult figure among investors, drawing 31,000 people to that city's Qwest Center arena for his annual shareholders meeting last year. He makes most of the investment decisions at Berkshire, while Lou Simpson, 72, manages the portfolio for car insurance unit Geico Corp. Buffett has cautioned investors against assuming all moves in the equity portfolio are his."
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| Buffett found losses in 2008 |
| 02/11/09 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire Warren Buffett likes to say his favorite length of time to hold a stock is 'forever.' That's a good thing because some of his more recent investments aren't making him money in the short run."
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| Ultimate bargain-hunter never had it so good |
| 02/06/09 | | Buffett |
"While Mr Buffett's October letter alluded strictly to a decision to add stocks to his personal investment account, the search for a higher return than what cash provides is a strategy he has embraced recently at Berkshire, too. 'I'll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: "Put your mouth where your money was",' Mr Buffett wrote. 'Today my money and my mouth say equities.'"
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| Buffett's metric says it's time to buy |
| 02/04/09 | | Buffett |
"Is it time to buy U.S. stocks? According to both this 85-year chart and famed investor Warren Buffett, it just might be."
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| One-on-one with Warren Buffett |
| 01/25/09 | | Buffett |
"We're celebrating NBR's 30th Anniversary, and so is Warren Buffett -- the legendary investor and Chairman & CEO of Berkshire-Hathaway. Recently, Buffett sat down with NBR's Susie Gharib to discuss the past, present, and future of Wall Street."
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| 10 investing basics from Buffett |
| 01/07/09 | | Buffett |
"The Oracle of Omaha became the world's richest person by adhering to simple but critical tenets. Here are his rules for smart living and savvy investing."
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| Buffett has 'nowhere to hide' |
| 01/02/09 | | Buffett |
"The stock plunge 'doesn't make any difference,' Buffett told Fox Business Network Nov. 21. 'It's happened to me three other times,' Buffett said. 'It happened when it went from 90 to 40 back in 1974, and it happened in 1987. It went down 50 percent in 1998-to-2000. I mean, I hope I live long enough so it happens a couple more times.'"
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| Buffett wins $224 million storm bet |
| 12/30/08 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire Warren Buffett.s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. won a $224 million bet that Florida would escape major damage from hurricanes this year."
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| Buffett will give more info on derivatives |
| 11/24/08 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire investor Warren Buffett will provide more information to investors on how he calculates losses on his Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s derivative bets in the firm's annual report early next year. The report will disclose 'all aspects of valuation' and cover 'deficiencies in the formula' for pricing the derivatives, 'which we nevertheless use,' Buffett said in an e- mail"
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| You pay a high price for a cheery consensus |
| 11/10/08 | | Buffett |
"There may well be some period in the near future when financial markets are demoralized and much better buys are available in equities; that possibility exists at all times. But you can be sure that at such a time the future will seem neither predictable nor pleasant. Those now awaiting a "better time" for equity investing are highly likely to maintain that posture until well into the next bull market."
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| The other reason for Warren Buffett's success |
| 11/02/08 | | Buffett |
"Since the end of 1988, Berkshire's stock portfolio has grown from $3.56 billion to $69.51 billion. That is a spectacular average annual increase of 16.5%, far surpassing the 10.5% annualized return of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Of course, this calculation is only a crude approximation, since it ignores the cash that Mr. Buffett added in -- and moved out -- along the way. Over the same period, the growth in Berkshire's book value per share, which reflects all of Mr. Buffett's activities, not just his stock-picking, was 19.9%. In other words, Mr. Buffett's skill at picking publicly traded stocks pales alongside the value he has added to the company through other means."
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| The revival of railroads |
| 10/23/08 | | Buffett |
"Last April, Warren E. Buffett flew to Kansas City, Mo., to join Matthew K. Rose for a ride in a vintage 1930s railcar. Buffett, the billionaire investor from Omaha, and Rose, the chief executive of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BN), munched on hamburgers and jelly beans as they chugged 430 miles up to Chicago. Along the way, they talked about Burlington Northern's unlikely turnaround and how the once-stalled railroad could build on its recent momentum."
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| The economy works |
| 10/23/08 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, speaking to California first lady Maria Shriver's Women's Conference in Long Beach, said he has no idea what will happen in the coming two years but was confident that over a 10-year span the stock market would outperform cash-based investments, such as certificates of deposits and savings accounts, which can lose value when inflation is subtracted from gains."
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| Buy American. I Am. |
| 10/17/08 | | Buffett |
"I've been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I'm talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities."
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| Warren E. Buffett braves a crisis |
| 10/06/08 | | Buffett |
"In the midst of a financial crisis, a towering figure of American business steps forward with his reputation and financial resources for public good and personal gain. Their times and personalities are vastly different, of course. But J. Pierpont Morgan's role in the Panic of 1907 has its echo in Warren E. Buffett's actions during the current financial troubles."
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| Buffett: My fix for the economy |
| 10/03/08 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett suggested Thursday that the U.S. Treasury team with private investors to buy the distressed mortgage assets at the center of the controversial $700 billion Wall Street bailout, and said the price tag of the rescue plan may have to rise."
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| Buffett buys GE preferred |
| 10/01/08 | | Buffett |
"General Electric Co. plans to offer $12 billion in common shares and billionaire investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will buy $3 billion stake of preferred shares."
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| It's the bailout, stupid! |
| 09/25/08 | | Buffett |
"Compared to the ham-handed hastiness in Washington, Warren Buffett's helping hand to Goldman Sachs was an elegant and brilliant stroke for both parties. The greatest investor of our time becomes the largest shareholder of our finest investment bank turned bank holding company."
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| Warren Buffett explains his Goldman investment |
| 09/24/08 | | Buffett |
"Well, I can't tell you it's exactly the right time. I don't try to time things, but I do try to price things. And I've got a formula that says bet on brains, and bet of them when it's the right type of deal. And in this case, there's no better firm on Wall Street. We've done business with them for years, with Goldman, and the price was right, the terms were right, the people were right. I decided to write a check."
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| Goldman to raise $7.5 billion from Berkshire |
| 09/23/08 | | Buffett |
"Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will raise at least $7.5 billion from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and public investors in a bid to quell concerns that pushed up the Wall Street firm's borrowing costs and hurt its stock."
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| Warren Buffett's happy housing story |
| 09/11/08 | | Buffett |
"Not every subprime lender is drowning in red ink. Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary Clayton Homes, the nation's largest maker and financer of prefab and mobile homes, has been a bright light in a mortgage market that has generated $500 billion in write-downs since the start of 2007."
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| Buffett becomes vulture |
| 09/02/08 | | Buffett |
"Ron Peltier runs HomeServices of America Inc., the second-largest U.S. real estate brokerage, and unlike No. 1 NRT Inc., his company is making money in the worst housing slump since the Great Depression. HomeServices also has a parent, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., with $28 billion of cash to help finance the purchase of brokerages that can't weather the housing recession. By contrast, NRT's parent Realogy Corp., owned by Leon Black's Apollo Management LP, has at least $875 million of debt that has an 89 percent chance of defaulting within five years, credit-default swaps tracked by London-based CMA DataVision indicate."
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| The backstory on the Buffett book |
| 08/25/08 | | Buffett |
"One of the most anticipated books of the fall is "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life." The title's publisher, Bantam, paid $7.2 million for the North American rights and expects to sell more than 1 million hardcover copies of "The Snowball," which is due out Sept. 29. Few investors have generated as much sustained public interest as Mr. Buffett, one of the world's richest men, with a fortune estimated as high as $62 billion. R.R. Bowker's Books in Print says there are an estimated 60 titles in print about him, with more than a dozen new ones on tap this year. Now Bantam is about to find out whether there's a limit to Buffetmania."
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| Three hours with Warren Buffett |
| 08/22/08 | | Buffett |
"I think I said one time that, you know, you only find out who's been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach. There's--it's just one discovery after another of firms that either didn't know what they were doing or that did things that they shouldn't have knowingly. And all of the troubles have not been revealed the first time around, usually, so there's considerable disillusionment that's set in in terms of are these guys telling us the truth now or maybe they just don't know what the truth is."
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| Why Buffett is buying |
| 07/10/08 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, 77, can afford to throw a little mud on his competitors in the private equity industry. Wall Street's acquisition machine has seized up, while Buffett, in the valedictory chapter of a career stretching back more than 60 years, is on a buying spree. He has $35.6 billion in cash to spend, and he's looking for companies that he can buy at a reasonable price, that have experienced managers he trusts, products with strong market positions or other competitive advantages."
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| Warren Buffett gets busy |
| 07/10/08 | | Buffett |
"But Buffett is putting things in perspective. Recession does not equal the second Great Depression or economic Armageddon. Rather, Buffett seems to be following the tried and true investing axiom that the best time to make long-term bets is when fear is at its peak. And make no mistake, this is a market ruled by fear right now."
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| Market turmoil? It doesn't rattle Warren |
| 07/06/08 | | Buffett |
"This week's market turmoil might make you feel nauseous but it makes Warren Buffett giddy - or more so at least. Back in February, while on a visit to Toronto, Mr. Buffett told an audience that he was '370 points giddier,' referring to a drop in the Dow Jones industrial average. He added that he wasn't quite elated yet. 'Things are not ridiculously cheap.' The index is 1,000 points lower today from back then, so presumably Mr. Buffett is closer to giddiness than he was six months ago. Wouldn't it be nice to enjoy markets that roil and plunge like he does? If you invested like Mr. Buffett, you would."
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| My $650,100 lunch with Warren Buffett |
| 07/01/08 | | Buffett |
"What would you pay to have lunch with the richest man in the world? For me and Mohnish Pabrai - a friend who, like me, runs a U.S.-based investment fund - the answer is $650,100. That's how much we forked over for the privilege of dining with Warren Buffett on June 25."
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| Record $2.1 Million for lunch with Warren Buffett |
| 06/28/08 | | Buffett |
"The big spender who won this year's "Power Lunch with Warren Buffett" charity auction with a record high bid of $2,110,100 is Zhao Danyang of the Hong-Kong based Pure Heart China Growth Investment Fund, according to a spokesperson for San Francisco's Glide Foundation."
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| Warren Buffett says sell to me, not 'porn shop' |
| 06/25/08 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is in Toronto, fielding questions from a crowd of 300 executives. One asks what makes people want to sell their companies to him. The Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chief executive officer replies that he tells a prospective seller to think of the company as a work of art. ``You can sell it to Berkshire, and we'll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it'll have a wing all by itself; it'll be there forever,'' he says at the February meeting. ``Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he'll take the painting and he'll make the boobs a little bigger and he'll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he'll buy it.''"
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| Stocks buffett would love |
| 06/10/08 | | Buffett |
"Buffett hasn't asked for our help, but we've identified five companies to lighten his pocketbook. Even if he doesn't buy them, the stocks should appeal to mortals, too."
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| Buffett's big bet |
| 06/09/08 | | Buffett |
"Will a collection of hedge funds, carefully selected by experts, return more to investors over the next 10 years than the S&P 500? That question is now the subject of a bet between Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and Protege Partners LLC, a New York City money management firm that runs funds of hedge funds - in other words, a firm whose existence rests on its ability to put its clients' money into the best hedge funds and keep it out of the underperformers. You can guess which party is taking which side."
