060: Investing Intensive 2017-Now

Table of Contents

1. 2017 Letter
2. 2018 Letter
3. 2019 Letter
4. 2020 Letter
5. We’re Done!

This issue does not and is not meant to fully summarize or recap the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters. Rather, it includes the tidbits I found interesting and wanted to highlight during my reading. Always do your own reading and come to your own conclusions about Mr. Buffett’s opinions.

How to find the quotations: It is difficult to cite specific sections of a given letter because there are no consistent page numbers and the sections are not numbered. The easiest way to find the quote is to open a PDF of the letter and use the search feature.

1. 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Letter, dated February 24, 2018

2017 Letter in PDF from Berkshire Hathaway website

Major Berkshire investments reported in the letter:

Standard of success mentioned at the beginning: net worth, and per-share book value.

“The format of that opening paragraph has been standard for 30 years. But 2017 was far from standard: A large portion of our gain did not come from anything we accomplished at Berkshire.” (It was from the new lower corporate tax rate.)

Highlights:

  • This letter was about their scorecard. He began like this: “At Berkshire what counts most are increases in our normalized per-share earning power. That metric is what Charlie Munger, my long-time partner, and I focus on – and we hope that you do, too. Our scorecard for 2017 follows.”
  • The opportunities offered by a downturn. “When major declines occur, however, they offer extraordinary opportunities to those who are not handicapped by debt. That’s the time to heed these lines from Kipling’s If:

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . .

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting . . .

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim . . .

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . . .

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.””

Checklist points:

  • “In our search for new stand-alone businesses, the key qualities we seek are durable competitive strengths; able and high-grade management; good returns on the net tangible assets required to operate the business; opportunities for internal growth at attractive returns; and, finally, a sensible purchase price.”In case any of us were feeling alone in our search for well-priced investments in 2017: “That last requirement proved a barrier to virtually all deals we reviewed in 2017, as prices for decent, but far from spectacular, businesses hit an all-time high. Indeed, price seemed almost irrelevant to an army of optimistic purchasers.”
  • Avoid debt, and sleep well at night. “The ample availability of extraordinarily cheap debt in 2017 further fueled purchase activity. After all, even a high-priced deal will usually boost per-share earnings if it is debt-financed. At Berkshire, in contrast, we evaluate acquisitions on an all-equity basis, knowing that our taste for overall debt is very low and that to assign a large portion of our debt to any individual business would generally be fallacious (leaving aside certain exceptions, such as debt dedicated to Clayton’s lending portfolio or to the fixed-asset commitments at our regulated utilities). We also never factor in, nor do we often find, synergies. Our aversion to leverage has dampened our returns over the years. But Charlie and I sleep well. Both of us believe it is insane to risk what you have and need in order to obtain what you don’t need. We held this view 50 years ago when we each ran an investment partnership, funded by a few friends and relatives who trusted us. We also hold it today after a million or so “partners” have joined us at Berkshire.”
  • I find these relatively short, pithy descriptions of his of new acquisitions lovely to read. Unfailingly, they remind what is important in a company. Moat. (Anyone who’s driven on the US interstate highway system will have found it difficult to avoid spending money at this company.) People. (Family founded and run, like so many Berkshire acquisitions.) “We were able to make one sensible stand-alone purchase last year, a 38.6% partnership interest in Pilot Flying J (“PFJ”). With about $20 billion in annual volume, the company is far and away the nation’s leading travel-center operator. PFJ has been run from the get-go by the remarkable Haslam family. “Big Jim” Haslam began with a dream and a gas station 60 years ago. Now his son, Jimmy, manages 27,000 associates at about 750 locations throughout North America. Berkshire has a contractual agreement to increase its partnership interest in PFJ to 80% in 2023; Haslam family members will then own the remaining 20%. Berkshire is delighted to be their partner. When driving on the Interstate, drop in. PFJ sells gasoline as well as diesel fuel, and the food is good. If it’s been a long day, remember, too, that our properties have 5,200 showers.”
  • Notice exactly how he words his investment: “the businesses of the investees”. He invests in the people who own/run the business. “Charlie and I view the marketable common stocks that Berkshire owns as interests in businesses, not as ticker symbols to be bought or sold based on their “chart” patterns, the “target” prices of analysts or the opinions of media pundits. Instead, we simply believe that if the businesses of the investees are successful (as we believe most will be) our investments will be successful as well. ” (emphasis mine)

