Focus on Berkshire’s Annual Meeting

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2023-05-07

A Full Recap of Everything Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Said at Berkshire’s Annual Meeting

2023-05-09

Buffett's Berkshire Gets a Stock Target Boost After “Best Annual Meeting in Years”

2023-05-08

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Dumps Billions of Dollars of US Stocks

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daz888888888

2023-11-09

[11/9] Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) Fantastic To Buy 💪🛑📣🎉

$Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$ Warren Buffett Buys More OXY Stock But Chevron is not the only way in which Berkshire has energy exposure. In fact, the firm has been making waves as it builds an increasingly large stake in Occidental Petroleum (OXY). Last year, it emerged that Berkshire had snapped up 91.2 million shares in the oil giant. It came as the price of oil spiked amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Berkshire bought another 5.99 million shares of Occidental Petroleum this year between Sept. 26 and 28, according to a Sept. 28 filing. Buffett has continued to build up his stake in the Houston-based energy giant in 2023, in the most recent quarter buying another 12.4 million shares, which increased the size of the position by a further 5.9%. Las

[11/9] Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) Fantastic To Buy 💪🛑📣🎉

MaverickWealthBuilder

2023-07-11

Why Warren Buffett increase stakes in LNG?

A few days ago, Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, increased its stake in $Occidental(OXY)$ Petroleum , raising its stakes to 25%. Buffett's favoritism towards Occidental Petroleum is well-known, and with the endorsement of the stock market guru, Occidental Petroleum is one of the strongest performing companies in the energy sector.However, Buffett also endorsed an oil and gas company. On July 10th, $Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$ Energy agreed to acquire a 50% stake in $Dominion Resources(D)$ energy's Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Maryland for $3.3 billion. After the completion of the transaction, Berkshire Hathaway will own a 75% limited p

Why Warren Buffett increase stakes in LNG?

MIe

2023-05-08

Oil upside with recovery on tight supply

Warren Buffett Has Been Betting Big on Oil. It’s Time to Find Out Why

JimmyChua

2023-05-07

China might ban apple products

Buffett Says Apple Is Berkshire Portfolio's Best Business

JimmyChua

2023-05-07

Great thanks

Sorry, the original content has been removed

OO_898

2023-05-07

Sorry, the original content has been removed

Great Joy

2023-05-07

Thank you

A Full Recap of Everything Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Said at Berkshire’s Annual Meeting