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| The next Buffetts |
| 05/27/08 | | Buffett |
"We hope that the greatest investor of all time has many, many good quotes left. But we also have to acknowledge reality. Buffett is 77 and even his steady diet of Cherry Coke and hamburgers can't keep a guy going forever. Investors who would like to put their money into Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's flagship company, have to deal with the unpleasant fact that Buffett may be on his last lap or two as champion of the stock market marathon. That raises a fascinating question: who is the next great Buffett-like investor going to be? He or she must be a great stock picker, of course. But that's just the beginning. What distinguishes Buffett is not only his stock market acumen. It's also his willingness to state his opinions in plain English, his independent turn of mind, and his willingness to treat investors as if they were his partners."
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| Buffett sees U.S. in recession |
| 05/25/08 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, whose business and investment acumen has made him one of the world's wealthiest men, was quoted in an interview published Sunday as saying the U.S. economy is already in a recession. Asked by Germany's Der Spiegel weekly whether he thinks the U.S. could still avoid a recession, he said that as far as the average person is concerned, it is already here."
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| Woodstock for capitalists 2008 blog |
| 05/04/08 | | Buffett |
"A shareholder asked how one can correct one's mind set away from a crowd mentality. Mr. Buffett said to read and re-read Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor. He specifically said that chapters 8 and 20 are most poignant, but that the lessons from the book are as relevant today as they were when he first read Graham's book when he was 19 years old. He also said there are basically three lessons to take away from the book: (1) Think of stocks as owning parts of a business, (2) Use the market to serve you rather than instruct you, and (3) Always require a margin of safety when investing. In today's environment, these principles are critical, and I especially think the second one is important to remember, as, in my opinion, it can help investors tune out the rampant noise in the market, helping them improve their investment temperament over time."
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| Updates from the annual meeting |
| 05/03/08 | | Buffett |
"Qwest Center Omaha is filled to the rafters with Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. More than 30,000 people were expected to hear Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger talk about the holding company that includes brand names like Benjamin Moore paints and Dairy Queen ice cream stores."
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| Interview with Warren Buffett |
| 05/02/08 | | Buffett |
"CNBC's Becky Quick sits down with Warren Buffett to discuss the upcoming shareholder meeting, which starts Friday night and runs through Monday. Buffett refers to the annual event as "Woodstock for Capitalists.""
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| Warren Buffett deal interview |
| 04/30/08 | | Buffett |
"I think we're in a recession. I mean, a recession is defined in a certain way by the National Bureau of Economic Research, but I think it's defined by the man in the street a little differently than whether there have been two quarters of reported (negative) GDP growth. And incidentally, when GDP growth is below 1% a year it's really falling on a per capita basis because our population increases about one percent. So even though the National Bureau uses an absolute figure, it's up one-tenth they don't count that as a recessionary quarter, but the GDP per capita has gone down in a quarter where the gain is half a percent or something of the sort. We are in a recession, unless you want to stick strictly to the technical definition, which I really don't think has much meaning to the fellow who has lost his job or is facing a money-market fund that isn't paying him out, or whatever it might be."
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| Meet the Buffetts |
| 04/30/08 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting happens May 3rd in Omaha and, once again, the company's billionaire chairman and CEO, Warren Buffett, will be in the spotlight. Last year, NBR brought viewers an interview with Buffett. This year, anchor Susie Gharib interviews Buffett's three children to find out what their father taught them about money and business."
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| New advice from on high |
| 04/30/08 | | Buffett |
"Everyone will be delighted to hear the details of the minority interest in the Mars-Wrigley candy giant that was made public this week. They will hang on to every hint of the future for Berkshire's huge position in railroad stocks (already profitable) and its staged acquisition of Marmon Group, which owns and leases 94,000 rail cars that must be used to carry the increasingly valuable coal from coast to coast. Think replay of 19th century railroad magnate here without the watered down stock and internecine battles with ruthless competitors." [I was uncertain about linking this one because of its focus on capital gains. Include dividends, which have historically been a major source of profits for stock investors, and the record of past returns improves dramatically.]
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| Warren Buffett - in 1974 |
| 04/30/08 | | Buffett |
"Stay dispassionate and be patient is Buffett's message. "You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be OK." First the crowd is boozy on optimism and buying every new issue in sight. The next moment it is boozy on pessimism, buying gold bars and predicting another Great Depression."
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| Economy in a recession, will be worse than feared |
| 04/29/08 | | Buffett |
"'This is not a field of specialty for me, but my general feeling is that the recession will be longer and deeper than most people think,' Buffett said. 'This will not be short and shallow.' 'I think consumers are feeling gas and food prices,' he added, 'and not feeling they've got a lot of money for other things.'"
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| Mars agrees to buy Wrigley |
| 04/28/08 | | Buffett |
"The purchase will be financed with $11 billion from Mars, $4.4 billion from Berkshire and $5.7 billion from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Berkshire will also buy a $2.1 billion stake in the Wrigley unit once the purchase is completed."
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| What Warren thinks... |
| 04/14/08 | | Buffett |
"You know, I always say you should get greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. But that's too much to expect. Of course, you shouldn't get greedy when others get greedy and fearful when others get fearful. At a minimum, try to stay away from that."
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| Berkshire's free money beats LBO model |
| 03/26/08 | | Buffett |
"Credit-market gridlock has trapped Stephen Schwarzman, who relies on lenders to fund acquisitions, while leaving Warren Buffett free to pursue the debt-free deals that have helped make him the world's richest person. Buffett, chairman of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has $59 billion in cost-free money from insurance premiums to invest. Schwarzman's New York-based Blackstone Group LP, manager of the biggest private-equity fund, is being forced to bypass Wall Street banks after they stopped financing most leveraged buyouts. Buffett and Schwarzman each takes a different approach to the same goal: finding companies they consider undervalued. Investors are betting Buffett's model will prevail, at least for now."
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| Just think, the fees you could charge Buffett |
| 03/12/08 | | Buffett |
"The news that Warren Buffett is now the world's richest man led to the predictable round of stories about his frugal habits - the cherry Coke, the well-done steaks and the bungalow in Omaha that has been home for 50 years. There is a point here. Like Bill Gates, whom he has toppled from the top spot, Mr Buffett is primarily interested in the business rather than the wealth that results. Money is a means of keeping score rather than an objective in its own right: the fun, Mr Buffett has said, is watching it grow."
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| Gates no longer world's richest man |
| 03/05/08 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is the richest man on the planet. Riding the surging price of Berkshire Hathaway stock, America's most beloved investor has seen his fortune swell to an estimated $62 billion, up $10 billion from a year ago. That massive pile of scratch puts him ahead of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who was the richest man in the world for 13 straight years."
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| Warren Buffett on Squawk Box part 1 |
| 03/03/08 | | Buffett |
"Buffett says there's been a lot of de-leveraging, and there's still more to come. In many cases, the de-leveraging is happening at crazy prices. People who were out on a limb are having the limb cut off."
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| Warren Buffett on Squawk Box part 2 |
| 03/03/08 | | Buffett |
"Becky asks why he thinks U.S. now in a recession. He replies he sees lots of indicators, including sales at his businesses and the reduction in people's net worth. He's sure there is a recession, not sure how far it will go."
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| Warren Buffett on Squawk Box part 3 |
| 03/03/08 | | Buffett |
"Joe Kernen asks about recent purchases of Glaxo and Sanofi? Why? Buffett says he made the decision to buy those stocks and that with drug companies he knows less specifically about those companies than, say, a candy company. Hard to make a bet on a specific drug company based on a drug that might be in the pipeline. "If you have a group" of drug companies, you'll "probably do OK." Would he buy a domestic drug company? Yes, but he does like earnings coming from abraod than earnings coming from the United States. Most big drug companies in the U.S. do get a lot of their profits from overseas."
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| Berkshire Hathaway 2007 Letter |
| 02/29/08 | | Buffett |
"Some major financial institutions have, however, experienced staggering problems because they engaged in the "weakened lending practices" I described in last year's letter. John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, aptly dissected the recent behavior of many lenders: "It is interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine." You may recall a 2003 Silicon Valley bumper sticker that implored, "Please, God, Just One More Bubble." Unfortunately, this wish was promptly granted, as just about all Americans came to believe that house prices would forever rise. That conviction made a borrower's income and cash equity seem unimportant to lenders, who shoveled out money, confident that HPA - house price appreciation - would cure all problems. Today, our country is experiencing widespread pain because of that erroneous belief. As house prices fall, a huge amount of financial folly is being exposed. You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out - and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight."
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| Berkshire becomes largest Kraft shareholder |
| 02/15/08 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, the second-richest man in the U.S., is often mimicked by investors who follow his stock picks. Using that strategy for the past 31 years would have delivered annual returns of about 25 percent, double the return of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, according to an academic study."
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| Snow White killed the 'triple-A' |
| 02/13/08 | | Buffett |
"Well, when a company issues a 14 per cent bond when US Treasuries are below 4 percent and it's rated triple-A, we've now seen the cow jumping over the moon."
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| Buffett "huge bull on the U.S. economy" |
| 02/07/08 | | Buffett |
"The second step is just as relevant, given all the nail-biting about whether or not we're in a recession. Hagstrom writes that "if you find yourself discussing and debating whether the economy is poised for growth or tilting toward a recession, whether interest rates are moving up or down, or whether there is inflation or disinflation, STOP! Give yourself a break. Except for his preconceived notions that the economy inherently has an inflation bias, Buffett dedicates no time or energy analyzing the economy.""
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| Warren Buffett makes news in Canada |
| 02/07/08 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett answered questions for almost 90 minutes yesterday during his appearance in Toronto to promote Business Wire's expansion into Canada. We focused on his credit, dollar and economy comments, but he made a lot of other news as well, including a revelation to Canada's National Post newspaper that he made "several hundred million dollars" owning the Canadian dollar, then sold, and now wishes he had kept his holdings in the Loonie."
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| Business Wire: A conversation with Warren Buffett |
| 02/07/08 | | Buffett |
Business Wire Canada Opening Reception: A Conversation with Warren Buffett (1 Hour 30 Minute MP3)
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| What would Buffett buy? |
| 02/05/08 | | Buffett |
"How does he do it? Author Robert Hagstrom tried to compile Buffett's key investing strategies in his 1994 best seller, The Warren Buffett Way: Investment Strategies of the World's Greatest Investor. With Hagstrom's book as a source, Standard & Poor's Portfolio Services devised a stock screen that picks companies using criteria similar to those that fit the legendary investor's growth-oriented style. S&P updates this screen on a semiannual basis, during February and again in August. Over the years, the screen has put in a pretty good performance itself. From Feb. 13, 1995, through Jan. 17, 2008, the screen had an annualized return of 14.9%, vs. 8.2% for the S&P 500. In 2007, the screen stocks gained 15.7%, vs. 3.5% for the S&P 500. (All results reflect price appreciation only.)"
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| Buffett starts up bond insurer |
| 12/28/07 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, who has described derivatives as 'financial weapons of mass destruction,' told the Journal he will focus on insuring municipal debt rather than CDOs."