Particular points of candor:

  • Hmm. Normally I’d be thrilled with his bet on people. Not sure this one went so well, though. “Finally, Precision Castparts, a company built through acquisitions, bought Wilhelm Schulz GmbH, a German maker of corrosion resistant fittings, piping systems and components. Please allow me to skip a further explanation. I don’t understand manufacturing operations as well as I do the activities of real estate brokers, home builders or truck stops. Fortunately, I don’t need in this instance to bring knowledge to the table: Mark Donegan, CEO of Precision, is an extraordinary manufacturing executive, and any business in his domain is slated to do well. Betting on people can sometimes be more certain than betting on physical assets.”
  • Quite detailed and candid about real insurance payouts, as well as potential ones. “Berkshire’s insurance managers are conservative and careful underwriters, who operate in a culture that has long prioritized those qualities. That disciplined behavior has produced underwriting profits in most years, and in such instances, our cost of float was less than zero. In effect, we got paid then for holding the huge sums tallied in the earlier table. I have warned you, however, that we have been fortunate in recent years and that the catastrophe-light period the industry was experiencing was not a new norm. Last September drove home that point, as three significant hurricanes hit Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. My guess at this time is that the insured losses arising from the hurricanes are $100 billion or so. That figure, however, could be far off the mark…We currently estimate Berkshire’s losses from the three hurricanes to be $3 billion (or about $2 billion after tax). If both that estimate and my industry estimate of $100 billion are close to accurate, our share of the industry loss was about 3%….We believe that the annual probability of a U.S. mega-catastrophe causing $400 billion or more of insured losses is about 2%. No one, of course, knows the correct probability. We do know, however, that the risk increases over time because of growth in both the number and value of structures located in catastrophe-vulnerable areas .” (emphasis mine)
  • “Berkshire shares have suffered four truly major dips. Here are the gory details:

    “This table offers the strongest argument I can muster against ever using borrowed money to own stocks. There is simply no telling how far stocks can fall in a short period. Even if your borrowings are small and your positions aren’t immediately threatened by the plunging market, your mind may well become rattled by scary headlines and breathless commentary. And an unsettled mind will not make good decisions.”

I was also struck by:

  • Todd and Ted managed $25 billion of assets in 2017. “Each, independently of me, manages more than $12 billion; I usually learn about decisions they have made by looking at monthly portfolio summaries. Included in the $25 billion that the two manage…”
  • Succession plan. “I’ve saved the best for last. Early in 2018, Berkshire’s board elected Ajit Jain and Greg Abel as directors of Berkshire and also designated each as Vice Chairman. Ajit is now responsible for insurance operations, and Greg oversees the rest of our businesses. Charlie and I will focus on investments and capital allocation. You and I are lucky to have Ajit and Greg working for us. Each has been with Berkshire for decades, and Berkshire’s blood flows through their veins. The character of each man matches his talents. And that says it all.”

2. 2018 Berkshire Hathaway Letter, dated February 23, 2019

2018 Letter in PDF from Berkshire Hathaway website

Major Berkshire investments reported in the letter:

Standard of success mentioned at the beginning: amount “earned” “utilizing generally accepted accounting principles”. (He was clearly unhappy about GAAP now requiring him to mark his unrealized capital gains to market, and pointed out losses and profits swung wildly quarter-to-quarter due to marketable equities while Berkshire’s subsidiaries delivered consistent earnings.)

Notable: no mention at all of book value. Which he acknowledged. “Long-time readers of our annual reports will have spotted the different way in which I opened this letter. For nearly three decades, the initial paragraph featured the percentage change in Berkshire’s per-share book value. It’s now time to abandon that practice.” His reasons are change in Berkshire’s makeup, the new accounting rules he hates, and plans to repurchase stock. Instead, quite surprisingly, he says that a highly volatile and emotional benchmark is what we should follow….over time: “In future tabulations of our financial results, we expect to focus on Berkshire’s market price. Markets can be extremely capricious: Just look at the 54-year history laid out on page 2. Over time, however, Berkshire’s stock price will provide the best measure of business performance.” Later on in the letter, he then wrote, about Berkshire’s business sectors, “I believe Berkshire’s intrinsic value can be approximated by summing the values of our four asset-laden groves and then subtracting an appropriate amount for taxes eventually payable on the sale of marketable securities.” The fifth grove is Berkshire’s insurance companies.

