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Dynamic

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  1. Exactly what gfp said. For both the Berkshire and NEAM 13F filings the front page includes important detail and is ignored by almost every site that scrapes their 13F. The Berkshire 13F-HR filing refers you to New England Asset Management and the NEAM filing describes the owner code in column 7. This changed one quarter in about 2019 where it was 1 2 instead of 01 02 so it's worth reading the cover page to make sure nothing changed since last quarter.
  2. The SEC publishes a list on their website every quarter of securities to be included in 13F filings. That does include a number of ADRs for primarily foreign listings, e.g. Diageo ADRs which are still reported as Berkshire Holdings under New England Asset Management's 13F-HR and a few years ago, Sanofi ADRs were in Berkshire's own 13F-HR (and the 2017 10-K disclosed that they then also held the main Paris listing of Sanofi which is not disclosable as it's not US). If the mystery holding was in about the top 15 holdings at year end (e.g. over about 1.5 to 2 billion) I'd suspect it might need to be disclosed in the Investments in Equity Securities part of the Annual Report/10-K, unless there is also permission to withhold the name.
  3. I've got to agree with you, bizarro. 80+% potential gain over a decade isn't that much considering the risk, especially having started with much less cash and having most of it offset by float liability. The counterfactual situation of rising rates remained a big possibility, and if it happened, large acquisition opportunities might have arisen at the exact moment the funds were depleted by too heavy a weighting on long dated T billls. That could have been a major error of commission potentially costing many decades of compound growth from the acquisition missed. Only with perfect hindsight can we know that rates fell further and prices of potential acquisition targets remained high, though it sounds like we came close to something big in 2017.
  4. I answered with my -6.03% native currency GBP return (-3.42% in USD) underperforming SP500 Total Return index by -21.82% in 2020. My downside estimate (which long-term tracks IV rather than price - hence labelling it USD_IV below) shows a +32.39% increase in USD at year end in USD. 2019's value was depressed thanks to a merger arb still in play in 2019 with high exposure and substantial low-likelihood downside if held to the merger date. I've rated 2020 YE downside as very low. The geometric averages over 5 years show my total compound return is in the ballpark of my compound change in IV/downside - about 14% less downside now than at 2015 YE. YEAR GBPret USDret SP500TR Outperf GBP_IV USD_IV 2020 -6.03% -3.42% 18.40% -21.82% 27.67% 32.39% 2019 13.59% 18.02% 31.49% -13.46% 1.81% 8.36% 2018 32.95% 25.30% -4.38% 29.69% 43.74% 40.88% 2017 14.14% 24.83% 21.83% 2.99% -2.19% 12.72% 2016 54.19% 24.16% 11.96% 12.20% 48.90% 19.09% ================================================ 5yAv 19.58% 17.23% 15.21% 2.02% 22.74% 20.39% ================================================
  5. I wasn't assigned, even though WFC closed at 29.01! Wow, that's quite a surprise, but I guess it can be a useful bonus that you can probably replace that exposure either with a higher premium or a lower strike at a good IRR. I don't do this as much as you, but I've never had that happen. The most unusual thing for me was to have a few contracts assigned to me a good number of days before expiry.
  6. https://www.halma.com/investors/regulatory-news A bit more news today is the sale of Fiberguide Industries to Molex around 12 years after its acquisition. There will be a gain declared on the purchase price. The sale price / acquisition price both on a debt-free basis amounts to around 6.3% annualised in USD terms ignoring any dividends spun off to the parent. My guess is it doesn't have the growth drivers or opportunities that Halma is looking for. I can't complain about my portfolio performance since I sold HLMA 4 years ago, but it's one of those that makes me wonder about the 'never sell' approach and nearly always seems to pricey to buy. Since my purchase in Oct 2001 it has been an 18-bagger (16% annualised capital gains alone) and would have repaid my full purchase price in dividends too.