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| Buffett wins the Pritzkers' prize |
| 12/26/07 | | Buffett |
"Marmon has improved its performance in recent years. The holding company, with more than 125 manufacturing and service businesses, hit a rough patch at the beginning of the decade as the economy softened. But in 2006, the company says revenue increased 24%, and now totals about $7 billion, while operating income surged 73%. (Because Marmon is privately held, it does not have to provide detailed financial statements to the public.) Marmon is owned by trusts for the benefit of the Pritzker family, which also developed the Hyatt Hotel chain. The Buffett deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008. Before the closing, Marmon will make a "substantial distribution of cash and certain assets to the selling shareholders," according to the statement."
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| Video tour of Berkshire Hathaway |
| 12/02/07 | | Buffett |
"CNBC's Becky Quick traveled to Omaha, Nebraska recently to shoot additional material for her one-hour special focusing on Warren Buffett's whirlwind tour of Asia. While she was there, Buffett gave Becky an on-camera tour of the Berkshire Hathaway offices. He talked about some of the mementos he's collected and their personal significance to him, and to his investing style."
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| Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery |
| 11/26/07 | | Buffett |
"We analyze the performance of Berkshire Hathaway's equity portfolio and explore potential explanations for its superior performance. Contrary to popular belief we show Berkshire's investment style is best characterized as a large-cap growth. We examine whether Berkshire's investment performance is due to luck and find that beating the market in 28 out of 31 years places it in the 99.99 percentile; however, incorporating the magnitude by which Berkshire beats the market makes the 'luck' explanation unlikely even after taking into account ex-post selection bias. After adjusting for risk we find that Berkshire's performance cannot be explained by assuming high risk. From 1976 to 2006 Berkshire's stock portfolio beats the S&P 500 Index by 14.65%, the value-weighted index of all stocks by 10.91%, and the Fama and French characteristic portfolio by 8.56% per year. The market also appears to under-react to the news of a Berkshire stock investment since a hypothetical portfolio that mimics Berkshire's investments created the month after they are publicly disclosed earns positive abnormal returns of 14.26% per year. Overall, the Berkshire Hathaway triumvirates of Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, and Lou Simpson posses' investment skill consistent with a number of recent papers that argue investment skill is more prevalent than earlier papers suggest."
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| A Buffett investment that wasn't |
| 11/20/07 | | Buffett |
"Last week, it began to look as if CarMax, one of the pioneers of the used-car superstore, had become the next target. Legndary investor Warren Buffett was said to be buying in. Headlines like "Buffett buys major stake in CarMax" and "Buffett Buy Sends CarMax shares soaring" appeared. Copycat investors sent CarMax's stock price shooting up when the news broke on November 15. CarMax's stock jumped $1.62, up 7.5%. But the story as reported by many news outlets isn't accurate, because Buffett wasn't directly involved in the purchase. The stock was bought by GEICO, the auto insurer and a subsidiary of Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathway. There's a big difference, as I'll explain."
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| Buying what Buffett buys on filings doubles S&P 500 |
| 11/16/07 | | Buffett |
"Buying whatever billionaire Warren Buffett bought, often months after his share purchases, delivered twice the return of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index during the past three decades. Investors would have earned an annual return of 24.6 percent by buying the same stocks as Buffett after he disclosed his holdings in regulatory filings, sometimes four months later, according to a soon-to-be-released study by Gerald Martin of American University in Washington and John Puthenpurackal of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The S&P 500 rose 12.8 percent a year in the same period."
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| Buffett testifies |
| 10/31/07 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett sat in front of a video camera in Omaha, spelled his name for the record and minced no words as he testified for the government yesterday in its case against former Freddie Mac chief executive Leland C. Brendsel. Brendsel is accused of presiding over accounting manipulations and running Freddie Mac in a reckless manner. Buffett, one of the most successful and revered investors, sold a huge stake in the mortgage funding company before the manipulations came to light, and the government wanted him to explain why. Buffett said he was troubled in part by a Freddie Mac investment that had nothing to do with its business. "I follow the old dictum: There's never just one cockroach in the kitchen," Buffett said."
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| Buffett predicts a long flight for loonie |
| 10/14/07 | | Buffett |
"At an invitation-only Toronto dinner Thursday for about 140 prominent investors, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said he expects the Canadian dollar to continue rising beyond the parity it recently reached with the U.S. dollar."
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| Interview with Warren Buffett |
| 10/14/07 | | Buffett |
"Nebraska's Warren Buffett is known as the Oracle of Omaha for the savvy stock market investments that have made him one the wealthiest people in the world. Through his holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett, 77, has amassed a fortune investing in companies like Coca-Cola, famously shunning trendy, riskier bets like Internet and technology companies. His success has earned him a near cult-like following, evident each year at Berkshire's hugely popular Omaha shareholders' meeting, which Buffett once called Woodstock for Capitalists. But for all his riches, Buffett is equally well-known for his frugal and folksy ways, and lately for his philanthropy. In 2006 he said he would give away 85 per cent of his roughly $50-billion fortune, with the bulk going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in annual instalments that Buffett insists be distributed in the year they are received. His sister Doris is also involved in philanthopy and runs the Sunshine Lady Foundation, which often deals with personal entreaties for aid that Buffett receives."
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| Get buffed up |
| 10/05/07 | | Buffett |
"Convinced to attend university by his father, stock-broker-turned-congressman Howard Buffett, the young Buffett complained he knew more than his teachers. When he attended Columbia University's business graduate school (after being turned down by Harvard for being too young), he met Benjamin Graham, whose investment strategies would turn out to greatly influence Buffett's own business model. The prodigy was the only student to ever earn an A+ in one of Graham's classes."
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| Warren Buffett: "I don't care" if the Fed cuts rates |
| 09/18/07 | | Buffett |
"I represent a different view, maybe, than your other viewers. I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever to an investor in stocks what they do today. I don't care, I wouldn't care whether they raise the rate in terms of what I would do in stocks. If I knew exactly what they were going to do, I would not change a buy or a sell order that I have in." [Perhaps one of the silliest Buffett interviews I've seen. Who did they think they were interviewing?]
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| Warren Buffett MBA Talk |
| 09/08/07 | | Buffett |
See Warren's address to MBA students on You Tube in 10 parts.
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| A world of winners, Warren's way |
| 08/11/07 | | Buffett |
"We have been running this screen for more than 12 years. Since its inception on Feb. 13, 1995, through July 31, 2007, the screen has had an annualized return of 15.69% vs. 9.28% for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Year-to-date through July 31, 2007, the Buffett screen stocks outperformed the market, returning 7.69% vs. the 2.61% gain for the S&P 500 (all results are price appreciation only)."
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| Tend to overanalyse stocks? |
| 08/11/07 | | Buffett |
"Contrast this with the investment process of Warren Buffett and his partner, Charlie Munger. Their record is astounding, yet they have no analysts on staff to crank out spreadsheets or discounted cash flow valuations. I'm not even sure these two guys know how to use Microsoft Excel to model financial projections (probably not). How can two people out-research a staff of 100 highly-trained CFAs using the latest and greatest computer technology? The answer is that Buffett and Munger are able to filter out the noise better than just about anyone else."
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| Making money the Warren Buffett way |
| 08/04/07 | | Buffett |
"When an investor amasses $52 billion over half a century, humble stock pickers take note. When he's Warren Buffett, the homespun "Oracle of Omaha," it not only pays to heed his thinking, but it's fun."
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| How Buffett bounces back |
| 07/02/07 | | Buffett |
"Thousands have studied the success of Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA). And for good reason: The value of Berkshire stock increased 361,156% from 1964 to 2006. But the country's most famous investor has made some infamous mistakes, too. Buffett's blunders offer their own lessons to investors trying to emulate the "Sage of Omaha.""
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| Warren Buffett timeline |
| 06/08/07 | | Buffett |
"A Chronological History of the Oracle of Omaha: 1930-1989"
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| Turtles in Omaha |
| 05/31/07 | | Buffett |
"Most of us frame the success or failure of a financial proposition in terms of the price. For instance, if you buy a stock at $30, any price above that level is mentally successful; any price below it is mentally unsuccessful. What investors often fail to consider is that change in wealth is not a function of how often you're right, it's a function of how much money you make when you're right versus how much you lose when you're wrong. You need to consider both frequency and magnitude to understand investment results. Faith illustrates this point by sharing 20 years of results for a trading system. Over that time span, the system generated about 5,600 trades, or around 250 a year. Of those trades, a shade over two-thirds lost money, making the success ratio less than one-third. But the winning trades earned 2.2 times the losing trades on average, netting a substantial overall profit."
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| Top 20 questions from 2007's meeting |
| 05/27/07 | | Buffett |
"The measurement of volatility: it's nice, it's mathematical, and wrong. Volatility is not risk. Those who have written about risk don't know how to measure risk. Past volatility does not measure risk. When farm prices crashed, [farm price] volatility went up, but a farm priced at $600 per acre that was formerly $2,000 per acre isn't riskier because it's more volatile. [Measures like] beta let people who teach finance use the math they've learned. That's nonsense. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. Dexter Shoes was a terrible mistake. I was wrong about the business, but not because shoe prices were volatile. If you understand the business you own, you're not taking risk. Volatility is useful for people who want a career in teaching. I cannot recall a case where we lost a lot of money due to volatility. The whole concept of volatility as a measure of risk has developed in my lifetime and isn't any use to us."
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| Buffett's Squanderville all maxed out |
| 05/23/07 | | Buffett |
"Buffett makes his point with an economic model dressed as storytelling. He invites his audience on "a wildly fanciful trip to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville". Squandervillians live it up by borrowing from Thriftville - something they can keep doing until they've mortgaged all their assets, including their land. This process could go on a long time before the market forces an adjustment. And by then, what damage might have been done to Squanderville's economic future, not to mention its strategic position with its financier Thriftville"
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| Picks from Berkshire's portfolio |
| 05/23/07 | | Buffett |
"At this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, Buffett said that when analyzing securities at Berkshire, they favor companies where they can have a very good idea of what the business will look like down the road. What's more, he said that when Berkshire looks to buy a business or stock, it wants to purchase those that have earned--and can continue to earn--high returns on capital for owners."
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| Buffett reveals stakes in two railroads |
| 05/19/07 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. on Tuesday revealed stakes in Norfolk Southern Corp. and Union Pacific Corp. - five weeks after the billionaire said he had invested in three railroad companies but wouldn't disclose the names of two. In filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkshire also disclosed a 979,700 share stake in WellPoint Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer by membership. The stake was valued at $79.5 million as of March 31, Berkshire said."
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| Live from Omaha |
| 05/15/07 | | Buffett |
"This year's meeting takes place tomorrow in Omaha's Qwest Center, and investors from all walks of life will gather to pepper Warren Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger with questions on a whole host of topics. ... If you can't make it to the big event, fear not! The Fool has sent yours truly to the land of steaks and corn to join the other 20,000-plus attendees and keep you abreast of the happenings. On Saturday, keep your eyes on Fool.com to read my live coverage."
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| What Buffett might buy |
| 05/07/07 | | Buffett |
"If Buffett is intent on finding a mega-deal, what kind of target is most likely? For starters, the sage favors high-quality businesses with long-term competitive advantages, what he describes as "a moat" that keeps rivals at a safe distance. He shies away from businesses he doesn't understand, such as technology. Perhaps most important, Buffett is looking for a well-run company with a solid management team that he doesn't have to go in and replace. And he's not chasing after a quick buck. Once he buys a company, he wants to hold on for the long haul, unlike most private equity firms."