Highlights:

  • This letter was about the shift in accounting rules, and assuring us that Berkshire is still carrying on as always despite the wildly fluctuating GAAP numbers. He wanted us to come away with the knowledge that Berkshire’s publicly traded companies are only a part – and a less important part – of Berkshire.

Checklist points:

  • I think this is so cute, and equally substantial. What a great question to ask yourself, when the preliminaries are out of the way and you’re sitting down for an annual review: “Now let’s take a look at what you own.”
  • Another reminder to look askance at adjusted earnings. “When we say “earned,” moreover, we are describing what remains after all income taxes, interest payments, managerial compensation (whether cash or stock-based), restructuring expenses, depreciation, amortization and home-office overhead. That brand of earnings is a far cry from that frequently touted by Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs. Too often, their presentations feature “adjusted EBITDA,” a measure that redefines “earnings” to exclude a variety of all-too-real costs.”
  • They don’t use amortization costs when evaluating any outside businesses. I think this is the first time he’s said that so straightforwardly. “Charlie and I do contend that our acquisition-related amortization expenses of $1.4 billion (detailed on page K-84) are not a true economic cost. We add back such amortization “costs” to GAAP earnings when we are evaluating both private businesses and marketable stocks.” (emphasis mine)
    • On the other side: “In contrast, Berkshire’s $8.4 billion depreciation charge understates our true economic cost. In fact, we need to spend more than this sum annually to simply remain competitive in our many operations. Beyond those “maintenance” capital expenditures, we spend large sums in pursuit of growth.” (emphasis mine)
  • Long-term thinking, in the numbers. “For 54 years our managerial decisions at Berkshire have been made from the viewpoint of the shareholders who are staying, not those who are leaving. Consequently, Charlie and I have never focused on current-quarter results. Berkshire, in fact, may be the only company in the Fortune 500 that does not prepare monthly earnings reports or balance sheets. I, of course, regularly view the monthly financial reports of most subsidiaries. But Charlie and I learn of Berkshire’s overall earnings and financial position only on a quarterly basis….Over the years, Charlie and I have seen all sorts of bad corporate behavior, both accounting and operational, induced by the desire of management to meet Wall Street expectations. What starts as an “innocent” fudge in order to not disappoint “the Street” – say, trade-loading at quarter-end, turning a blind eye to rising insurance losses, or drawing down a “cookie-jar” reserve – can become the first step toward full-fledged fraud. Playing with the numbers “just this once” may well be the CEO’s intent; it’s seldom the end result. And if it’s okay for the boss to cheat a little, it’s easy for subordinates to rationalize similar behavior.”
  • Another warning to avoid debt. “In most cases, the funding of a business comes from two sources – debt and equity. At Berkshire, we have two additional arrows in the quiver to talk about, but let’s first address the conventional components. [Note: The other two are the insurance float and deferred income taxes.] We use debt sparingly. Many managers, it should be noted, will disagree with this policy, arguing that significant debt juices the returns for equity owners. And these more venturesome CEOs will be right most of the time. At rare and unpredictable intervals, however, credit vanishes and debt becomes financially fatal.”
  • I really like this distinction between a splendid business and a poor investment. It can be the first and also be the second. “On occasion, a ridiculously-high purchase price for a given stock will cause a splendid business to become a poor investment – if not permanently, at least for a painfully long period. Over time, however, investment performance converges with business performance.”

Particular points of candor:

  • Ha! “Abraham Lincoln once posed the question: “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?” and then answered his own query: “Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.” Abe would have felt lonely on Wall Street.”