Arvel

2023-05-07

good write up

Sorry, the original content has been removed

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In fact, the firm has been making waves as it builds an increasingly large stake in Occidental Petroleum (OXY). Last year, it emerged that Berkshire had snapped up 91.2 million shares in the oil giant. It came as the price of oil spiked amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Berkshire bought another 5.99 million shares of Occidental Petroleum this year between Sept. 26 and 28, according to a Sept. 28 filing. Buffett has continued to build up his stake in the Houston-based energy giant in 2023, in the most recent quarter buying another 12.4 million shares, which increased the size of the position by a further 5.9%. Las","listText":"<a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/BRK.B\">$Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$&nbsp;</a> Warren Buffett Buys More OXY Stock But Chevron is not the only way in which Berkshire has energy exposure. In fact, the firm has been making waves as it builds an increasingly large stake in Occidental Petroleum (OXY). Last year, it emerged that Berkshire had snapped up 91.2 million shares in the oil giant. It came as the price of oil spiked amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Berkshire bought another 5.99 million shares of Occidental Petroleum this year between Sept. 26 and 28, according to a Sept. 28 filing. Buffett has continued to build up his stake in the Houston-based energy giant in 2023, in the most recent quarter buying another 12.4 million shares, which increased the size of the position by a further 5.9%. Las","text":"$Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$ Warren Buffett Buys More OXY Stock But Chevron is not the only way in which Berkshire has energy exposure. In fact, the firm has been making waves as it builds an increasingly large stake in Occidental Petroleum (OXY). Last year, it emerged that Berkshire had snapped up 91.2 million shares in the oil giant. It came as the price of oil spiked amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Berkshire bought another 5.99 million shares of Occidental Petroleum this year between Sept. 26 and 28, according to a Sept. 28 filing. Buffett has continued to build up his stake in the Houston-based energy giant in 2023, in the most recent quarter buying another 12.4 million shares, which increased the size of the position by a further 5.9%. Las","images":[{"img":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/d21e78a6abb37b9c766587bfd0ac1bed","width":"750","height":"894"}],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":2,"paper":2,"likeSize":15,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":5,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/239638484627512","isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":911,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":1,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":196642694267008,"gmtCreate":1689047778576,"gmtModify":1689047793048,"author":{"id":"4102740236684050","authorId":"4102740236684050","name":"MaverickWealthBuilder","avatar":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/bbf0f514b8e5abb92266789b89f6e1e6","crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"4102740236684050","authorIdStr":"4102740236684050"},"themes":[],"title":"Why Warren Buffett increase stakes in LNG?","htmlText":"A few days ago, Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, increased its stake in <a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/OXY\">$Occidental(OXY)$</a> Petroleum , raising its stakes to 25%. Buffett's favoritism towards Occidental Petroleum is well-known, and with the endorsement of the stock market guru, Occidental Petroleum is one of the strongest performing companies in the energy sector.However, Buffett also endorsed an oil and gas company. On July 10th, <a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/BRK.B\">$Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$</a> Energy agreed to acquire a 50% stake in <a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/D\">$Dominion Resources(D)$</a> energy's Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Maryland for $3.3 billion. After the completion of the transaction, Berkshire Hathaway will own a 75% limited p","listText":"A few days ago, Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, increased its stake in <a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/OXY\">$Occidental(OXY)$</a> Petroleum , raising its stakes to 25%. Buffett's favoritism towards Occidental Petroleum is well-known, and with the endorsement of the stock market guru, Occidental Petroleum is one of the strongest performing companies in the energy sector.However, Buffett also endorsed an oil and gas company. On July 10th, <a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/BRK.B\">$Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$</a> Energy agreed to acquire a 50% stake in <a href=\"https://ttm.financial/S/D\">$Dominion Resources(D)$</a> energy's Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Maryland for $3.3 billion. After the completion of the transaction, Berkshire Hathaway will own a 75% limited p","text":"A few days ago, Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, increased its stake in $Occidental(OXY)$ Petroleum , raising its stakes to 25%. Buffett's favoritism towards Occidental Petroleum is well-known, and with the endorsement of the stock market guru, Occidental Petroleum is one of the strongest performing companies in the energy sector.However, Buffett also endorsed an oil and gas company. On July 10th, $Berkshire Hathaway(BRK.B)$ Energy agreed to acquire a 50% stake in $Dominion Resources(D)$ energy's Cove Point liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Maryland for $3.3 billion. After the completion of the transaction, Berkshire Hathaway will own a 75% limited p","images":[{"img":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6f1ed02b54cc14ab0653c1bd815137a1","width":"798","height":"408"},{"img":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/b14326e23d7c8f748eb836495f4605e1","width":"560","height":"240"},{"img":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/bed851a34434cd2fcc0c58f3a65e9b06","width":"927","height":"282"}],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":2,"paper":2,"likeSize":522,"commentSize":7,"repostSize":54,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/196642694267008","isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":4473,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[{"author":{"id":"3479274803156147","authorId":"3479274803156147","name":"0billionaire","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a5d8c2eb1c079c85b43879eb951e8684","crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"idStr":"3479274803156147","authorIdStr":"3479274803156147"},"content":"The fact is that OXY is owned mostly by Institutional Investors - 78% +-, about 10% OXY Insiders, and about 12% average on this board. This is important because the little guy trading a hundred or a thousand shares does not do much to the market","text":"The fact is that OXY is owned mostly by Institutional Investors - 78% +-, about 10% OXY Insiders, and about 12% average on this board. This is important because the little guy trading a hundred or a thousand shares does not do much to the market","html":"The fact is that OXY is owned mostly by Institutional Investors - 78% +-, about 10% OXY Insiders, and about 12% average on this board. This is important because the little guy trading a hundred or a thousand shares does not do much to the market"}],"imageCount":3,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":9947428949,"gmtCreate":1683522862882,"gmtModify":1683522867227,"author":{"id":"3577182936341023","authorId":"3577182936341023","name":"MIe","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":6,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3577182936341023","authorIdStr":"3577182936341023"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"Oil upside with recovery on tight supply&nbsp;","listText":"Oil upside with recovery on tight supply&nbsp;","text":"Oil upside with recovery on tight supply","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9947428949","repostId":"1150270496","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1150270496","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1683365998,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1150270496?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2023-05-06 17:39","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Warren Buffett Has Been Betting Big on Oil. It’s Time to Find Out Why","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1150270496","media":"The Wall Street Journal","summary":"Not long ago, Warren Buffett seemed like he was mostly done with oil stocks. The renowned investor l","content":"<html><head></head><body><p>Not long ago, Warren Buffett seemed like he was mostly done with oil stocks. The renowned investor lost big on an oil-company investment in 2008, and bailed out of another in 2014. He assured his shareholders he had learned his lesson.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Then, last year, Mr. Buffett built up a fresh $39 billion bet.</p><p>At this weekend’s annual gathering of shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, Mr. Buffett is certain to face questions about his drastic about-face. Investors hope Mr. Buffett and his lieutenants will outline the thinking that led them to build a massive stake in two of the Permian Basin’s biggest producers, and explain what they think the future looks like for oil—and the companies that drill for it—as the world looks to lessen its dependence on fossil fuels.