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| Regaled with Buffettania |
| 05/07/07 | | Buffett |
"Will global liquidity keep driving prices higher? The second-richest man in America is "baffled by the liquidity sloshing around in the world. It's hard to find very much fear. That's the trouble with a complacent world." Chimed in Munger: "Eventually we'll have an event that will change people's perception. We always do." What will it be? Privately, Buffett worries about a debacle many times Long Term Capital's demise in 1998. He suggests it will be many hedge funds all with the same highly leveraged positions in derivatives that will be damnably hard--if not impossible--to unwind."
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| Buffett ready to buy 'big business' |
| 05/06/07 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett usually laments that his company has more cash than investment opportunities. Yesterday he envisioned an acquisition so big that he'd have to sell some stocks to free up funds."
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| Buffett, the Wal-Mart shopper |
| 05/06/07 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, who rarely reveals much about his investment moves in public, started building a big position in Wal-Mart back in 2005, according to filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Two years later, Berkshire owns some 19.9 million shares, roughly $960 million worth, making it one of the insurer's largest holdings. Target first popped up in the portfolio about a year ago, a stake some speculate was bought by Berkshire's other bargain hunter, Lou Simpson, chief investment officer at the GEICO car insurance subsidiary. But in the third quarter of 2006, Berkshire held fewer than 1 million shares, and by the end of the year the investment had disappeared from the company's financial reports."
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| Berkshire Hathaway resembles a mutual fund |
| 05/03/07 | | Buffett |
"The mix of companies and investments billionaire Warren Buffett's company holds makes some people think investing in Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is a bit like buying shares of a mutual fund that emphasizes insurance."
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| A maestro of investments |
| 04/24/07 | | Buffett |
"The bigger mystery is who will become the chief investment officer. Mr. Buffett says he does not know himself. On this point of succession, 'frankly, we are not as well prepared,' he wrote in his 2006 shareholder letter last month. Here is a clue, though. He or she will probably be a lot like Louis Simpson. Louis who? Mr. Simpson, 70, has long overseen the investment portfolio of Geico, the insurance company Berkshire owns, which is now valued at more than $4 billion. He is also the only man other than Mr. Buffett who has managed stock investments in Berkshire's portfolio. "
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| Buffett's Berkshire buys big Burlington stake |
| 04/07/07 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has bought a stake of more than 10 percent in railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. that's worth about $3.2 billion, according to a filing with regulators."
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| Buffett wisdom |
| 04/04/07 | | Buffett |
"LTCM had taken a huge leveraged position in these bonds when the spreads were much smaller, but didn't have the collateral to hold on to it when the spread widened. Buffett quoted John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1931 that 'The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent'. As the spread widened, Keynes' dictum became devastatingly relevant for LTCM. But Berkshire, with its huge cash hoard, could withstand the pressure of even more market irrationality before the spread eventually returned to normal. Unfortunately, Warren was never able to consummate the deal. He had been invited by Bill Gates to vacation in Alaska when the crisis broke and it was hard to negotiate such a deal on a cell phone. Eventually the banks holding the collateral made a deal with LTCM and Berkshire didn.t have a chance to top their offer. Warren is philosophical about the loss of this opportunity, noting it was the most expensive vacation he ever took. 'Bill Gates cost me about $3 billion,' he shrugged."
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| User's guide to Buffett's portfolio |
| 03/26/07 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, the smartest investor ever, has done a lot of work for us when he buys a position and then discloses his holdings. Studying in the footsteps of the master and his disciples, but using that as a starting point for your own research, will end up being a very lucrative practice."
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| Warren Buffet talks competitiveness |
| 03/16/07 | | Buffett |
"CNBC's Liz Claman and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett sat down for an exclusive interview March 13 at a high-profile conference in Washington D.C. on the competitiveness of U.S. capital markets hosted by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Buffett, known as the Oracle of Omaha for his investing acumen, was one of the many big-name business leaders who took part in two panels on the subject."
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| No free rides on Berkshire's dollar |
| 03/15/07 | | Buffett |
"Sure, there are CEOs who have no qualms about having shareholders foot the bill for frequent use of company planes and other lavish expenses, but Buffett won't be counted among their ranks. Last year he reimbursed Berkshire $50,000 for personal expenses, so that shareholders wouldn't be stuck with the bill for his postage stamps and phone calls home, according to the statement. In fact, Buffett describes his payment as "equal to or greater than the costs" of his expenses."
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| Berkshire Hathaway's 5-star stocks |
| 03/02/07 | | Buffett |
"In its recent filing, Berkshire disclosed three new positions: Ingersoll-Rand Company (IR), United Healthcare (UNH), and US Bancorp (USB). It should be noted that Berkshire had been accumulating its stake in US Bancorp since early 2006 but had been granted permission to delay the filing of this position over the last couple of quarters. Berkshire also modestly boosted its stake in Wells Fargo (WFC) and USG (USG)."
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| Berkshire Hathaway annual for 2006 |
| 03/01/07 | | Buffett |
"Let me end this section by telling you about one of the good guys of Wall Street, my long-time friend Walter Schloss, who last year turned 90. From 1956 to 2002, Walter managed a remarkably successful investment partnership, from which he took not a dime unless his investors made money. My admiration for Walter, it should be noted, is not based on hindsight. A full fifty years ago, Walter was my sole recommendation to a St. Louis family who wanted an honest and able investment manager."
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| Buffett bets on housing |
| 02/22/07 | | Buffett |
"So what is he buying now, and what can we learn from it? First, he's once again making the bet that housing and construction might be in a medium correction but not a long-term slump."
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| One of our favorite 5-star stocks |
| 02/10/07 | | Buffett |
"Any final words of wisdom for those who own or are considering owning the shares? In my opinion, Berkshire remains a premier franchise whose stock is currently offering investors a very attractive risk/reward scenario. If you bought some Berkshire stock today and put it under your mattress, I strongly believe that 10 years from now it will be worth significantly more than what you paid for it."
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| Buy 'em like Buffett |
| 02/09/07 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett has established his reputation as the "World's Greatest Investor" by taking the longer view - buying quality stocks with good earnings power and hanging on through both bull and bear markets. During the last few decades, he has parlayed some well-chosen core holdings into an unparalleled performance record - not to mention an enormous personal fortune."
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| The Berkshire Hathaway portfolio |
| 01/12/07 | | Buffett |
"Now you're probably thinking: Great, if Buffett himself thinks Berkshire's equity investments will only be slower growers, why should I be interested in them? Well, in my view, the ability to buy a fractional ownership interest in some great businesses at attractive prices with limited downside is still a very good proposition, especially when compared to the average investor's current opportunities."
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| Words of wisdom from Warren Buffett |
| 01/12/07 | | Buffett |
"Warm and fuzzy aren't words normally used to describe captains of industry. That is unless you're talking about Warren Buffett. He's the second-richest man on the planet, the best investor ever, one of the most significant philanthropists in world history--and yet he seems as down-to-earth and grandfatherly as say, Wilford Brimley. Buffett helps perpetuate this homespun mystique with his annual investor newsletters, which are chock full of folksy words of wisdom."
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| Warren Buffett Q&A video |
| 01/06/07 | | Buffett |
"The video is about 40 minutes long and contains a lot of great sound bites from Warren on investing, business and entrepreneurship."
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| How Warren Buffet made his billions |
| 12/26/06 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is a man who has made millions but he also started working at his father's brokerage when he was 11 years old, that's an age when most other kids were playing hide-n-seek and didn't know how to spell 'brokerage'. This financial wizard is by recent estimates, worth $46 billion but how he got there is the fascinating story."
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| Why Warren Buffett's a genius again |
| 11/28/06 | | Buffett |
"On Oct. 23, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway hit a price of $100,000 a share. As far as I can discover, that's the highest price ever for shares of a publicly traded company. The A shares are up about 5,555 times since May 1965, when Buffett took control of what was then a modest textile company. With that milestone behind the shares, of course, the question now is, will Berkshire Hathaway A become the first $200,000 stock? Yes. Not a doubt. Remember that you heard it here first: Berkshire Hathaway A will be the first $200,000-per-share stock."
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| The billionaire next door |
| 11/13/06 | | Buffett |
"Buffet takes Claman on a personal tour of his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska from his grandfather's store where he turned his first profit selling chewing gum and soda, to the $31,500 house he's owned for almost a half-century. The unassuming billionaire says, "I like the way I was living when I was in my 20's. I still like that way...I like to go home and put on a sweat suit." Buffett owned his first stock at the age of 11, but admits, "I don't know why I wasted time before that stock...I got started late." In the hour-long special, Claman gets Buffett to open up on a variety of topics such as his gut instincts about business, his feelings about Wall Street, how he feels when he makes a deal, his surprising view about his own tax rate and his $31 billion pledge to the only person in the world with more money, his good friend Bill Gates."
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| Hedge funds are older than you think |
| 10/09/06 | | Buffett |
"In a letter to Financial History, the magazine of the Museum of American Finance, Buffett gently begs to differ with a statement in the magazine that the first known hedge fund was started in 1949 by Alfred Winslow Jones. This is, says Buffett, "an error that has often appeared elsewhere, including in a Federal Reserve report." While Jones was indeed an early practitioner of the hedge-fund art, says Buffett, he was not the first. The esteemed investor and writer Benjamin Graham managed a hedge fund as early as the mid-1920s."
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| The battle of the billionaires |
| 09/13/06 | | Buffett |
"You don't become a billionaire by making a lot of bad bets. But two of the world's richest men are now on opposite sides of a wager that may see one of them lose a fair chunk of change. The two men: Warren Buffett, whose mastery of value investing has helped him accumulate more than $40 billion, and Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who has earned more than $8 billion with astute and aggressive stock plays. They are now taking sides over the fate of USG Corp., the leading gypsum wallboard maker, which just emerged from bankruptcy protection. Which investor turns out to be right will depend in large part on the ultimate health of the U.S. housing market."
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| Warren Buffett Interviews |
| 07/16/06 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett stunned the world when he announced he was giving his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Charlie Rose is the only broadcast journalist with access to Buffett and Gates on their friendship which resulted in this historic announcement."
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| Would you like that $11 billion in twenties? |
| 07/11/06 | | Buffett |
"On July 3, Warren Buffett drove himself downtown, walked into the cavernous and nearly deserted central branch of U.S. Bank in Omaha, descended a flight of steps, and opened his large safe-deposit box. He took out a 1979-dated certificate for 121,737 shares of Berkshire Hathaway A stock, on that day worth about $11 billion - roughly one-quarter of his Berkshire fortune. Driving back to his office, he pondered the next step: getting that certificate and a few others (worth only tens of millions) to Wells Fargo in Minneapolis for conversion at a 30-to-1 ratio into around 3.75 million shares of Berkshire B stock. He considered FedEx and elected instead to turn one of the 16 people working at Berkshire headquarters into a courier."
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| Warren Buffett gives away his fortune |
| 06/25/06 | | Buffett |
"We were sitting in a Manhattan living room on a spring afternoon, and Warren Buffett had a Cherry Coke in his hand as usual. But this unremarkable scene was about to take a surprising turn. "Brace yourself," Buffett warned with a grin. He then described a momentous change in his thinking. Within months, he said, he would begin to give away his Berkshire Hathaway fortune, then and now worth well over $40 billion."