I was also struck by:

  • To reiterate and emphasize what he wrote at the end of last year’s letter, this year he put it right up front at the top of the letter. “Before moving on, I want to give you some good news – really good news – that is not reflected in our financial statements. It concerns the management changes we made in early 2018, when Ajit Jain was put in charge of all insurance activities and Greg Abel was given authority over all other operations. These moves were overdue. Berkshire is now far better managed than when I alone was supervising operations. Ajit and Greg have rare talents, and Berkshire blood flows through their veins.”
  • On investing in gold: “Those who regularly preach doom because of government budget deficits (as I regularly did myself for many years) might note that our country’s national debt has increased roughly 400-fold during the last of my 77-year periods. That’s 40,000%! Suppose you had foreseen this increase and panicked at the prospect of runaway deficits and a worthless currency. To “protect” yourself, you might have eschewed stocks and opted instead to buy 3 1/4 ounces of gold with your $114.75. And what would that supposed protection have delivered? You would now have an asset worth about $4,200, less than 1% of what would have been realized from a simple unmanaged investment in American business. The magical metal was no match for the American mettle.”

3. 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Letter, dated February 22, 2020

2019 Letter in PDF from Berkshire Hathaway website

Major Berkshire investments reported in the letter:

Standard of success mentioned at the beginning: “earned…according to generally accepted accounting principles”, which Buffett completely disagrees with, reiterating the reasons said last year. His standards are operating earnings, and intrinsic value.

Highlights:

  • This letter was about the compounding power of retained earnings in companies. He used to typically (not always) wait until the end of his letter to dispense some investing wisdom, after telling us the details of how Berkshire did that year. Here, he put it upfront.
  • “In 1924, Edgar Lawrence Smith, an obscure economist and financial advisor, wrote Common Stocks as Long Term Investments, a slim book that changed the investment world…For the crux of Smith’s insight, I will quote an early reviewer of his book, none other than John Maynard Keynes: “I have kept until last what is perhaps Mr. Smith’s most important, and is certainly his most novel, point. Well-managed industrial companies do not, as a rule, distribute to the shareholders the whole of their earned profits. In good years, if not in all years, they retain a part of their profits and put them back into the business. Thus there is an element of compound interest (Keynes’ italics) operating in favour of a sound industrial investment. Over a period of years, the real value of the property of a sound industrial is increasing at compound interest, quite apart from the dividends paid out to the shareholders.”… It’s difficult to understand why retained earnings were unappreciated by investors before Smith’s book was published. After all, it was no secret that mind-boggling wealth had earlier been amassed by such titans as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford, all of whom had retained a huge portion of their business earnings to fund growth and produce ever-greater profits. Throughout America, also, there had long been small-time capitalists who became rich following the same playbook. Nevertheless, when business ownership was sliced into small pieces – “stocks” – buyers in the pre-Smith years usually thought of their shares as a short-term gamble on market movements. Even at their best, stocks were considered speculations. Gentlemen preferred bonds. Though investors were slow to wise up, the math of retaining and reinvesting earnings is now well understood. Today, school children learn what Keynes termed “novel”: combining savings with compound interest works wonders.” (emphasis Buffett’s (and Keynes’)

Checklist points:

  • Canon. Focus on the retained earnings. “…we constantly seek to buy new businesses that meet three criteria. First, they must earn good returns on the net tangible capital required in their operation. Second, they must be run by able and honest managers. Finally, they must be available at a sensible price….Berkshire’s financial results from the commitment will in large part be determined by the future earnings of the business we have purchased….In the non-controlled companies, in which we own marketable stocks, only the dividends that Berkshire receives are recorded in the operating earnings we report. The retained earnings? They’re working hard and creating much added value, but not in a way that deposits those gains directly into Berkshire’s reported earnings.” (emphasis Buffett’s)
  • Insight into Buffett’s thinking as he evaluates his own investments – annual retained earnings plus dividends are the metrics he set forth here. “Here, we list our 10 largest stock-market holdings of businesses. The list distinguishes between their earnings that are reported to you under GAAP accounting – these are the dividends Berkshire receives from those 10 investees – and our share, so to speak, of the earnings the investees retain and put to work. Normally, those companies use retained earnings to expand their business and increase its efficiency. Or sometimes they use those funds to repurchase significant portions of their own stock, an act that enlarges Berkshire’s share of the company’s future earnings.”