  7. Small bolt on acquisition of Shaw Paints Ltd as Benjamin Moore Paints look to increase UK penetration. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201216005758/en/Benjamin-Moore-Acquires-UK-Distributor-Shaw-Paints-Ltd
  8. I was listening to a podcast recently - Focused Compounding - talking about banks - this episode in fact: https://focusedcompounding.libsyn.com/website/how-is-a-bank-like-a-railroad-and-other-crazy-ideas-geoff-has-about-investing-in-efficiency-driven-businesses-0 Unlike, say, restaurants, Banks tend to survive even if they're fairly poorly run. Some will have poor cost-control but still manage to charge a sufficient interest margin between their borrowing cost (e.g. deposit rate) and their lending rate (e.g. loan rates) and maintain sufficient client relationships that few customers will shop around and actually switch. In the case of inefficient small local banks they might earn lower returns than putting their capital in an index fund but they can still keep running and paying the staff and the CEO can still be the guy at the country club who runs a bank and there's nothing forcing them to up their game. Other operators will fanatically cut costs from the non-customer-facing side and anything that doesn't benefit the clients or add efficiency to their systems. There are some interesting examples in that podcast. I wonder if Buffett, Munger and Li have determined that BAC is pretty much the low-cost operator among the big banks with a relentless focus on efficiency, much like GEICO is to car insurance. I think there's a lot of admiration for what Brian Moynihan is delivering at BAC. There's admiration for Jamie Dimon too, but I think the investment banking side of JPM is too big for Berkshire to go huge. In the podcast episode Geoff Gannon was talking about the effects of an ultra-low interest rate environment (made even lower by COVID-19) and whether that would squeeze the interest margin available to the less efficient operators in the industry, while the likes of BAC, able to make massive IT investments spread across millions of clients, would be able to maintain their profitability and possibly win new business better than their competitors and may even be able to make cheap acquisitions of banks with lower efficiency and make efficiency improvements post acquisition. I'm not sure that is the case for BAC versus the likes of WFC, but I think it's a line of reasoning to consider if investing in banks, especially having such an extreme environment as we're seeing now, with the possibility of even negative interest rates looming. Perhaps someone has more insight into it. I'm not in the US, I'm no longer a direct investor in BAC (just via my BRK exposure) and my experience with US banks is limited to a few interactions with Wells Fargo, so I don't want to express an opinion. Another option is that WFC was seen as one of those situations where they decided they'd seen enough rats coming through the kitchen door to worry that the kitchen was infested and get out perhaps before the new CEO does a load of big bath write-downs. Maybe there's concern that unauthorized account opening scandal is just the first example of a culture of poorly-aligned incentives encouraging illegal behavior or maybe the response to it has not been decisive enough to satisfy Buffett. We'll know for sure by Monday whether Berkshire's 13F and their holdings in New England Asset Management's 13F included any remaining shares of WFC at 30th Sep. My suspicion is that they had sold the whole WFC stake by mid August, judging by the rate of sales in Q2. I imagine we'll see the Berkshire filing on Saturday and might have to wait until Monday to see NEAM's filing based on the last time the 45-day deadline fell on a weekend.
  9. There is a Safe Harbor rule which exempts companies from Insider Trading or Stock Manipulation investigations for their buyback activity which limits buying to certain times and certain average daily volumes. Berkshire is clearly not following that rule unless it has negotiated some pretty large off market purchases.