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| See's, Buffett's candy shop, pushes across U.S. again |
| 05/25/06 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Chairman Buffett bought See's in 1972 for $25 million at the urging of Vice Chairman Munger. With its first new chief executive officer in 34 years, See's is taking another run at becoming as familiar across the U.S. as International Dairy Queen Inc., also a Berkshire unit, and Coca-Cola Co., whose biggest shareholder is Berkshire. Brad Kinstler, CEO since January, is cultivating Internet sales and operating more gift shops during the Christmas season, when See's gets half its revenue. The drive follows a failed effort 30 years ago to put See's black-and-white-tiled stores in malls from St. Louis to Houston. After 85 years in business, See's still has more than three-quarters of its 200 stores in California."
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| 38 stocks in the Buffett portfolio |
| 05/24/06 | | Buffett |
"We also understand that Berkshire recently acquired a stake in U.K.-based retailer Tesco PLC. These public investments coincide with Berkshire's proposed acquisition of Israel-based Iscar Metalworking Companies for $4 billion. Taken together, we estimate that Berkshire has added almost $6 billion of "nondollar" assets to its holdings over the last few months. We aren't overly surprised by this, given Buffett's continued belief that large U.S. trade deficits will eventually cause the dollar to weaken."
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| The Warren & Charlie Show: 2006 |
| 05/10/06 | | Buffett |
"I was in Omaha on Saturday to attend Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders' meeting at the Qwest Center there. As they do every year, CEO Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger spent the bulk of the session answering questions from shareholders. Here are my notes from the gathering"
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| Buffett solves his cash crisis |
| 05/07/06 | | Buffett |
"With each passing year, they seem to become a little less interested in buying small stakes of companies that trade in the stock market - and more interested in buying majority holdings in private businesses. That, they believe, is how they can now get the biggest bang for their big bucks. Buffett and Munger are more thoughtful about what to do with cash than any other business leaders in America. That's because they know that cash is like most good things in life: It takes only a tiny bit too much to turn it from a blessing into a curse."
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| Wit and wisdom of Buffett and Munger |
| 05/07/06 | | Buffett |
"Selected comments from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger from Saturday's annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in Omaha, Nebraska."
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| Omaha notebook |
| 05/07/06 | | Buffett |
"The annual shareholder gathering at Berkshire Hathaway's headquarters in Omaha on Saturday, often called "Woodstock for capitalists," included bling, a merger deal and appearances by the "Desperate Housewives" cast. Here are dispatches from the meeting."
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| Buffett: Real estate slowdown ahead |
| 05/06/06 | | Buffett |
"I don't think there's a bubble in agricultural commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans. But in metals and oil there's been a terrific [price] move. It's like most trends: At the beginning, it's driven by fundamentals, then speculation takes over. As the old saying goes, what the wise man does in the beginning, fools do in the end. With any asset class that has a big move, first the fundamentals attract speculation, then the speculation becomes dominant. Once a price history develops, and people hear that their neighbor made a lot of money on something, that impulse takes over, and we're seeing that in commodities and housing...Orgies tend to be wildest toward the end. It's like being Cinderella at the ball. You know that at midnight everything's going to turn back to pumpkins & mice. But you look around and say, 'one more dance,' and so does everyone else. The party does get to be more fun -- and besides, there are no clocks on the wall. And then suddenly the clock strikes 12, and everything turns back to pumpkins and mice."
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| Age and acquisitions top Berkshire agenda |
| 05/04/06 | | Buffett |
" But the shares have stagnated over the past two years, as Buffett has struggled to find big acquisitions that meet his strict value-investing criteria. In his 2004 shareholder letter, Buffett admitted that he'd "struck out" by not making any multi-billion dollar acquisitions that year. "Berkshire therefore ended the year with $43 billion of cash equivalents, not a happy position," he wrote, promising to try to "translate some of this hoard into more interesting assets during 2005." By the end of last year, Berkshire had made more than $10 billion in acquisitions, but its cash pile still stood at more than $40 billion because the company's current businesses generate so much profit."
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| Harley-Davidson, Mattel fit Buffett purchase criteria |
| 05/04/06 | | Buffett |
"Buffett repeats his acquisition criteria each year in Berkshire's annual report. Companies must have at least $75 million in pretax profit, consistent earnings, 'good' returns on equity and 'little or no debt' to be considered. Managers must stay with the company, which should be in a 'simple' business. The valuation of $5 billion to $20 billion has stood since 1998. The range was $5 billion to $10 billion before then. The Bloomberg News search looked at more than 5,000 publicly traded U.S. companies. To qualify, stocks needed a price-to- earnings ratio of 15 at most, less generous than the 17 times earnings Berkshire is paying for Russell. They also had total debt to common equity of less than 50 percent and five-year geometric earnings growth of 10 percent annually. "
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| Buffett shares wisdom with students |
| 04/15/06 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is known for shrewd financial deals, but the world's second-richest man also invests some of his time to help guide business students. Buffett's Berkshire-Hathaway Inc. made an average of $23.4 million a day in 2005, yet he plans to spend the better part of 20 days this year answering questions and offering advice based on decades of stunningly successful experience. It's time the Oracle of Omaha thoroughly enjoys."
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| Buffett makes $14 Billion bet on global stocks |
| 04/03/06 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire sold a form of insurance to buyers who wanted protection from a drop in 'four major equity indexes' over the next 15 to 20 years, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Instead of buying the individual shares, Buffett is wagering the indexes, three of which are outside the U.S., won't tumble and force Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire to pay a claim."
|
| Visiting Warren Buffett |
| 03/30/06 | | Buffett |
"It is Buffett's peculiar genius that he is able to make the game sound so straightforward. Want to make money investing in businesses? Remember three things: Mr. Market, Margin of Safety, and make sure the business has a moat. The moat either comes from a low-cost position or from pricing power, the latter of which usually results from a strong brand. If you're going in with a partner, make sure that they are a passionate and ambitious fanatic who has devoted their life to the business, and that they don't lie, cheat, or steal. That's about it. As Buffett puts it, you don't need an eleventh commandment; it's all spelled out in the first ten."
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| OK, bash Buffett - but buy his stock |
| 03/28/06 | | Buffett |
"Insurance companies are amazing cash-flow machines. With a couple of flat years behind it, Berkshire Hathaway has cleared the decks for solid profits."
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| The trouble with being a legend |
| 03/22/06 | | Buffett |
"Legendary investor Warren Buffett, the "Oracle of Omaha", has had an unusually lengthy period of underperformance and other troubles. Is he struggling under the weight of his own past achievements or is this just a blip in the legend of Warren Buffet?"
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| Buffett's biz worth less than sum of its parts |
| 03/13/06 | | Buffett |
"The shares have been treading water for two years. And they no longer trade at a premium to the rest of the market. In fact, on 16 times earnings and just 1.7 times sales, they are cheaper than at almost any time since Bloomberg began tracking the data in 1990. And that ignores the fact that, in addition to all the businesses his company owns, Buffett is also sitting on an astonishing $92 billion in cash and stock market investments."
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| Warren Buffett's billion dollar secrets |
| 03/06/06 | | Buffett |
"Buffett's time-tested belief: Investors don't always act rationally, the market isn't always efficient and bargains can be made. Competing with Efficient Market theorists, he says, is like playing bridge against opponents who were taught it does no good to look at the cards."
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| Berkshire Hathaway report for 2005 |
| 03/04/06 | | Buffett |
"Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases."
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| Oracle of Omaha offers words of wisdom |
| 02/28/06 | | Buffett |
"The market is a psychotic, drunk, manic depressive selling 4,000 companies everyday. "If you buy a farm, you look to the farm to determine the value of your interest, not to some guy coming by giving you a quote everyday.""
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| Students pitch Oracle of Omaha |
| 02/01/06 | | Buffett |
"Lots of people get to study at the feet of a master, but not many get to pitch him on a billion-dollar deal."
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| Buffett warns of trouble |
| 01/19/06 | | Buffett |
"The U.S. trade deficit is a bigger threat to the domestic economy than either the federal budget deficit or consumer debt and could lead to "political turmoil,"-billionaire investor Warren Buffett warned."
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| Buffett Q&A |
| 01/18/06 | | Buffett |
"Graham didn't get excited about making money. I would come to him with a great investment idea, I'd say "we're going to get rich!". He didn't care (although Jerry Newman did). He wrote books because he had an academic nature. He wanted to explain investing in a way anyone could understand. Graham wanted to develop a method that a dentist in Iowa could follow, a system that someone with no special knowledge could use and make money. He wanted to provide a quantitative approach that anyone could follow. The three big ideas that came from Graham are all in The Intelligent Investor. 1) View stocks as pieces of businesses; 2) The market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long term; 3) Margin of safety."
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| Warren Buffett in 1974 |
| 12/25/05 | | Buffett |
""I call investing the greatest business in the world," he says, "because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it." But pity the pros at the investment institutions. They're the victims of impossible "performance" measurements. Says Buffett, continuing his baseball imagery, "It's like Babe Ruth at bat with 50,000 fans and the club owner yelling, 'Swing, you bum!' and some guy is trying to pitch him an intentional walk. They know if they don't take a swing at the next pitch, the guy will say, 'Turn in your uniform.'""
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| What's in Buffett's shopping bag |
| 11/28/05 | | Buffett |
"He's making up for missed chances and stocking the liquor cabinet while staying mum on key stakes"
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| Berkshire Hathaway reveals stakes |
| 11/22/05 | | Buffett |
"According to amended U.S. regulatory documents, Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it held 44.7 million shares of Anheuser-Busch stock valued at about $1.9 billion and 19.9 million shares of Wal-Mart stock valued at about $874 million as of September 30."
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| Warren Buffett, unplugged |
| 11/17/05 | | Buffett |
"The hands-off billionaire shuns computers, leaves his managers alone, yet has notched huge returns. He just turned 75. Can anyone fill his shoes?"
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| 33 Stocks in the Buffett portfolio |
| 10/26/05 | | Buffett |
"Many of these stocks aren't Buffett's picks, since Lou Simpson, who manages the equity portfolio at auto-insurance subsidiary GEICO also invests the firm's capital. Buffett and Simpson share similar investment styles--buying high-return businesses, focusing on best ideas--and they operate independently. Although we're occasionally asked, we rarely devote time to guessing which stocks are Buffett's picks and which are Simpson's. We think this is irrelevant--as Buffett pointed out in his 2004 shareholder letter, Simpson is one heck of an investor, having outperformed the S&P 500 SPX by 6.8% over the past 24 years. We'd gratefully learn from either."
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| Q&A session with Warren Buffett |
| 10/25/05 | | Buffett |
"The major themes Mr. Buffett spoke about--do what you're interested in, have passion, always act with integrity, don't follow the crowd, respect your community, the best ideas are the obvious ones"
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| Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery |
| 10/18/05 | | Buffett |
"First we empirically determine the returns Berkshire Hathaway has experienced in both the long-term and risk arbitrage investment activities and estimate annualized returns in the arbitrage investments to be several times larger than even Buffett's estimates. Next we show a popular mischaracterization of Warren Buffett's investment style. Most books and financial press accounts describe Buffett as a value investor who looks for undervalued securities. This is not borne out by his investments from 1980 to 2003. Using the Fama and French size and book-to-market categories we show Buffett's style is consistent with a growth investor in big stocks. Buffett himself admits in his 1987 Letter to Berkshire Shareholders "Charlie and I have found that making silk purses out of silk is the best that we can do; with sows ears, we fail." His philosophy places emphasis squarely on the determinants of value: the estimation of future cash flows and growth rates which is also consistent with his principle of investing in businesses that he understands and is not difficult to predict."