</p><p>And can he explain what’s different this time around?</p><p>Mr. Buffett spent 2008 amassing a sizable stake in oil producer <u>ConocoPhillips</u>. When the global recession hit, oil prices—along with ConocoPhillips’s stock price—came crashing down. Berkshire had its worst year since Mr. Buffett took over the company in the 60s.</p><p>“So far, I have been dead wrong,” Mr. Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive, <u>lamented</u> to shareholders in early 2009. </p><p>Berkshire tried again. It invested in <u>Exxon Mobil</u> several times over the following years, only to dump the entirety of its stake in 2014, when oil prices began what would wind up being one of their worst pullbacks in modern history.</p><p>“We will not be buying, very often, oil and gas stocks,” Mr. Buffett said at Berkshire’s 2015 shareholder meeting.</p><p>Then <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/OXY\">Occidental Petroleum</a> caught Mr. Buffett’s eye.</p><p>Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub was in her Jeep Wrangler in March 2022, on her way to watch a college baseball game. Occidental shares had been ripping higher, but no one knew why. Her phone rang. She was about to get the answer.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Vicki, this is Warren,” Mr. Buffett said, according to an account of the conversation Ms. Hollub shared at a symposium dinner in November. “We just bought 10% of your company.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">That call marked the beginning of a big binge on oil stocks for Berkshire. Mr. Buffett’s company went back to buy more Occidental shares later that month, in May and in June. Even as oil prices fell from a peak, Berkshire kept buying, making additional investments in July, August, September and March 2023. It also increased its stake in a much larger Occidental rival, <a href=\"https://laohu8.com/S/CVX\">Chevron</a> in the first three quarters of the year.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">After a <u>flurry of investments</u> over the past year, Berkshire has become both Occidental and Chevron’s biggest shareholder. Energy shares made up about 14% of Berkshire’s stock portfolio at the end of 2022—the highest share going back to at least 2000, according to an analysis of company filings.</p><p>After mostly swearing off energy stocks, Warren Buffett has re-entered the sector with large investments in Chevron and Occidental Petroleum.</p><p></p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/24d52fe76cc37ffa803ec2e83dab7a39\" tg-width=\"667\" tg-height=\"750\"/></p><p>Mr. Buffett’s followers may get some more clarity on Berkshire’s investments in the energy industry on Saturday, when he and his right-hand man, Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, take the stage. Greg Abel, Mr. Buffett’s designated successor, and Ajit Jain, the head of Berkshire’s insurance operations, are also to field questions from the audience at the meeting.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">It’s been a busy year for Mr. Buffett. The 92-year-old <u>flew to Japan</u> in April to meet with the heads of five trading houses that Berkshire has invested in. His company also completed its biggest deal since 2016 in October, when it finished acquiring insurer Alleghany, and went on <u>a buying spree</u> in the stock market—spending a record $68 billion purchasing stocks in 2022. Berkshire’s investments in Occidental and Chevron stand out as some of Mr. Buffett’s biggest bets during that stretch.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Occidental shares have climbed 5% through Wednesday since Berkshire first disclosed its stake in the company in March 2022. Chevron shares have fallen 1.8% since Berkshire disclosed significantly increasing its stake in April 2022.</p><p>“The way they’ve gone in on the energy business…you’d think a boom era is going on,” said Cole Smead, CEO and portfolio manager at Smead Capital Management, which owns Berkshire shares. </p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/cc7f0709a70c6793981351284adcd970\" alt=\"Warren Buffett has said that the world will need fossil fuels for many years to come. ‘Just try doing without 11 million barrels a day and see what happens tomorrow,’ he said. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: DANA SMITH; BLOOMBERG NEWS (3); GETTY IMAGES (4)\" title=\"Warren Buffett has said that the world will need fossil fuels for many years to come. ‘Just try doing without 11 million barrels a day and see what happens tomorrow,’ he said. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: DANA SMITH; BLOOMBERG NEWS (3); GETTY IMAGES (4)\" tg-width=\"700\" tg-height=\"1050\"/><span>Warren Buffett has said that the world will need fossil fuels for many years to come. ‘Just try doing without 11 million barrels a day and see what happens tomorrow,’ he said. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: DANA SMITH; BLOOMBERG NEWS (3); GETTY IMAGES (4)</span></p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">That hasn’t been the case—making it all the more striking that Mr. Buffett, <u>one of the most successful investors of all time</u>, has chosen this moment to embrace oil stocks.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">U.S. crude oil prices have fallen to around $69 a barrel after surging above $130 a barrel last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Society’s attitude toward fossil fuels has also changed over the years. Businesses have come under <u>growing pressure</u> to rein in their carbon emissions. At Berkshire, shareholders including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System have put forward a shareholder resolution demanding the company assess and disclose the risks it faces from climate change and the transition to clean energy. Shareholders will vote on the proposal, which is similar to proposals put forward in previous years that were <u>soundly defeated</u>, at the company’s meeting Saturday. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Mr. Buffett’s investment is that energy stocks have mostly been money-losing investments in recent years. Boom-and-bust cycles, waves of bankruptcies and worries about the future of fossil fuels have contributed to the S&amp;P 500 energy sector significantly underperforming the broader market since oil prices hit their all-time high in 2008. </p><p>“There’s a huge spread between what they’re interested in and what everyone else is buying,” Mr. Smead said of Messrs. Buffett and Munger.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Why, then, has Berkshire made such a big push into energy stocks?</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">The simplest answer, according to analysts and investors who have followed Mr. Buffett over the years: The investor seems to firmly believe that even as a growing number of companies set ambitious goals to reduce their carbon emissions, the world will continue to need oil. Lots of oil. That should make it a commodity that companies like Occidental and Chevron can profit from selling for years to come. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I suspect some of it may be connected to a view that the transition away from fossil fuels will take longer than the market expects,” said Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust, a Berkshire shareholder. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Mr. Buffett himself remarked in 2022 that the U.S. didn’t look like it was close to <u>moving away from oil</u> entirely. He declined to comment for this article. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“If we were to try and change over, in three years, or five years, nobody knows what would happen, but the odds that it would work well are extremely low, it seems to me,” he said at Berkshire’s shareholder meeting last year.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Critics of the energy industry have suggested that anybody who “produced a barrel of oil was somehow something terrible,” Mr. Buffett said then.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Indeed, Berkshire itself faced the ire of some shareholders in 2007 for holding on to its investment in <u>PetroChina</u>. The Chinese oil producer’s parent company was accused of having close ties to Sudan’s government during the Darfur genocide, which began in 2003. Later in 2007, Berkshire disclosed it had dissolved the entirety of its stake, although Mr. Buffett described the move—which netted him a profit of about $3.5 billion—to Fox Business Network as being “100% a decision based on valuation.” </p><p>Despite some people’s moral judgments about fossil fuels, the fact of the matter is, the U.S. would grind to a halt without it, Mr. Buffett said at the 2022 shareholder meeting. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I mean, just try doing without 11 million barrels a day and see what happens tomorrow,” he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Berkshire’s investments in energy over the past year make it clear that, even as technology companies have grown more and more dominant in the stock market, Mr. Buffett “still appreciates old-economy businesses,” said James Shanahan, a senior equity research analyst at Edward Jones who covers Berkshire.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Mr. Buffett didn’t elaborate on the reason for his Occidental and Chevron investments in his most recent direct communication to shareholders: his annual letter, which he released in late February.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Investors who have followed Messrs. Buffett and Munger for years say the two men are highly averse to risk taking. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">That’s another reason oil companies might seem like an unusual investment for Berkshire. After all, the companies’ profits are dependent on the price of oil, which in turn is affected by unpredictable factors like the pace of economic growth, the speed at which companies drill for and produce oil and geopolitical shocks that might affect the supply of oil around the world.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Yet Mr. Buffett doesn’t seem to be counting on oil heading to sky-high levels again.</p><p>Ms. Hollub “says she doesn’t know the price of oil next year. Nobody does,” Mr. Buffett said at Berkshire’s 2022 shareholder meeting. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Instead, he may be wagering that oil prices will stay within a certain range that makes profits possible for oil companies, said Mohnish Pabrai, founder of the Pabrai Investments Funds and a Berkshire shareholder who met Mr. Buffett in 2008, after winning a dinner with the famed investor at a charity auction.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Many oil companies have said they can be profitable with oil prices trading far below current levels, thanks to advances in technology that have made it easier for companies to extract oil, even in environments that have historically been tougher to operate in. Occidental, for instance, has said it can turn a profit with oil as low as $40 a barrel.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Let’s say, for example, he has a view that in the next 10 years, oil prices will range from $60 to $150 a barrel,” Mr. Pabrai said. As long as they mostly stay within that range, Berkshire’s stock investment would likely pay off—or at the least, return more than Berkshire would be able to get from putting that same money in U.S. Treasury notes, he said. The 10-year U.S. Treasury note had a yield of 3.401% Wednesday.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Another likely selling point: Both Occidental and Chevron have dominant presences in the Permian Basin. The region spanning West Texas to southeastern New Mexico is one of the most prolific oil fields in the world, accounting for roughly 43% of U.S. crude oil production in June 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.</p><p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/76415db6f9448446f176492defdb7715\" alt=\"Chevron has a dominant presence in the Permian Basin. The region spanning West Texas to southeastern New Mexico is one of the most prolific oil fields in the world, PHOTO: PATRICK T. FALLON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES\" title=\"Chevron has a dominant presence in the Permian Basin. The region spanning West Texas to southeastern New Mexico is one of the most prolific oil fields in the world, PHOTO: PATRICK T. FALLON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES\" tg-width=\"700\" tg-height=\"466\"/><span>Chevron has a dominant presence in the Permian Basin. The region spanning West Texas to southeastern New Mexico is one of the most prolific oil fields in the world, PHOTO: PATRICK T. FALLON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES</span></p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Asked whether Berkshire was likely to hold onto its positions in Occidental and Chevron over the long run, Mr. Munger said at a question-and-answer session in February that “having a big position in the Permian Basin through those two companies is likely to be a pretty good long-term hold.” </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Mr. Munger added that he admires both companies.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">What’s also clear is that, in the case of Occidental, Ms. Hollub has won Mr. Buffett’s confidence. </p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">While in the past, many oil companies have made the mistake of increasing production as soon as oil prices have turned higher, Ms. Hollub has spent the years following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic focused on paying down Occidental’s debt load, paying dividends and buying back the company’s stock—moves that analysts and investors say likely resonated with Mr. Buffett.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“She’s basically like Buffett in terms of thinking about returning cash to shareholders,” Mr. Pabrai said.</p><p>Occidental has also, with Mr. Buffett’s blessing, invested more than $1 billion in a <u>carbon capture</u> process that involves using fans to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air, and then funneling that CO2 deep underground. Though the technology is still evolving, the company says it will help it reach its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 while allowing it to keep investing in oil extraction.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">That may help explain why Berkshire went from owning none of Occidental’s common stock to becoming its largest shareholder in the span of just a couple of weeks in 2022.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Mr. Buffett likely “felt like he could make an investment like that because he had a high level of confidence in her,” Mr. Smead said. Ms. Hollub “just gets it. She’s by far and away the most successful oil exec I’ve ever met,” he added.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger have built Berkshire for the long haul, Mr. Pabrai said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“When you think about the railroad—100 years from now, it’ll still be cranking,” he said, referring to Berkshire’s BNSF Railway business. “The utilities—they’re going to be around for a long time,” he said, referring to Berkshire Hathaway Energy.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">It makes sense, then, that Berkshire’s stock portfolio would include oil companies, which Messrs. Buffett and Munger seem to believe will continue churning out profits for years to come.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“They’re not going to chase the latest fad,” Mr. Pabrai said. “They’re as much as possible looking for no-brainers.”</p></body></html>","source":"wsj_highlight","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Warren Buffett Has Been Betting Big on Oil. It’s Time to Find Out Why</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nWarren Buffett Has Been Betting Big on Oil. It’s Time to Find Out Why\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2023-05-06 17:39 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-oil-stocks-berkshire-hathaway-charlie-munger-2c8b12b8?mod=business_lead_pos13><strong>The Wall Street Journal</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Not long ago, Warren Buffett seemed like he was mostly done with oil stocks. The renowned investor lost big on an oil-company investment in 2008, and bailed out of another in 2014. He assured his ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-oil-stocks-berkshire-hathaway-charlie-munger-2c8b12b8?mod=business_lead_pos13\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"OXY":"西方石油","BRK.B":"伯克希尔B","BRK.A":"伯克希尔","CVX":"雪佛龙"},"source_url":"https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-oil-stocks-berkshire-hathaway-charlie-munger-2c8b12b8?mod=business_lead_pos13","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1150270496","content_text":"Not long ago, Warren Buffett seemed like he was mostly done with oil stocks. The renowned investor lost big on an oil-company investment in 2008, and bailed out of another in 2014. He assured his shareholders he had learned his lesson.Then, last year, Mr. Buffett built up a fresh $39 billion bet.At this weekend’s annual gathering of shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, Mr. Buffett is certain to face questions about his drastic about-face. Investors hope Mr. Buffett and his lieutenants will outline the thinking that led them to build a massive stake in two of the Permian Basin’s biggest producers, and explain what they think the future looks like for oil—and the companies that drill for it—as the world looks to lessen its dependence on fossil fuels.And can he explain what’s different this time around?Mr. Buffett spent 2008 amassing a sizable stake in oil producer ConocoPhillips. When the global recession hit, oil prices—along with ConocoPhillips’s stock price—came crashing down. Berkshire had its worst year since Mr. Buffett took over the company in the 60s.“So far, I have been dead wrong,” Mr. Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive, lamented to shareholders in early 2009. Berkshire tried again. It invested in Exxon Mobil several times over the following years, only to dump the entirety of its stake in 2014, when oil prices began what would wind up being one of their worst pullbacks in modern history.“We will not be buying, very often, oil and gas stocks,” Mr. Buffett said at Berkshire’s 2015 shareholder meeting.Then Occidental Petroleum caught Mr. Buffett’s eye.Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub was in her Jeep Wrangler in March 2022, on her way to watch a college baseball game. Occidental shares had been ripping higher, but no one knew why. Her phone rang. She was about to get the answer.