  10. With the 13F-HR forms for Berkshire and New England Asset Management both released yesterday, I've updated only the Google sheet that you can copy but not edit. I do not intend to update the publicly editable version I used to do any longer. As the number of units held is one-millionth of the latest share count (from 10-Q cover page), column I represents the company's total portfolio in millions of dollars. The 13F date is 31st March 2020, and we know about some changes since then, mostly the complete sale of the four airlines. Also the sale of a little USB to trim the Berkshire stake plus Benjamin Moore pension stake plus Warren Buffett private stake below 10% combined, all of which I have adjusted for. There are probably about another $2 billion of sales in April that we cannot yet identify along with about $0.4bn is purchases. Other than minor increases in the airlines that were reversed in April, PNC Financial was the only increase at +5.4%. Phillips 66 (PSX) was sold off completely, as expected based on the previous quarter. As we found out in the 10-Q, Wells Fargo was not sold down further, contrary to my expectations. Goldman Sachs (GS) was sold down 81% so I would not be surprised if it has been sold entirely by now, but we'll have to wait until later to find out. Other sales look mostly like minor trimming. One further change is that in the 2019 Berkshire 10-K Note 4 and especially Note 20 the OXY preferred stock and OXY warrants fair values are marked to model and the key inputs are described. The warrants are such a small fair value I haven't tried a Black Scholes approach and just set a fixed value for OXY.warrant. For the preferred, I came up with an 8.54% discount rate to match the Note 20 valuation and adopted the appropriate per-share value for OXY.preferred I then adjusted to suit BAC.preferred and found a reasonable value with 6.54% discount rate, which makes the Note 4 value of the Bank of America equity stake at 31st March to match to the nearest $0.1bn rounding, when it had been rounding to $0.1bn too low without including those warrants. The preferreds and warrants don't contribute to the Look-Through EPS. Here's the table of position changes since 31st Dec 2019: AAL_________ American Airlin…Group Inc -100.00% ________________ AAPL________ Apple Inc._______________ ____unch _unchanged count AMZN________ Amazon Com Inc___________ __-0.70% _________533,300 AXP_________ American Express Co______ ____unch _unchanged count AXTA________ Axalta Coating …stems Ltd __-0.90% ______21,686,000 BAC_________ Bank of America…rporation ____unch _unchanged count BAC.preferre Bank of America…red stock ____unch _unchanged count BIIB________ Biogen Inc.______________ __-0.80% _________643,022 BK__________ Bank of New Yor…llon Corp ____unch _unchanged count CASS________ Società Cattoli…operativa ____unch _unchanged count CHTR________ Charter Communi…tions Inc ____unch _unchanged count COST________ Costco Wholesale Corp____ ____unch _unchanged count DAL_________ Delta Air Lines, Inc_____ -100.00% ________________ DEO_________ Diageo P L C Spon ADR New ____unch _unchanged count DVA_________ DaVita HealthCa…tners Inc __-2.50% ______18,043,482 GL__________ Globe Life Inc …ark Corp) ____unch _unchanged count GM__________ General Motors Co________ __-0.70% ______47,687,000 GS__________ Goldman Sachs Group Inc__ _-81.10% _______2,351,243 HCG_________ Home Capital Gr… (CANADA) ____unch _unchanged count HKG:1211____ BYD Company Lim… Listing) ____unch _unchanged count JNJ_________ Johnson & Johnson________ ____unch _unchanged count JPM_________ JPMorgan Chase & Co______ __-3.00% ______58,259,433 KHC_________ Kraft Heinz Co___________ ____unch _unchanged count KO__________ Coca-Cola Co_____________ ____unch _unchanged count KR__________ Kroger Co._______________ ____unch _unchanged count LBTYA_______ Liberty Global …c Class A __-4.20% ______10,931,000 LBTYK_______ Liberty Global …c Class C ____unch _unchanged count LILA________ Liberty LiLAC Group A____ __-5.20% _______1,541,123 LILAK_______ Liberty LiLAC Group C____ ____unch _unchanged count LSXMA_______ Liberty Sirius … Series A ____unch _unchanged count LSXMK_______ Liberty Sirius … Series C __-1.00% ______23,702,958 LUV_________ Southwest Airls Co_______ -100.00% ________________ LXS_________ Lanxess AG_______________ ____unch _unchanged count MA__________ MasterCard Inc___________ ____unch _unchanged count MCO_________ Moody's Corporation______ ____unch _unchanged count