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| The $91 Billion conversation |
| 10/17/05 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett and Bill Gates answer questions, first for 2,000 Nebraska students, then for FORTUNE. The billionaire buddies on the economy, philanthropy, and investment strategy"
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| How Buffett accumulated $40b |
| 08/25/05 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett celebrates his 75th birthday next week. The legendary investor is currently worth some $40b and is the second richest person in the world. While his friends and family struggle to think of a suitable present, mere mortals like you and me probably ought to reflect on how he accumulated so much money."
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| Invest like Warren Buffett |
| 08/08/05 | | Buffett |
"If you're looking for a guide to help you navigate this brutal bear market, can we suggest a candidate? He's folksy and a bit old fashioned, the type of person who likes nothing better than relaxing over a Cherry Coke and a Dairy Queen hamburger. He's also hopeless when it comes to technology and he insists on living in the middle of nowhere (Omaha, Neb. to be precise). Still, we think he's got potential. For one thing, he's already made a few billion dollars in the stock market. Better yet, he's survived and even thrived during previous market downturns."
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| A Buffett-style performance |
| 08/07/05 | | Buffett |
"The screen continues to harbor quite a few health-care and financial shares, as companies in these sectors typically feature high margins and high return on equity -- key criteria for Buffett. Once again, a sprinkling of technology and energy concerns made the list as well."
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| Is Warren ever wrong? |
| 08/06/05 | | Buffett |
"So did Warren somehow, in some fashion, conjure up this heatwave? It's hard to believe, but he really does seem to be scarily in the right place at the right time. It's likely that this week, with temperatures nearing 120 degrees in places like Phoenix, the nation will exceed all previous energy consumption - and the investor-owned utilities will be supplying it. All it takes to make money, it would seem, is do whatever Buffett says he's doing."
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| Warren Buffett Q&A |
| 07/13/05 | | Buffett |
"I know more about business and investing today, but my returns have continued to decline since the 50's. Money gets to be an anchor on performance. At Berkshire's size, there would be no more than 200 common stocks in the world that we could invest in if we were running a mutual fund or some other kind of investment business."
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| American Everyman |
| 06/19/05 | | Buffett |
"Buffett's public image represents a singular cultural accomplishment whose difficulty is hard to overstate. Until Buffett came along, the notion of a folk-hero investor was an oxymoron in America. Before the 1920s, buying and selling corporate securities was regarded by ordinary people as an occult activity practiced by a shadowy elite acting in nobody's interest but its own."
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| Another Buffett buffet |
| 06/15/05 | | Buffett |
"Third auctioned lunch with billionaire investor expected to fetch at least $200,000 for charity."
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| Warren Buffett's problem child |
| 06/15/05 | | Buffett |
"Now at the center of a series of investigations, General Re is one of Berkshire Hathaway's biggest buys -- and worst investments"
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| Buffett unit to buy utility for $9.4B |
| 05/25/05 | | Buffett |
"The acquisition is Buffett's largest since he bought reinsurer General Re Corp. in 1998. Under it, MidAmerican Energy, his Des Moines, Iowa-based unit, will assume $4.3 billion of net debt. PacifiCorp provides services to 1.6 million customers in six western states."
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| Roundup of the Berkshire Hathaway meetings |
| 05/18/05 | | Buffett |
"We don't produce verbatim transcripts--we can neither write quickly nor listen infallibly--but we do believe that we've captured the essence of Buffett and Munger's thoughts. In any event, Berkshire will conduct meetings again next year, and any shareholder may attend. As a bonus, we think Berkshire shares look cheap at the moment, which isn't a bad way to acquire an admission ticket. However, anyone can attend the Wesco meeting, which is usually more intimate, and the odds of being selected to ask a question are substantially higher."
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| Cash happens |
| 05/18/05 | | Buffett |
"The purpose of this commentary is to provide our clients with an update on our thoughts with regard to this significant investment we have made on their behalf. Though relatively straightforward, in our view, Berkshire's business model and the attractiveness thereof remains misunderstood by the general investing populace. Fortunately, our target audience in these periodic commentaries is an informed and knowledgeable investor universe which has the context and perspective with which to utilize the information contained herein."
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| Still earning after all these years |
| 05/04/05 | | Buffett |
"The legendary investor who stood the efficient-markets thesis on its head has hit a spot of bother. But Warren Buffett has survived such spots before"
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| Buffett exclusive: trade, taxes, terror |
| 05/04/05 | | Buffett |
"Investment guru expounds on reforms in corporate America, trade deficit and terrorism against U.S."
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| Notes from the 2005 "Woodstock of Capitalists" |
| 05/03/05 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire doesn't do much asset allocation. We don't want to have our search constrained by pre-set limits. On this issue, we are out of step with modern investment management. That's okthey're wrong. We could've owned $30 billion in junk bonds if the market hadn't gone up so quickly. I'm a big believer in the saying that "If it's not worth doing at all, then it's not worth doing well.""
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| The oracle speaks |
| 05/01/05 | | Buffett |
"It was below freezing in Omaha early Saturday morning, with frost silvering the golf courses and rolling lawns of the city where Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is headquartered. But the atmosphere was warm inside the Qwest Center arena, where roughly 20,000 shareholders gathered from around the world to hear Buffett and his vice chairman, Charles Munger, answer questions for more than five-and-a-half hours."
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| Follow the Acme brick road |
| 05/01/05 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Vice Chairman Charles Munger is often dour during the company's annual shareholders' meeting, but this year he outdid himself, seeming to revel as he described the various ills of the business and finance world."
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| Berkshire Hathaway has grown, but so has wariness |
| 04/26/05 | | Buffett |
"The stock market seems to think the master has lost his touch. That's the only possible explanation for this puzzling fact: The underlying share price of Berkshire Hathaway is back to the depressed levels of late 1999, even though the company's growth has been excellent."
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| New Monopoly game features Warren Buffett |
| 04/23/05 | | Buffett |
"If you've got $30 and some imagination, you can invest with Warren Buffett. A special edition of the "Monopoly" board game featuring Buffett and his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. companies will be unveiled next week in conjunction with Buffett's annual shareholder meeting in Omaha."
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| Buffett shows a taste for Budweiser |
| 04/21/05 | | Buffett |
"Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc., the largest U.S. brewer, said Thursday Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the holding company run by billionaire Warren Buffett, has acquired a significant stake in the company."
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| Nobody's fool |
| 04/05/05 | | Buffett |
"Is Warren Buffett lazy? Or foolish? Why else would he allow more than $40 billion dollars to pile up on the balance sheet of Berkshire Hathaway? Why else would he refuse to buy any of the stocks that Wall Street's finest minds recommend?"
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| Is Buffett in trouble? |
| 04/05/05 | | Buffett |
"the AIG transactions plainly failed what Buffett himself had referred to as the "New York Times test" (and which should perhaps be relabeled the Wall Street Journal test). When considering an action, executives and managers should think about how it would look if it were splashed on the front page of the New York Times. So far, this is one test the Sage of Omaha is failing."
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| Buffett isn't investing; why should you? |
| 03/29/05 | | Buffett |
"Since 1965, Buffet has delivered an average annual gain of 21.9 percent (which averages 11.5 points more than the S&P 500's average annual 10.4 percent gain over the same period). With a track record like that, most investors should want to learn why today is different enough to keep Buffett on the sidelines."
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| Buffett may face regulators |
| 03/29/05 | | Buffett |
"Regulators have called Warren Buffett to answer questions next month about any involvement he might have had in an insurance transaction between a unit of his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., and American International Group Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday."
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| Learn to think Like Warren Buffett |
| 03/20/05 | | Buffett |
"Commentary on Buffett's annual letters is now somewhat ubiquitous, so we'd like to take a different tack and share three less-obvious insights we gleaned."
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| Even Buffet times it wrong |
| 03/13/05 | | Buffett |
"In Britain, this company would have been laughed off the City stage, ostracised by fund managers, pilloried by governance watchdogs and sold for break-up. Across the Atlantic, Berkshire Hathaway is seen as the living corporate embodiment of successful, sensible investment and American business values."
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| Steel man forges slot among super-rich |
| 03/10/05 | | Buffett |
"Once again, Warren Buffett comes in at second, but the Sage of Omaha is closing the gap with $44 billion. At one stage last year, the relative stock prices of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway led Forbes to draft a press release proclaiming that Buffett had overtaken Gates at the top, only for the stocks to drift the other way."
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| Lessons from Buffett's Annual Letter |
| 03/10/05 | | Buffett |
"No investor is going to succeed without some discipline, and as Buffett points out, a large number fail to beat the indexes because they lack discipline. A good starting point, in his view (and one that we've long advocated), is a long-term commitment to a low-cost approach. To be effective at such an approach, trading on tips or sentiment (buying things after they've gotten hot and selling them after they've cooled) is best avoided. Moreover, limiting costs, particularly those associated with high management fees or excessive trading, is an important factor in getting the better of broad market indexes."
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| Fuzzy math and stock options |
| 03/05/05 | | Buffett |
"Until now the record for mathematical lunacy by a legislative body has been held by the Indiana House of Representatives, which in 1897 decreed by a vote of 67 to 0 that pi - the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter - would no longer be 3.14159 but instead be 3.2. Indiana schoolchildren momentarily rejoiced over this simplification of their lives. But the Indiana Senate, composed of cooler heads, referred the bill to the Committee for Temperance, and it eventually died."
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| Selling the nation |
| 03/05/05 | | Buffett |
"An ominous fact: The rest of the world owns a staggering $2.5 trillion more of the U.S. than we own of other countries."
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| Berkshire Hathaway 2004 annual report |
| 03/05/05 | | Buffett |
"Over the 35 years, American business has delivered terrific results. It should therefore have been easy for investors to earn juicy returns: All they had to do was piggyback Corporate America in a diversified, low-expense way. An index fund that they never touched would have done the job. Instead many investors have had experiences ranging from mediocre to disastrous. There have been three primary causes: first, high costs, usually because investors traded excessively or spent far too much on investment management; second, portfolio decisions based on tips and fads rather than on thoughtful, quantified evaluation of businesses; and third, a start-and-stop approach to the market marked by untimely entries (after an advance has been long underway) and exits (after periods of stagnation or decline). Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."
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| Investing in the 'cult of Buffett' |
| 02/26/05 | | Buffett |
"So far, the Mississauga, Ont.-based financial advisor and aspiring television producer has yet to find the perfect candidate, although he has produced a documentary on the world's second-richest man titled Warren Buffett, Money Master, which will air tonight (Saturday) on Global Television."
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| Meeting with Warren Buffett |
| 02/24/05 | | Buffett |
"The first question I ask is: "Does the owner love the business or does he/she love the money?" It's very easy to tell the difference."