    “Obviously, the realized gains we will eventually record from partially owning each of these companies will not neatly correspond to “our” share of their retained earnings. Sometimes, alas, retentions produce nothing. But both logic and our past experience indicate that from the group we will realize capital gains at least equal to – and probably better than – the earnings of ours that they retained.”
  • Good reminder about what NOT to ignore. “In the paragraphs that follow, we group our wide array of non-insurance businesses by size of earnings, after interest, depreciation, taxes, non-cash compensation, restructuring charges – all of those pesky, but very real, costs that CEOs and Wall Street sometimes urge investors to ignore.” (emphasis mine)
  • Goals. “What we see in our holdings, rather, is an assembly of companies that we partly own and that, on a weighted basis, are earning more than 20% on the net tangible equity capital required to run their businesses. These companies, also, earn their profits without employing excessive levels of debt.”
  • After he last discussed his views on the best and worst boards of directors, he returned to the subject in this issue. I love getting his insights on what makes a great board work, because it’s so difficult to find a great board. “”The bedrock challenge for directors, nevertheless, remains constant: Find and retain a talented CEO possessing integrity, for sure – who will be devoted to the company for his/her business lifetime. Often, that task is hard. When directors get it right, though, they need to do little else. But when they mess it up, . . . . . .” (emphasis Buffett’s)
    • “One very important improvement in corporate governance has been mandated: a regularly-scheduled “executive session” of directors at which the CEO is barred. Prior to that change, truly frank discussions of a CEO’s skills, acquisition decisions and compensation were rare.”
    • “Acquisition proposals remain a particularly vexing problem for board members. The legal orchestration for making deals has been refined and expanded (a word aptly describing attendant costs as well). But I have yet to see a CEO who craves an acquisition bring in an informed and articulate critic to argue against it. And yes, include me among the guilty.”
    • “Over the years, board “independence” has become a new area of emphasis. One key point relating to this topic, though, is almost invariably overlooked: Director compensation has now soared to a level that inevitably makes pay a subconscious factor affecting the behavior of many non-wealthy members. Think, for a moment, of the director earning $250,000-300,000 for board meetings consuming a pleasant couple of days six or so times a year….Despite the illogic of it all, the director for whom fees are important – indeed, craved – is almost universally classified as “independent” while many directors possessing fortunes very substantially linked to the welfare of the corporation are deemed lacking in independence. Not long ago, I looked at the proxy material of a large American company and found that eight directors had never purchased a share of the company’s stock using their own money. (They, of course, had received grants of stock as a supplement to their generous cash compensation.) This particular company had long been a laggard, but the directors were doing wonderfully. Paid-with-my-own-money ownership, of course, does not create wisdom or ensure business smarts. Nevertheless, I feel better when directors of our portfolio companies have had the experience of purchasing shares with their savings, rather than simply having been the recipients of grants.” (emphasis Buffett’s)
    • “At Berkshire, we will continue to look for business-savvy directors who are owner-oriented and arrive with a strong specific interest in our company. Thought and principles, not robot-like “process,” will guide their actions. In representing your interests, they will, of course, seek managers whose goals include delighting their customers, cherishing their associates and acting as good citizens of both their communities and our country.”

Particular points of candor:

  • “Over the years Berkshire has acquired many dozens of companies, all of which I initially regarded as “good businesses.” Some, however, proved disappointing; more than a few were outright disasters. A reasonable number, on the other hand, have exceeded my hopes. In reviewing my uneven record, I’ve concluded that acquisitions are similar to marriage: They start, of course, with a joyful wedding – but then reality tends to diverge from pre-nuptial expectations. Sometimes, wonderfully, the new union delivers bliss beyond either party’s hopes. In other cases, disillusionment is swift. Applying those images to corporate acquisitions, I’d have to say it is usually the buyer who encounters unpleasant surprises. It’s easy to get dreamy-eyed during corporate courtships. Pursuing that analogy, I would say that our marital record remains largely acceptable, with all parties happy with the decisions they made long ago. Some of our tie-ups have been positively idyllic. A meaningful number, however, have caused me all too quickly to wonder what I was thinking when I proposed.”
  • Some gallows humor. “I must add one final item that underscores the wide scope of Berkshire’s operations. Since 2011, we have owned Lubrizol, an Ohio-based company that produces and markets oil additives throughout the world. On September 26, 2019, a fire originating at a small next-door operation spread to a large French plant owned by Lubrizol. The result was significant property damage and a major disruption in Lubrizol’s business. Even so, both the company’s property loss and business-interruption loss will be mitigated by substantial insurance recoveries that Lubrizol will receive. But, as the late Paul Harvey was given to saying in his famed radio broadcasts, “Here’s the rest of the story.” One of the largest insurers of Lubrizol was a company owned by . . . uh, Berkshire. In Matthew 6:3, the Bible instructs us to “Let not the left hand know what the right hand doeth.” Your chairman has clearly behaved as ordered.”