“Vicki, this is Warren,” Mr. Buffett said, according to an account of the conversation Ms. Hollub shared at a symposium dinner in November. “We just bought 10% of your company.”That call marked the beginning of a big binge on oil stocks for Berkshire. Mr. Buffett’s company went back to buy more Occidental shares later that month, in May and in June. Even as oil prices fell from a peak, Berkshire kept buying, making additional investments in July, August, September and March 2023. It also increased its stake in a much larger Occidental rival, Chevron in the first three quarters of the year.After a flurry of investments over the past year, Berkshire has become both Occidental and Chevron’s biggest shareholder. Energy shares made up about 14% of Berkshire’s stock portfolio at the end of 2022—the highest share going back to at least 2000, according to an analysis of company filings.After mostly swearing off energy stocks, Warren Buffett has re-entered the sector with large investments in Chevron and Occidental Petroleum.Mr. Buffett’s followers may get some more clarity on Berkshire’s investments in the energy industry on Saturday, when he and his right-hand man, Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, take the stage. Greg Abel, Mr. Buffett’s designated successor, and Ajit Jain, the head of Berkshire’s insurance operations, are also to field questions from the audience at the meeting.It’s been a busy year for Mr. Buffett. The 92-year-old flew to Japan in April to meet with the heads of five trading houses that Berkshire has invested in. His company also completed its biggest deal since 2016 in October, when it finished acquiring insurer Alleghany, and went on a buying spree in the stock market—spending a record $68 billion purchasing stocks in 2022. Berkshire’s investments in Occidental and Chevron stand out as some of Mr. Buffett’s biggest bets during that stretch.Occidental shares have climbed 5% through Wednesday since Berkshire first disclosed its stake in the company in March 2022. Chevron shares have fallen 1.8% since Berkshire disclosed significantly increasing its stake in April 2022.“The way they’ve gone in on the energy business…you’d think a boom era is going on,” said Cole Smead, CEO and portfolio manager at Smead Capital Management, which owns Berkshire shares. Warren Buffett has said that the world will need fossil fuels for many years to come. ‘Just try doing without 11 million barrels a day and see what happens tomorrow,’ he said. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: DANA SMITH; BLOOMBERG NEWS (3); GETTY IMAGES (4)That hasn’t been the case—making it all the more striking that Mr. Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, has chosen this moment to embrace oil stocks.U.S. crude oil prices have fallen to around $69 a barrel after surging above $130 a barrel last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Society’s attitude toward fossil fuels has also changed over the years. Businesses have come under growing pressure to rein in their carbon emissions. At Berkshire, shareholders including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System have put forward a shareholder resolution demanding the company assess and disclose the risks it faces from climate change and the transition to clean energy. Shareholders will vote on the proposal, which is similar to proposals put forward in previous years that were soundly defeated, at the company’s meeting Saturday. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Mr. Buffett’s investment is that energy stocks have mostly been money-losing investments in recent years. Boom-and-bust cycles, waves of bankruptcies and worries about the future of fossil fuels have contributed to the S&P 500 energy sector significantly underperforming the broader market since oil prices hit their all-time high in 2008. “There’s a huge spread between what they’re interested in and what everyone else is buying,” Mr. Smead said of Messrs. Buffett and Munger.Why, then, has Berkshire made such a big push into energy stocks?The simplest answer, according to analysts and investors who have followed Mr. Buffett over the years: The investor seems to firmly believe that even as a growing number of companies set ambitious goals to reduce their carbon emissions, the world will continue to need oil. Lots of oil. That should make it a commodity that companies like Occidental and Chevron can profit from selling for years to come. “I suspect some of it may be connected to a view that the transition away from fossil fuels will take longer than the market expects,” said Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust, a Berkshire shareholder. Mr. Buffett himself remarked in 2022 that the U.S. didn’t look like it was close to moving away from oil entirely. He declined to comment for this article. “If we were to try and change over, in three years, or five years, nobody knows what would happen, but the odds that it would work well are extremely low, it seems to me,” he said at Berkshire’s shareholder meeting last year.Critics of the energy industry have suggested that anybody who “produced a barrel of oil was somehow something terrible,” Mr. Buffett said then.Indeed, Berkshire itself faced the ire of some shareholders in 2007 for holding on to its investment in PetroChina. The Chinese oil producer’s parent company was accused of having close ties to Sudan’s government during the Darfur genocide, which began in 2003. Later in 2007, Berkshire disclosed it had dissolved the entirety of its stake, although Mr. Buffett described the move—which netted him a profit of about $3.5 billion—to Fox Business Network as being “100% a decision based on valuation.” Despite some people’s moral judgments about fossil fuels, the fact of the matter is, the U.S. would grind to a halt without it, Mr. Buffett said at the 2022 shareholder meeting. “I mean, just try doing without 11 million barrels a day and see what happens tomorrow,” he said.Berkshire’s investments in energy over the past year make it clear that, even as technology companies have grown more and more dominant in the stock market, Mr. Buffett “still appreciates old-economy businesses,” said James Shanahan, a senior equity research analyst at Edward Jones who covers Berkshire.Mr. Buffett didn’t elaborate on the reason for his Occidental and Chevron investments in his most recent direct communication to shareholders: his annual letter, which he released in late February.Investors who have followed Messrs. Buffett and Munger for years say the two men are highly averse to risk taking. That’s another reason oil companies might seem like an unusual investment for Berkshire. After all, the companies’ profits are dependent on the price of oil, which in turn is affected by unpredictable factors like the pace of economic growth, the speed at which companies drill for and produce oil and geopolitical shocks that might affect the supply of oil around the world.Yet Mr. Buffett doesn’t seem to be counting on oil heading to sky-high levels again.Ms. Hollub “says she doesn’t know the price of oil next year. Nobody does,” Mr. Buffett said at Berkshire’s 2022 shareholder meeting. Instead, he may be wagering that oil prices will stay within a certain range that makes profits possible for oil companies, said Mohnish Pabrai, founder of the Pabrai Investments Funds and a Berkshire shareholder who met Mr. Buffett in 2008, after winning a dinner with the famed investor at a charity auction.Many oil companies have said they can be profitable with oil prices trading far below current levels, thanks to advances in technology that have made it easier for companies to extract oil, even in environments that have historically been tougher to operate in. Occidental, for instance, has said it can turn a profit with oil as low as $40 a barrel.“Let’s say, for example, he has a view that in the next 10 years, oil prices will range from $60 to $150 a barrel,” Mr. Pabrai said. As long as they mostly stay within that range, Berkshire’s stock investment would likely pay off—or at the least, return more than Berkshire would be able to get from putting that same money in U.S. Treasury notes, he said. The 10-year U.S. Treasury note had a yield of 3.401% Wednesday.Another likely selling point: Both Occidental and Chevron have dominant presences in the Permian Basin. The region spanning West Texas to southeastern New Mexico is one of the most prolific oil fields in the world, accounting for roughly 43% of U.S. crude oil production in June 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.Chevron has a dominant presence in the Permian Basin. The region spanning West Texas to southeastern New Mexico is one of the most prolific oil fields in the world, PHOTO: PATRICK T. FALLON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESAsked whether Berkshire was likely to hold onto its positions in Occidental and Chevron over the long run, Mr. Munger said at a question-and-answer session in February that “having a big position in the Permian Basin through those two companies is likely to be a pretty good long-term hold.” Mr. Munger added that he admires both companies.What’s also clear is that, in the case of Occidental, Ms. Hollub has won Mr. Buffett’s confidence. While in the past, many oil companies have made the mistake of increasing production as soon as oil prices have turned higher, Ms. Hollub has spent the years following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic focused on paying down Occidental’s debt load, paying dividends and buying back the company’s stock—moves that analysts and investors say likely resonated with Mr. Buffett.“She’s basically like Buffett in terms of thinking about returning cash to shareholders,” Mr. Pabrai said.Occidental has also, with Mr. Buffett’s blessing, invested more than $1 billion in a carbon capture process that involves using fans to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air, and then funneling that CO2 deep underground. Though the technology is still evolving, the company says it will help it reach its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 while allowing it to keep investing in oil extraction.That may help explain why Berkshire went from owning none of Occidental’s common stock to becoming its largest shareholder in the span of just a couple of weeks in 2022.Mr. Buffett likely “felt like he could make an investment like that because he had a high level of confidence in her,” Mr. Smead said. Ms. Hollub “just gets it. She’s by far and away the most successful oil exec I’ve ever met,” he added.Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger have built Berkshire for the long haul, Mr. Pabrai said.“When you think about the railroad—100 years from now, it’ll still be cranking,” he said, referring to Berkshire’s BNSF Railway business. “The utilities—they’re going to be around for a long time,” he said, referring to Berkshire Hathaway Energy.It makes sense, then, that Berkshire’s stock portfolio would include oil companies, which Messrs. Buffett and Munger seem to believe will continue churning out profits for years to come.“They’re not going to chase the latest fad,” Mr. Pabrai said. “They’re as much as possible looking for no-brainers.”","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":248,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":9947436685,"gmtCreate":1683436241248,"gmtModify":1683436245205,"author":{"id":"3574984385549978","authorId":"3574984385549978","name":"JimmyChua","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3574984385549978","authorIdStr":"3574984385549978"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"China might ban apple products","listText":"China might ban apple products","text":"China might ban apple products","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":5,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9947436685","repostId":"2333499507","repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"2333499507","kind":"highlight","weMediaInfo":{"introduction":"Reuters.com brings you the latest news from around the world, covering breaking news in markets, business, politics, entertainment and technology","home_visible":1,"media_name":"Reuters","id":"1036604489","head_image":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/443ce19704621c837795676028cec868"},"pubTimestamp":1683416463,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/2333499507?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2023-05-07 07:41","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Buffett Says Apple Is Berkshire Portfolio's Best Business","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2333499507","media":"Reuters","summary":"OMAHA/NEW YORK May 6 (Reuters) - Warren Buffett said on Saturday that Apple Inc is a better business","content":"<html><head></head><body><p>OMAHA/NEW YORK May 6 (Reuters) - Warren Buffett said on Saturday that Apple Inc is a better business than any other in Berkshire Hathaway Inc&#39;s portfolio.</p><p>&#34;Apple is different than the other businesses we own. It just happens to be a better business,&#34; said Buffett during Berkshire&#39;s annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.</p><p>Berkshire revealed a $1 billion stake in Apple in May 2016, and by March 2023 had boosted that stake to $151 billion, accounting for 46% of its $328 billion equity portfolio,</p><p>Buffett has long praised Apple CEO Tim Cook, and viewed Apple less as a technology company and more as a consumer products company with a dominant product, the iPhone, that people want and need.</p><p>Berkshire has recently held a 5.6% stake in Apple, and Buffett said it could buy more.</p></body></html>","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Buffett Says Apple Is Berkshire Portfolio's Best Business</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nBuffett Says Apple Is Berkshire Portfolio's Best Business\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n<a class=\"head\" href=\"https://laohu8.com/wemedia/1036604489\">\n\n\n<div class=\"h-thumb\" style=\"background-image:url(https://static.tigerbbs.com/443ce19704621c837795676028cec868);background-size:cover;\"></div>\n\n<div class=\"h-content\">\n<p class=\"h-name\">Reuters </p>\n<p class=\"h-time\">2023-05-07 07:41</p>\n</div>\n\n</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<html><head></head><body><p>OMAHA/NEW YORK May 6 (Reuters) - Warren Buffett said on Saturday that Apple Inc is a better business than any other in Berkshire Hathaway Inc&#39;s portfolio.</p><p>&#34;Apple is different than the other businesses we own. It just happens to be a better business,&#34; said Buffett during Berkshire&#39;s annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.</p><p>Berkshire revealed a $1 billion stake in Apple in May 2016, and by March 2023 had boosted that stake to $151 billion, accounting for 46% of its $328 billion equity portfolio,</p><p>Buffett has long praised Apple CEO Tim Cook, and viewed Apple less as a technology company and more as a consumer products company with a dominant product, the iPhone, that people want and need.</p><p>Berkshire has recently held a 5.6% stake in Apple, and Buffett said it could buy more.</p></body></html>\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BRK.B":"伯克希尔B","BRK.A":"伯克希尔","AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"2333499507","content_text":"OMAHA/NEW YORK May 6 (Reuters) - Warren Buffett said on Saturday that Apple Inc is a better business than any other in Berkshire Hathaway Inc's portfolio.\"Apple is different than the other businesses we own. It just happens to be a better business,\" said Buffett during Berkshire's annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.Berkshire revealed a $1 billion stake in Apple in May 2016, and by March 2023 had boosted that stake to $151 billion, accounting for 46% of its $328 billion equity portfolio,Buffett has long praised Apple CEO Tim Cook, and viewed Apple less as a technology company and more as a consumer products company with a dominant product, the iPhone, that people want and need.Berkshire has recently held a 5.6% stake in Apple, and Buffett said it could buy more.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":255,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":9947436899,"gmtCreate":1683436176411,"gmtModify":1683436180796,"author":{"id":"3574984385549978","authorId":"3574984385549978","name":"JimmyChua","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3574984385549978","authorIdStr":"3574984385549978"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"Great thanks","listText":"Great thanks","text":"Great thanks","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":6,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9947436899","repostId":"1128633960","repostType":4,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":404,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":9947433874,"gmtCreate":1683433672498,"gmtModify":1683433675948,"author":{"id":"3582969710070724","authorId":"3582969710070724","name":"OO_898","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/9fb3c360d5d7711641a868a144192fc7","crmLevel":4,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"3582969710070724","authorIdStr":"3582969710070724"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"Like&nbsp;","listText":"Like&nbsp;","text":"Like","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":6,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9947433874","repostId":"2333499507","repostType":4,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":297,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":9947494533,"gmtCreate":1683424400323,"gmtModify":1683424403766,"author":{"id":"4111809398482662","authorId":"4111809398482662","name":"Great Joy","avatar":"https://community-static.tradeup.com/news/60d4182388f8b85c577b0310c872c28d","crmLevel":5,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"4111809398482662","authorIdStr":"4111809398482662"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"Thank you&nbsp;","listText":"Thank you&nbsp;","text":"Thank you","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":8,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9947494533","repostId":"1128633960","repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1128633960","kind":"news","weMediaInfo":{"introduction":"Dow Jones publishes the world’s most trusted business news and financial information in a variety of media.","home_visible":1,"media_name":"Dow Jones","id":"1012688067","head_image":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/150f88aa4d182df19190059f4a365e99"},"pubTimestamp":1683417035,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1128633960?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2023-05-07 07:50","market":"us","language":"en","title":"A Full Recap of Everything Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Said at Berkshire’s Annual Meeting","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1128633960","media":"Dow Jones","summary":"The Q&A session at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting ended early on Saturday, a","content":"<html><head></head><body><p>The Q&amp;A session at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting ended early on Saturday, after back-to-back three-hour sessions of questioning for the conglomerate’s management.</p><p>CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairmen Charlie Munger, Ajit Jain, and Greg Abel addressed queries from shareholders about Berkshire’s business performance, their thoughts on macroeconomic issues and the recent banking turmoil</p><p>Buffett, 92, and Munger, 99, sprinkled in genial anecdotes and grandfatherly advice for Berkshire’s younger shareholders. Attendance was high at this year’s so-called “Woodstock for Capitalists,” after a relatively muted 2022 confab following two year of virtual meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic.</p><p>Berkshire’s first-quarter results were released earlier on Saturday morning, showing a 12.6% rise in operating profit, to $8.1 billion, and a faster pace of buybacks compared with the fourth quarter of 2022.</p><h3>Berkshire Won’t Be Investing In Automakers, Buffett Says</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) isn’t likely to invest in shares of automakers like General Motors (GM) or Ford Motor (F), CEO Warren Buffett said at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday.</p><p>“Charlie [Munger] and I have long felt that the auto business is just too tough,” Buffett said, adding an anecdote about Henry Ford’s challenges in the industry in the early 1900s.</p><p>Buffett said that there are too many global competitors for the automaking business to generate attractive returns. It’s also in the midst of a transition to electric vehicles, which imposes huge capital costs and risks in the near term before it becomes clear which companies will be successful and which won’t.</p><p>Berkshire prefers the auto dealership business, where it owns 78 dealerships across the U.S. Those generate more than $8 billion in annual revenue, making Berkshire among the largest dealership groups in the U.S.</p><h3>Buffett Says Berkshire Remains On the Hunt for an ‘Elephant-Sized’ Acquisition</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) has nearly $130 billion in cash and Treasury bills on its balance sheet. There’s ongoing speculation about what the company might do with all that dry powder.</p><p>At Berkshire’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday, CEO Warren Buffett said that he would rather do a deal for a large company than sit on the cash, earning interest, but that it all depends on the prices available. Things are generally expensive these days.</p><p>“If we could buy a company for $15 billion, $75 billion, $100 billion, we could do it,” Buffett said. He noted that it’s more complex to buy a publicly traded company due to the longer timeline, shareholder vote, and other rules. But there just aren’t that many private companies of that scale available.</p><p>Buffett spoke about opportunities that emerged during the global financial crisis in 2008, including deals to buy shares in several troubled banks at attractive prices, and said that he expects Berkshire to get similar calls in the future.</p><p>“There’s no one else quite like us who can [do a deal] under the right circumstances,” Buffett said.</p><p>In the meantime, Berkshire is earning close to 5% on its T-bills. It has also been buying stock in recent years.</p><h3>Cash Is Not Trash, Buffett Says</h3><p>Buffett is watching currency in circulation, calling it &#34;one of the most interesting figures&#34; to consider and calling out those who previously said &#34;cash is trash&#34; back in 2007 and 2008.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">&#34;The Federal Reserve balance sheet has gone from $800 billion to $2.2 trillion and most of that&#39;s in $100 bills overwhelmingly. … I would really like to know where all of that is,&#34; he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">&#34;Anyone who thinks cash is trash ought to look at the Federal Reserve balance sheet,&#34; he added. &#34;It is just astounding the way $100 bills have spread. … Believe me, cash is not trash.&#34;</p><h3 style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett knocks down speculation Berkshire would take full control of Occidental</h3><p>Buffett said Saturday that Berkshire Hathaway won&#39;t take full control of Occidental Petroleum, the energy stock where it has amassed a stake above 20%.</p><p>&#34;There&#39;s speculation about us buying control, we&#39;re not going to buy control. … We wouldn&#39;t know what to do with it,&#34; he said.</p><h3 style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett says he’ll stick with Bank of America</h3><p>Buffett says he’s keeping his Bank of America holdings <em>— </em>but that he doesn’t know what’s in store.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“We do remain with one bank holding ... , but we originated that deal, with Bank of America. I like Bank of America, I liked the management and I proposed the deal for them. So I stick with it,” said Buffett.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">He said that the recent crises in the banking sector have reaffirmed his belief that the American public and lawmakers fail to understand the banking sector.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“But do I know how to project out what’s going to happen from here? The answer is I don’t, because I’ve seen so many things in the last few months, which really weren’t that unexpected to me to see. But which reconfirmed my belief that the American public doesn’t understand our banking system.”</p><h3 style=\"text-align: start;\">It’s a joke to think of ‘tokens’ as the world’s reserve currency, Buffett says</h3><p>People may be losing faith in the dollar, but that doesn’t make it bitcoin’s moment to shine, Buffett said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Forget about all the toys – it’s a joke to think of any tokens, that’s madness,” when it comes to the reserve currency of the world, he said. “But it’s also madness to just keep printing money.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett was responding to a question about the current dedollarization trend and warned about the extent to which the U.S. has been printing money.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“It’s easy for America to do a lot, but if we do too much it’s very hard to see how you recover once you’ve let the genie out of the bottle,” he said. “People lose faith in the currency and they behave in an entirely different manner than they do when they feel … they’re going to have something with roughly equal purchasing power. It changes the economy.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Munger criticized it more sharply, saying “at some point printing money to buy boats will become counterproductive.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Still, Buffett stood by the dollar: “We are the reserve currency, I see no option for any other currency to be the reserve currency,” he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Bitcoin gained popularity among investors in 2021 because of its potential to act as an inflation hedge, after the U.S. printed trillions of dollars in Covid-19 stimulus. Many have let go of that narrative after bitcoin dropped more than 60% in 2022 amid persistently high inflation.</p><h3>Buffett Says Streaming Remains a Challenging Business, Sticks With Paramount</h3><p>CEO Warren Buffett addressed Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) investment in Paramount Global (PARA) at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha on Saturday. The media company is in the midst of an expensive transition from legacy businesses in cable TV and movies to a streaming future.</p><p>Paramount shares dropped 28% on May 5 following a disastrous quarterly earnings report that included a large loss and a slash to the company’s dividend.</p><p>“It’s not good news when any company cuts its dividend dramatically,” Buffett said.</p><p>He noted that the streaming business remains challenging, with numerous competitors keeping prices low. It’s easy to cancel a streaming subscription and hop to a competing service.</p><p>“There are a bunch of companies who don’t want to quit,” Buffett said. “Who knows what will happen with pricing.”</p><p>Berkshire became the largest holder of Paramount stock last year, with a stake of around 15%. Shares are down by about half since Berkshire began buying in the first quarter of 2022.</p><h3>Buffett Faults Bank Risk Taking, Calls for More Active FDIC</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett sees excessive risk taking at banks as the root of the 2023 banking turmoil. He called for more conservative banking practices and better communication from regulators at Berkshire’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“The situation in banking is what it always was,” Buffett said. “Fear is contagious. Sometimes the fear is justified, sometimes it isn’t.” Buffett recalled that his father, Howard Buffett, lost his job during a bank run in the Great Depression.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett praised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for the greater stability of the banking system offered by the regulators’ deposit insurance, but said that it needed to better communicate with the American public to prevent further potential bank runs and potentially consider guaranteeing 100% of deposits until the current turmoil has passed. That’s especially relevant today, when digital banking makes deposits less “sticky,” he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett faulted management at First Republic Bank—which was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. last month before its takeover by JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—for concentrating its balance sheet in low-yielding assets that lost value as interest rates rose over the past year.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett placed signs reading “Available for Sale” and “Held-to-Maturity” on the table in front of him and Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice chairman, to laughs from the audience. Those are terms that refer to the accounting treatment of securities on a bank’s balance sheet.