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| Berkshire doubles Comcast stake |
| 02/15/05 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway Inc. doubled its stake in Comcast Corp. and reduced its stake in Nike Inc., according to a Monday fourth-quarter filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."
|
| P&G to buy Gillette for $57B |
| 01/28/05 | | Buffett |
""It's a dream deal," Buffett said, adding that he would increase his holdings so that he would end up with 100 million shares of P&G by the time the deal closes."
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| Buffett firm helps with SEC probe |
| 01/04/05 | | Buffett |
"The SEC is seeking information from General Re, Berkshire's reinsurance unit, as part of a wider inquiry into the legality of "non-traditional" policies, also known in the industry as "loss mitigation" or "retroactive" products. The regulator is investigating claims that some companies have used these products to hide losses from investors. The accounting rules governing these products are unclear."
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| What Warren Buffett learnt from Graham |
| 12/21/04 | | Buffett |
"When Buffett graduated with a master's degree from Columbia Business School, he asked for a job at Graham-Newman, offering to work for no salary if necessary. Jokingly, Buffett has said Ben "made his customary calculation of value to price and said no.""
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| Financial time bombs |
| 12/08/04 | | Buffett |
"The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply until some event makes their toxicity clear. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."
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| Students pay homage to Sage of Omaha |
| 12/03/04 | | Buffett |
"On a subsequent question, Mr. Buffett dispelled the seeming contradiction between his preaching about the importance of honest and competent managers and his purchasing businesses after spending just a few minutes with management. The key factor, Mr. Buffett explained, is to determine whether the managers love the money or the business. Characteristically humble, Mr. Buffett admitted that occasionally he makes mistakes."
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| Gleaning insights from Berkshire |
| 11/21/04 | | Buffett |
"Overall, it was a quiet quarter of trading for Berkshire. It added net shares worth about $150 million -- driven primarily by the addition of $140 million of Comcast shares and ServiceMaster shares worth $72 million. These additions were offset by reductions in its holdings in HCA, Zenith, and Mueller."
|
| The top givers |
| 11/19/04 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is famous for two things. First, for amassing the second-biggest fortune in the U.S. as one of the most talented investors the world has ever known. Second, for an aversion to spending a dime of that $41 billion on anything but the strictly necessary. That includes declining to provide his kids with fortunes of their own, collecting yachts or racehorses, or giving large chunks of his wealth to worthy causes. Thus it may strike some as the supreme paradox that the man who is one of America's greatest misers in life will probably become one of its greatest philanthropists in death."
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| Buffett fans visit Neb. to learn tips firsthand |
| 11/17/04 | | Buffett |
"Wharton junior Douglas Sherrets went to a Wharton Council function last January and was asked to introduce his club. After listening to other prestigious clubs list their accomplishments, Sherrets got up and simply said, "I am founder of the Warren Buffett Club." Sherrets said he was practically laughed out of the room. However, the Warren Buffett Club began to add accolades to its resume last weekend, after members took a trip to visit its namesake -- a former Wharton student and the second-richest man in the world."
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| Buffett's Berkshire could be the right 'fund' for you |
| 10/09/04 | | Buffett |
"In uncertain investing times like these, it's nice to have someone smart looking after your money. How about Warren Buffett? One of this generation's greatest investment minds, Mr. Buffett probably could do wonders for you. He's fully occupied in his current position as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., but that's no problem. All you have to do is buy shares of Berkshire."
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| Buffett lunch fetches $202,100 |
| 07/09/04 | | Buffett |
"For about $200,000, you can buy two shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s stock -- or you can have lunch with its chairman, Warren Buffett."
|
| Fuzzy math and stock options |
| 07/06/04 | | Buffett |
"I have no objection to the granting of options. Companies should use whatever form of compensation best motivates employees -- whether this be cash bonuses, trips to Hawaii, restricted stock grants or stock options. But aside from options, every other item of value given to employees is recorded as an expense. Can you imagine the derision that would be directed at a bill mandating that only five bonuses out of all those given to employees be expensed? Yet that is a true analogy to what the option bill is proposing."
|
| Secrets behind a successful media company |
| 07/04/04 | | Buffett |
"The Washington Post Company adopted its 'no quarters' stance under the guidance of Warren Buffett, who bought $10 million of stock in the company during the recession of 1974 and joined the company's board that same year. 'My mother realized that he was the smartest businessman she had ever met,' said Graham. Buffett's input 'has been worth billions to the company.'"
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| Buffett on the block |
| 06/29/04 | | Buffett |
"So if you can scrape together the minimum bid of $25,000, you might have a shot a dining with the Oracle of Omaha."
|
| Buffett continues to sell |
| 05/20/04 | | Buffett |
"In addition, although Berkshire's cash position increased to a staggering $41 billion in the latest quarter, the company did not make any additions to its equity portfolio."
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| Warren and me |
| 05/18/04 | | Buffett |
"Never did I imagine, when I was a little girl growing up in an Illinois village encircled by farms, that I would ever sit in the same space with America's second-richest man and his billionaire buddy. Yet, at the recent Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in the Omaha Convention center, Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger carried on what felt like a personal conversation with me -- amid 19,499 others."
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| Warren Buffett and his 20 punches |
| 05/05/04 | | Buffett |
"At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting this past week, Charlie Munger dismissed the idea that highly liquid capital markets have been a net benefit to capitalism. This assertion made Bill Mann think back to Warren Buffett's old challenge to investors: Make each transaction as if you only get to invest in 20 companies in your lifetime. Would your portfolio look different?"
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| Warren Buffett dishes out advice |
| 05/05/04 | | Buffett |
"To watch Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger perform on stage is like witnessing one of the great double acts."
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| Notes from the 2004 Berkshire Hathaway meeting |
| 05/03/04 | | Buffett |
Whitney Tilson's lengthy notes [.DOC File]
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| Buffett's wit and wisdom |
| 05/03/04 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting is a great place to go for investing wit and wisdom from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Whitney Tilson was there this year, and in this column he shares some of the duo's choice comments on how to become a better investor, the irrationality of financial markets, stock options, executive compensation, Google's owner's manual, and more."
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| What Warren Buffett wants you to know |
| 05/03/04 | | Buffett |
"How do you learn from a master? Start by listening to what he has to say."
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| Munger crowd favorite at Berkshire meeting |
| 05/02/04 | | Buffett |
"And while Buffett often tries to qualify some of his criticisms, Munger, Berkshire's vice chairman, pulls no punches. "I would rather stick a viper down my shirt than hire a compensation consultant," Munger said in a discussion about determining management salaries that create proper incentives."
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| Berkshire Hathaway millionaires gather |
| 05/02/04 | | Buffett |
"This year, as in the past, several business school professors brought their entire classes to the meeting. The scene was strikingly different when Mr. Scargle attended his first meeting in 1979, held in the cafeteria of National Indemnity, Berkshire's first insurance company. About 25 people attended, Mr. Scargle said, most of them employees and relatives of Mr. Buffett."
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| Folksy fun at Buffett meeting |
| 05/01/04 | | Buffett |
"The excitement ran high this morning as more than 16,000 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders converged on the Qwest Center in Omaha for Warren Buffett's annual meeting."
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| Warren Buffett, rock star |
| 05/01/04 | | Buffett |
"Leave it to Warren Buffett to figure out how to combine America's two greatest passions about money: making it and spending it. Who but Buffett would have the nerve to kick off his annual shareholders' meeting in a jewelry store?"
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| Warren Buffett ready to hold court |
| 04/30/04 | | Buffett |
"At a time when a $31 billion pile of cash is testing Warren Buffett's investing prowess more than ever, thousands of shareholders head to Omaha this weekend hoping for clues to his next move."
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| Reformers' proxy votes polarize governance debate |
| 04/18/04 | | Buffett |
"By taking aim at American business icons Warren Buffett and Sanford "Sandy" Weill, reformers seeking to prevent fresh scandals from ripping apart corporate America have gone too far, critics say."
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| Enter Berkshire meeting for $2.50 |
| 04/17/04 | | Buffett |
"The price of admission to Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual meeting is at least $3,077 for the cheapest share. Billionaire Chairman Warren Buffett just dropped it to $2.50 a pass, shipping included."
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| Buffett's Coke role questioned |
| 04/12/04 | | Buffett |
"The problem, according to ISS is that companies controlled by Mr Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway investment firm buys millions of dollars of products from Coca-Cola every year."
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| Buffett's investing strategy scrutinized |
| 03/29/04 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire's equity holdings are even more concentrated than is apparent at first glance, said Steven Check, chief investment officer at Check Capital Management, an investment advisory business in Costa Mesa that owns roughly $22.8 million in Berkshire stock. For instance, more than 80 percent of Buffett's holdings were in stocks in just three economic sectors: financial services, consumer goods and energy."
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| Herb lore from the Sage of Omaha |
| 03/11/04 | | Buffett |
"The heady prices that investors are willing to pay for less-than-fragrant credits can be seen in the weediest of the lot: those awarded a rating of CCC by the rating agencies (the lowest rating is D, which does not stand for durable). Michael Lewitt, who runs Harch Capital, a hedge fund, neatly sums up the risks investors run by buying these bonds: 'It's like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded.'"
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| Buffett's annual letter |
| 03/06/04 | | Buffett |
"In recent years, however, we've found it hard to find significantly undervalued stocks, a difficulty greatly accentuated by the mushrooming of the funds we must deploy. Today, the number of stocks that can be purchased in large enough quantities to move the performance needle at Berkshire is a small fraction of the number that existed a decade ago. (Investment managers often profit far more from piling up assets than from handling those assets well. So when one tells you that increased funds won't hurt his investment performance, step back: His nose is about to grow.)"
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| Buffett sells. Should you? |
| 03/05/04 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is clearly not finding many opportunities to invest the U.S. stock market today. Despite the fact that he has $27 billion of cash sitting idle, concerns about valuation are driving him to sell some stocks and increase that pile of cash. In doing so, he is sending a strong, clear message not only about the specific stocks he is selling, but also about the U.S. equity market in general. Individual investors should be listening closely."
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| Warren, show me the money |
| 12/15/03 | | Buffett |
"Microsoft's fairly recent decision to pay a dividend demonstrates the dawning reality that this company has changed. But, they're not the only one. Market-dominator Berkshire Hathaway generates massive amounts of cash, and the Oracle should also share the wealth."
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| Wall St. Journal 'Buffetted' |
| 11/21/03 | | Buffett |
"The article focused on the difference between the mere $2,264 in taxes Buffett pays on a $4 million house he bought in Laguna Beach, California, in the early 1970s, and the $14,401 taxes he pays on his home in Omaha, Nebraska, which Buffett believes is worth $500,000."
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| What's Buffett up to? |
| 11/12/03 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway sells everything from Blizzards to long underwear. But Buffett has also been trying his hand at peddling something else entirely: influence."
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| The battle for Buffett's picks |
| 11/10/03 | | Buffett |
"I have noticed that Warren Buffett does not buy stock of companies listed on the Nasdaq. What are the differences between the exchanges, and why might Buffett prefer companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange over Nasdaq-listed firms?"
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| Buffett, screaming value and the DCF |
| 11/03/03 | | Buffett |
"The lack of precision around valuation makes a lot of people uncomfortable. To deal with this discomfort, some people wrap themselves in the security blanket of complex discounted cash flow analyses. My view of these things is best summarized by this brief exchange at the 1996 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman) said, "Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I've never seen him do one." "It's true," replied Buffett. "If (the value of a company) doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.""