I was also struck by:

  • Just lovely to read about wind energy that benefits the wallets of consumers. “When Berkshire entered the utility business in 2000, purchasing 76% of BHE, the company’s residential customers in Iowa paid an average of 8.8 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Prices for residential customers have since risen less than 1% a year, and we have promised that there will be no base rate price increases through 2028. In contrast, here’s what is happening at the other large investor-owned Iowa utility: Last year, the rates it charged its residential customers were 61% higher than BHE’s. Recently, that utility received a rate increase that will widen the gap to 70%. The extraordinary differential between our rates and theirs is largely the result of our huge accomplishments in converting wind into electricity. In 2021, we expect BHE’s operation to generate about 25.2 million megawatt-hours of electricity (MWh) in Iowa from wind turbines that it both owns and operates. That output will totally cover the annual needs of its Iowa customers, which run to about 24.6 million MWh. In other words, our utility will have attained wind self-sufficiency in the state of Iowa.”

4. 2020 Berkshire Hathaway Letter, dated February 27, 2021

2020 Letter in PDF from Berkshire Hathaway website

Major Berkshire investments reported in the letter:

Standard of success mentioned at the beginning: operating earnings, and per-share intrinsic value. (With the same caveats and explanation about GAAP being misleading due to unrealized gains/losses as previous years.)

Highlights:

  • His letters were, for many years, mostly about Berkshire’s specific businesses. This letter strikes me as far more introspective, and far less of a report. Lovely little walk down memory lane in this letter, back all the way to 1956 and his first Buffett partnerships. It’s a bit macabre, but he must be wondering, at this point, if this is the last annual letter he will write. He wants us to know where it all came from. (And as usual with major world news, barely mentioned the pandemic.)

Checklist points:

  • Watch out for conglomerates that look like Berkshire, but are not of the same quality. The bad kind of conglomerate uses tricky accounting to push the stock price up, then uses that higher stock to overpay for mediocre businesses. “Beyond that, as conglomerateurs dipped into this universe of mediocre businesses, they often found themselves required to pay staggering “control” premiums to snare their quarry. Aspiring conglomerateurs knew the answer to this “overpayment” problem: They simply needed to manufacture a vastly overvalued stock of their own that could be used as a “currency” for pricey acquisitions. (“I’ll pay you $10,000 for your dog by giving you two of my $5,000 cats.”) Often, the tools for fostering the overvaluation of a conglomerate’s stock involved promotional techniques and “imaginative” accounting maneuvers that were, at best, deceptive and that sometimes crossed the line into fraud. When these tricks were “successful,” the conglomerate pushed its own stock to, say, 3x its business value in order to offer the target 2x its value. Investing illusions can continue for a surprisingly long time. Wall Street loves the fees that deal-making generates, and the press loves the stories that colorful promoters provide. At a point, also, the soaring price of a promoted stock can itself become the “proof” that an illusion is reality. Eventually, of course, the party ends, and many business “emperors” are found to have no clothes. Financial history is replete with the names of famous conglomerateurs who were initially lionized as business geniuses by journalists, analysts and investment bankers, but whose creations ended up as business junkyards. Conglomerates earned their terrible reputation.” (emphasis mine)
  • “Charlie and I will simply deploy your capital into whatever we believe makes the most sense, based on a company’s durable competitive strengths, the capabilities and character of its management, and price. If that strategy requires little or no effort on our part, so much the better. In contrast to the scoring system utilized in diving competitions, you are awarded no points in business endeavors for “degree of difficulty.” Furthermore, as Ronald Reagan cautioned: “It’s said that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?”” (emphasis Buffett’s (and Reagan’s)
  • List of stakeholders (customers, employees, lenders, and community), and how he views a company’s responsibility to its stakeholders. Note, however, his italics on directors and shareholders. “In addition, of course, Berkshire directors want the company to delight its customers, to develop and reward the talents of its 360,000 associates, to behave honorably with lenders and to be regarded as a good citizen of the many cities and states in which we operate. We value these four important constituencies. None of these groups, however, have a vote in determining such matters as dividends, strategic direction, CEO selection, or acquisitions and divestitures. Responsibilities like those fall solely on Berkshire’s directors, who must faithfully represent the long-term interests of the corporation and its owners. Beyond legal requirements, Charlie and I feel a special obligation to the many individual shareholders of Berkshire.”
  • He says Berkshire is owned by five buckets of shareholders, and I think these are useful buckets to think of the market ownership overall: himself, index funds, active fund managers (“These professional managers have a mandate to move funds from one investment to another based on their judgment as to valuation and prospects. That is an honorable, though difficult, occupation.”), individuals who own Berkshire as a stock investment, and individuals who own Berkshire permanently. “Charlie and I would be less than human if we did not feel a special kinship with our fifth bucket: the million-plus individual investors who simply trust us to represent their interests, whatever the future may bring. They have joined us with no intent to leave, adopting a mindset similar to that held by our original partners. Indeed, many investors from our partnership years, and/or their descendants, remain substantial owners of Berkshire.”
    • In the market, or in other companies, the buckets might be founders, index funds, active fund managers, individual speculators, and individual long-term investors. Knowing the long-term or short-term orientation of much of the shareholder base is instructive as to how they will behave when things turn downwards.