MDLZ________ Mondelez Intern…ional Inc ____unch _unchanged count MTB_________ M&T Bank Corp____________ ____unch _unchanged count OXY_________ Occidental Petr…eum Corp. ____unch _unchanged count OXY.preferre Occidental 8% p…red stock ____unch _unchanged count OXY.warrant_ Occidental warr…50 strike ____unch _unchanged count PG__________ Proctor and Gamble_______ ____unch _unchanged count PNC_________ PNC Financial S…Group Inc ___5.40% ______10,298,484 PSX_________ Phillips 66______________ -100.00% ________________ QSR_________ Restaurant Bran…ional Inc ____unch _unchanged count RH__________ RH (formerly Re…Holdings) ____unch _unchanged count SAN_________ Sanofi Euronext Paris____ ____unch _unchanged count SIRI________ Sirius XM Hldgs Inc______ __-2.80% _____132,418,729 SPY_________ SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust___ ____unch _unchanged count STNE________ StoneCo Ltd._____________ ____unch _unchanged count STOR________ Store Capital Corp_______ ____unch _unchanged count SU__________ Suncor Energy Inc New____ __-0.50% ______14,949,031 SYF_________ Synchrony Financial______ __-3.20% ______20,128,000 TEVA________ Teva Pharmaceut…Ltd (ADR) __-1.10% ______42,789,295 TRV_________ Travelers Companies Inc__ -100.00% ________________ UAL_________ United Continen…dings Inc -100.00% ________________ UPS_________ United Parcel S…Inc (UPS) ____unch _unchanged count USB_________ U.S. Bancorp_____________ ____unch _unchanged count V___________ Visa Inc_________________ ____unch _unchanged count VOO_________ Vanguard S&P 500 ETF_____ ____unch _unchanged count VRSN________ VeriSign Inc_____________ __-1.70% _______7,768,349 WFC_________ Wells Fargo & Co New_____ ____unch _unchanged count
  11. I'm very busy right now in real life, but soon hope to reflect the complete sale of all the airline stocks in the portfolio. The figures reported for the April sales during the AGM will probably only include the shares attributable to Berkshire shareholders. A large proportion of the AAL stake was held in pension funds instead.
  12. Another vote for a great teacher. I also think it's very clear that his patience far exceeds most investors I see commenting and essentially saying "Swing you bum". Right now in particular, many asset prices are down from their Jan/Feb 2020 peaks but still relatively high, yet many commenters on the internet are making it seem like everything is at bargain prices right now. Another important lesson he's demonstrating now is never to risk multiplying your run of results by zero, so he's being patient and ensuring that Berkshire has ample capital to survive if this situation gets worse and probably to thrive on the other side, when the future outlook is more predictable.
  13. 150,088,061 shares of USB were controlled by Berkshire at 31 December 2019, unchanged from 30 June 2019, having increased slightly in 2019Q2. 17,628,443 of these were held via New England Asset Management 13F-HR so don't show up on most Berkshire portfolio trackers unless they adjust for the latest Form 3 filing like CNBC sometimes does. 590,275 were held by subsidiary pension funds, not for the benefit of Berkshire shareholders, so I subtract these from my tracker but they still count towards the 10% rule for filling Form 3.
  14. The Yahoo Finance meeting webcast has been open to anyone since it began, and that includes the formal meeting (the boring part) as well as the Q&A. The only thing never seen by those who don't go to Omaha is the movie.
  15. I doubt this would have reached Buffett until this report. I am aware of another manufacturer and distributor of fastenings in another country who have issued letters to relevant employees so they can show them if stopped when traveling to work, stating that they manufacture and supply fastenings to medical equipment manufacturers and are thus essential workers. Nonetheless they recognise that it's a modest fraction of their business and seem to be taking a responsible attitude to the lockdown in furloughing many staff and having all vital admin staff work from home where possible to support the reduced level of business they are conducting and administer the furloughing etc. Hard to guess how much is legitimate from the outside of the firm and how much is playing fast and loose with the lockdown orders. Also hard to guess if the employee source has legitimate concerns or is for example petrified of going to work or home a grudge.
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