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| The contradictions Of Warren Buffett |
| 11/03/03 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is not Warren Buffett. In recent editions of Barron's and Fortune, the legendary US investor contradicts three viewpoints long associated with his long-term stock market approach. Here's a rundown of what Buffett has declared in the past, and what he's now saying"
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| Warren Buffett speaks his mind |
| 10/29/03 | | Buffett |
"The man who as a boy collected and sold used golf balls, started a pinball machine business in high school, and later stepped in as the interim chairman and chief executive of Salomon Brothers for an annual salary of one dollar, rolled into town last week full of the honesty, insightfulness and good humor for which he is known and revered."
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| Buffett's major currency investment |
| 10/28/03 | | Buffett |
"Fortune magazine said in a press release Monday that in an article to be published in the Nov. 10 issue of the magazine, Buffett writes, 'To hold other currencies is to believe that the dollar will decline. Both as an American and an investor, I actually hope these commitments prove to be a mistake.'"
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| Pass the Coke! |
| 10/27/03 | | Buffett |
"Buffett said that Berkshire has paid, on average, about seven times pretax earnings for its acquisitions, an attractive price given current stock-market valuations. The Standard & Poor's 500 index trades for nearly 20 times projected 2003 operating profits and for 13 to 14 times pretax earnings. The company's notable acquisitions have included Shaw Industries, the leading U.S. carpet manufacturer; Benjamin Moore, the paint producer; Johns Manville, which makes insulation, roofing and other materials; and 80% of Mid-American Energy, an Iowa-based utility with large interests in the U.K."
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| Notes from Berkshire Hathaway & Wesco meetings |
| 10/26/03 | | Buffett |
Columns and notes from 2000 to 2003
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| The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville |
| 10/21/03 | | Buffett |
"'Superinvestor' Warren E Buffett, who got an A+ from Ben Graham at Columbia in 1951, never stopped making the grade. He made his fortune using the principles of Graham & Dodd's Security Analysis. Here, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of that classic text, he tracks the records of investors who stick to the 'value approach' and have gotten rish going by the book."
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| Sharing his wealth |
| 10/20/03 | | Buffett |
"The world's second-richest man came to the University of Tennessee and gave students degrees, stock and advice Tuesday."
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| Buffett's company to sell $1.5B in debt |
| 09/29/03 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway unit plans to sell 5-year and 10-year notes in an unsecured debt offering."
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| High court hears from Buffett |
| 09/09/03 | | Buffett |
"Billionaire investor Warren Buffett was among those whose opinions were being weighed by the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices as they heard arguments Monday regarding the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act."
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| Pious Buffett should heed own counsel |
| 09/02/03 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, estimated to be the world's second-richest man, has gained prophet status in the world of business by calling on corporate America to become cleaner, better governed and more transparent. Because of this towering reputation, people sit up and listen when he preaches on things like financial disclosure and corporate governance. Problem is, his own actions at Berkshire Hathaway do not match his words."
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| Auditing an Oracle |
| 08/28/03 | | Buffett |
"Shareholders nearly deify Warren Buffett for the way he manages his diverse holding company, Berkshire Hathaway of Omaha. There's little doubt that he's squeaky clean in how he operates. But that doesn't necessarily mean that other companies can or should follow the way the avuncular champion of business ethics conducts his own affairs. His approach: handshake deals on billion-dollar acquisitions and near-complete avoidance of technology in combating fraud."
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| All about California |
| 08/23/03 | | Buffett |
"With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gary Coleman, a porn star and a partridge in a pear tree scrambling to become governor of California, a troubling question emerges."
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| The world's greatest trader |
| 08/13/03 | | Buffett |
"Berkshire Hathaway just released a bombshell. The company sold virtually its entire government bond portfolio -- $9 billion worth -- in the first half of 2003, just before the bond market crashed. This isn't the first time the poster child for buy-and-hold has scalped a billion or two from dumb old Mr. Market."
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| Schwarzenegger campaign taps Buffett as adviser |
| 08/13/03 | | Buffett |
"Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign said Wednesday that Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway will serve as the senior financial and economic adviser to the film star on his bid for the governorship of California."
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| Buffett bids: $80,000 and rising |
| 07/10/03 | | Buffett |
"How much would you pay to slurp Coca-Cola with Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest man and arguably its most famous investor?"
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| Buffett hits back at Greenspan |
| 05/13/03 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, has unleashed a further blistering attack on the use of derivatives by banks, arguing that the complex financial instruments could pose significant risks for the health of the global economy."
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| Buffett: Do as I say, not as I did |
| 05/08/03 | | Buffett |
"When Warren Buffett launched his latest campaign against excessive CEO pay, he first anticipated an inevitable question: how has Buffett's own record been on this issue? "Not so good," was his answer."
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| Warren Buffett's profits soar |
| 05/04/03 | | Buffett |
"Investment guru Warren Buffett has confirmed his legendary ability to back the right businesses by doubling his company's profits."
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| Buffett says CEOs overpaid |
| 05/04/03 | | Buffett |
"'It's always invigorating,' Mr. Eisner said. 'They make things sound very clear and very simple, which, of course, it is not.'" Humm, how much does Eisner make?
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| Buffett now worth about $32.8 billion |
| 03/22/03 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett may be ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's second-richest man, but he has received the same $100,000 annual salary since 1980."
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| Warren's 2002 Report |
| 03/09/03 | | Buffett |
"We've yet to see a pro-forma presentation disclosing that audited earnings were somewhat high. So let's make a little history: Last year, on a pro-forma basis, Berkshire had lower earnings than those we actually reported."
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| Comeback Crusader |
| 03/03/03 | | Buffett |
"Investing legend Warren Buffett has regained his golden touch, and his call for reform has CEOs running scared - or taking notes."
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| Words from the Wise |
| 01/30/03 | | Buffett |
"Cover Article in the Inaugural Issue of CFA, a new publication of the Association of Investment Management & Research"
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| The jewels in Berkshire Hathaway's crown |
| 12/09/02 | | Buffett |
"Robert P. Miles, professional speaker and the author of The Warren Buffett CEO: Secrets From the Berkshire Hathaway Managers, and 101 Reasons to Own the World's Greatest Investment, shares his insights into Warren Buffett's investment strategy and his entry into the jewelry industry."
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| Buffett emerges as major Lloyd's insurance backer |
| 11/06/02 | | Buffett |
"Recent investments by firms in Warren Buffett's empire have made the Omaha-based billionaire one of the biggest backers of the prestigious, but cash-strapped, Lloyd's of London insurance market."
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| Buffett succeeds at nothing |
| 11/01/02 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is known as being one of the best investors of all time. But it might come as a surprise to many that his investing strategy often encompasses long periods of what he calls "sitting on my butt." There have been periods of years when Berkshire Hathaway has purchased not a single share of stock, interspersed with some enormous activity. Sometimes doing nothing is the best thing you can do."
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| Is Buffett buying? |
| 10/17/02 | | Buffett |
"Rumors abounded Tuesday that the Oracle of Omaha was getting out of bonds, and getting into stocks."
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| Flying in the face of excess with the Sage of Omaha |
| 09/30/02 | | Buffett |
"Buffett, aged 72, is chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, an investment holding company that owns stakes in Coca-Cola, Gillette and The Washington Post. He summed up the present market turmoil in his usual folksy way. "It's only in the rinse cycle that you find out how dirty the laundry's been," he mused. "We're in the rinse cycle now.""
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| Buffett the bargain-hunter returns |
| 09/11/02 | | Buffett |
"Buffett is back. Of course, the billionaire Oracle of Omaha, Nebraska, never went away. But Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man -- and probably the most successful investor this century -- is showing a new generation a thing or two about value."
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| The new Buffett way |
| 09/05/02 | | Buffett |
"With so many stocks having plummeted, so many companies beset by scandal, so much money fleeing the market, and such a crisis of investor confidence, one might expect that the classic value situations that are Buffett's hallmark would be everywhere. Buffett should be grabbing an underpriced company every few days. The fact that Buffett, who has oodles of cash to put to work, hasn't found many-and has instead been nibbling on distressed properties-shows just how overvalued stocks still are."
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| Get your Buffett fix |
| 08/11/02 | | Buffett |
"The rest of the investing world is tiptoeing back into stocks, but Warren Buffett is on a roll. He's shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars in recent weeks to invest in half-dead telecom and energy companies."
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| Warren Buffett & his CEO's-A team that works |
| 05/30/02 | | Buffett |
"It's a very limited management role that I have, very, very limited. But I enjoy - if you want to call that managing, I enjoy that more than investing. I mean, I like the managers that I work with. I like thinking about business problems and occasionally being able to do something about them. And I would say that it's just amore interesting. There's more human interaction. And I would - if I had to choose one or the other, I would choose the management role over the investing role at Berkshire."
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| Rich beyond reason |
| 05/08/02 | | Buffett |
"Warren Buffett is to be admired - but his fortune bears no proportion to his social or economic contribution" -- One very wrong comrade analyst.
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| When Buffett talks, 14,000 people listen |
| 05/06/02 | | Buffett |
"Terrorism, business ethics and wealth in society came up for discussion Saturday by Warren Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha."
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| Warren's piece |
| 05/05/02 | | Buffett |
"Both Buffett and Munger left no question they find the pickings slim in the stock market. Asked about the relative weight of equities compared to bonds and cash in Berkshire's portfolio, Munger said dryly, 'Our constraint does not come from structure; it comes from our lack of enthusiasm for stocks, generally.'"
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| Buffett: 'I can't recall ever having more fun' |
| 05/05/02 | | Buffett |
"Behind that grin is a track record that put a lid on critics who had questioned his ability to keep pace with the New Economy: Berkshire stock is up nearly 35% for the past two years, while the S&P 500 is down nearly 25% for the same period."
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| Buffetting corporate America |
| 03/20/02 | | Buffett |
Bill Gross talks about the secret to Buffett's success and highlights GE's precarious position.
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| Buffett's 2001 letter |
| 03/10/02 | | Buffett |
"Some people disagree with our focus on relative figures, arguing that "you can't eat relative performance." But if you expect - as Charlie Munger, Berkshire's Vice Chairman, and I do - that owning the S&P 500 will produce reasonably satisfactory results over time, it follows that, for long-term investors, gaining small advantages annually over that index must prove rewarding. Just as you can eat well throughout the year if you own a profitable, but highly seasonal, business such as See's (which loses considerable money during the summer months) so, too, can you regularly feast on investment returns that beat the averages,however variable the absolute numbers may be." [PDF]
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| Buffett on Ga. buying spree |
| 03/05/02 | | Buffett |
"What do a carpet company, a custom picture frame-maker and a real estate firm have in common? All are Georgia companies that have been bought by powerhouse investor Warren Buffett."
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| Berkshire: strong in times of trial |
| 10/09/01 | | Buffett |
The Fools praise Buffett's conservative approach and try to transform a $2 billion loss into a good thing.
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| Memo from Mr.Buffett |
| 10/05/01 | | Buffett |
Warren estimates that Berkshire will lose about $2.2 billion due to the events in New York and states that the U.S. is probably in what will be a serious recession. A sobering message.
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