Particular points of candor:

  • Back in 2015, he praised Todd Combs for bringing Precision Castparts to Berkshire. Here, only five years later, in his mea culpa about buying it, he mentioned no one else. All the blame lies with him. Furthermore, he still stands by the company. To use his wonderful words from his 2018 letter, it is a splendid company but, at the price, a poor investment. “The final component in our GAAP figure – that ugly $11 billion write-down – is almost entirely the quantification of a mistake I made in 2016. That year, Berkshire purchased Precision Castparts (“PCC”), and I paid too much for the company. No one misled me in any way – I was simply too optimistic about PCC’s normalized profit potential. Last year, my miscalculation was laid bare by adverse developments throughout the aerospace industry, PCC’s most important source of customers. In purchasing PCC, Berkshire bought a fine company – the best in its business. Mark Donegan, PCC’s CEO, is a passionate manager who consistently pours the same energy into the business that he did before we purchased it. We are lucky to have him running things. I believe I was right in concluding that PCC would, over time, earn good returns on the net tangible assets deployed in its operations. I was wrong, however, in judging the average amount of future earnings and, consequently, wrong in my calculation of the proper price to pay for the business. PCC is far from my first error of that sort. But it’s a big one.” (emphasis mine)

I was also struck by:

  • He must have included this Mae West quote in at least five different letters. (OK I searched for it, and this quote was in four letters – 1988, 1993, 2012, and 2020 – reminding us roughly once per decade.) I love how much he loves it. “And as a sultry Mae West assured us: “Too much of a good thing can be . . . wonderful.””

5. We’re Done!

What a ride. The Investing Intensive has been, for me, edifying, difficult, a real commitment to continuous practice, fascinating, filled with insights, sometimes boring, intense, and always surprisingly joyful. I hope my notes have been useful to your practice and your reading has been even more useful to your practice.

Now, the ideas stuck in my head for my practice: I want to drill down on my checklist points from Mr. Buffett and turn them into a real, useful, checklist. I want to make more detailed notes of his mistakes. I guess – I’m excited for more time with the letters? Ha! Who knew?!

We’re going on a summer break for the next few weeks. The next issue will come in early September. Happy summer!

1 thought on “060: Investing Intensive 2017-Now”

  1. Julie Simpson

    Hope you have a GREAT summer!!! I am still working on reading/going through your commentary. I have learned so much! Thank you for your fantastic work!

    Julie Simpson

    Reply

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