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I’m old fashioned,” Munger said. “I liked it when banks didn’t do investment banking…I think having a lot of investment bankers trying to get rich isn’t a good thing. I think bankers should be more like engineers, thinking about what could go wrong.”</p><h3>Abel Says He’ll Continue Buffett’s Approach to Share Buybacks</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman Greg Abel, Warren Buffett’s appointed successor as CEO, will continue to buy back stock when it appears cheap and the best use of the conglomerate’s cash.</p><p>Berkshire bought back $4.4 billion of stock in the first three months of 2023, up from $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.</p><p>“Greg understands capital allocation as well as I do…and I expect he’ll make those decisions under the same framework that Charlie and I do,” Buffett said.</p><p>Buffett is all about intrinsic value, and seeks to buy back Berkshire stock when its price falls below that estimate. He has praised companies like Apple (AAPL) for using excess capital to repurchase shares. He has also criticized management teams for buying back their company’s stock at inflated prices in the past.</p><p>“When the opportunity presents itself, we’ll want to be an active purchaser of Berkshire shares,” Abel said. “It’s great for our shareholders to be able to own a larger share in all of Berkshire’s businesses.”</p><h3>Insurance Profits Are Up at Berkshire, But Jain Worries About a Florida Hurricane</h3><p>Pricing is strong and improving in catastrophe insurance after a tough decade and a half for the category, Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman in charge of insurance operations Ajit Jain said at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday. Those are policies that insure homes and businesses against natural disasters including earthquakes and hurricanes.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">That has helped to drive better underwriting profits at Berkshire’s reinsurance businesses.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Jain warned that the company’s exposure was “unbalanced,” however, with particularly large concentration in Florida. Across all of Berkshire’s insurance operations, the conglomerate could see a loss of up to $15 billion if there’s a majorly destructive hurricane in Florida this year—if there isn’t, it could mean a profit of up to $7 billion, Jain estimated.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Jain said that the recently acquired insurer Alleghany, which Berkshire bought last year for about $11.6 billion, would continue doing business as it had before the deal.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“We treat our operating units independent of each other,” Jain said. “Alleghany will keep doing what they’re doing and they’ve been very successful at it.”</p><h3>Berkshire Hathaway Is Taking Part In the Energy Transition</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Greg Abel addressed the conglomerate’s efforts to boost its participation in renewable energy generation at the conglomerate’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha on Saturday.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“There’s no question there’s an energy transition going on,” said Abel, who oversees Berkshire’s non-insurance businesses, including Berkshire Hathaway Energy. He said the utility company is working to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% in 2030 relative to 2005 levels.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Berkshire Hathaway Energy is investing in windmills and other clean energy generation, plus extending transmission lines to more renewable energy sources, which by their nature are more distributed than traditional power plants.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“It’s a very, very good business opportunity for us,” Abel added.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett said that the United States’ approach to renewable energy is overly fragmented, with different rules and regulations state by state and no society-wide organized effort. He drew a comparison to the World War II-era coordination between the federal government and American businesses to reorient the nation’s industrial economy to support the war effort.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“The capital is there, the people are there, the objective is obvious, we just don’t seem to be able to do it in peacetime,” Buffett said.</p><h3>Buffett and Munger Disagree on the Future of Value Investing</h3><p>Legendary value investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger see divergent paths for value investors in the coming years. The Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) managers were responding to shareholders’ questions at the company’s annual meeting in Omaha on Saturday.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I think value investors are going to have a harder time now that there are so many of them competing for a diminished set of opportunities,” Munger said. “My advice to value investors is to get used to making less.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Charlie has been telling me the same thing the whole time we’ve known each other,” Buffett said. The two first met over dinner in 1959.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett sees more opportunities than his long-time partner. “What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things,” he said. “...And there’s been a great increase in people doing dumb things.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">The 92-year-old value investor noted that Berkshire’s current scale can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, with many potential opportunities too small to move the needle for the $719 billion conglomerate.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">A long-term investing horizon is still key to realizing value in investing, Buffett said. “I’d love to be born today, start out with not too much money, and turn it into a lot of money,” he said. “I’m sure Charlie would too.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I’d like my big pile [of money] to stay just the way it is,” Munger quipped, to laughs from the crowd. He has a net worth of approximately $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.</p><h3>Buffett, 92, and Munger, 99 Aren’t Particularly Bullish on AI, Robotics</h3><p>A shareholder asked Berkshire Hathaway&#39;s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to share their thoughts on artificial intelligence and robotics and which businesses stood to be disrupted most. “I thank you for asking Charlie that question,” Buffett, 92, demurred.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Munger, 99, noted that he was impressed by the level of automation at BYD (ticker: BYDDY) factories in Asia. But, “I think regular old intelligence works just fine,” Munger added.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“There won’t be any AI that will replace Ajit [Jain, Berkshire vice chairman],” Buffett quipped. He went on to warn about the potential risks of AI technologies, drawing a parallel to the development of the atomic bomb.</p><h3>Buffett’s Vice Chairmen Discuss Berkshire’s Businesses</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett kicked a question about the company’s subsidiaries’ performance to his deputies.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Geico is coming off a strong first quarter, with an underwriting profit of $703 million, versus a loss of $178 million in the year-ago quarter.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Ajit Jain, who oversees Berkshire’s insurance operations, said that Geico is working to close the gap with competitors on its employment of telematics, or usage-based insurance, which adjusts customers’ rates based on how they drive.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Geico’s technology needs a lot more work than I thought it would,” Jain said, noting that the company uses more than 600 distinct tech platforms.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Greg Abel, who oversees non-insurance operations and is in line to succeed Buffett as CEO, spoke about BNSF. He said there was “more work to be done” on making the railroad more efficient and productive and that he was aware of most competitors moving to precision-scheduled railroading.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">2022 was a “reset” year for the business, Abel said, that will set it up for better long-term growth.</p><h3>Buffett Agrees With Regulators’ Decision to Protect Failing Bank Deposits</h3><p>The 2023 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting’s first question had to do with the past few months’ banking-industry turmoil.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">CEO Warren Buffett said that regulators made the right decision to intervene to protect depositors at banks including Silicon Valley Bank, which failed in March.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Had they not, “it would have been catastrophic,” Buffett said.</p><h3>Buffett Talks First-Quarter Results, Berkshire’s Balance Sheet, and Buybacks</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ran through the company’s first-quarter results, which were released on Saturday morning. The conglomerate’s operating profit after taxes was up almost 13% year over year, to $8.1 billion.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett attributed the gain to a higher return on the company’s stock portfolio, better interest income on its cash holdings, and a higher insurance underwriting profit.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">He continued with an overview of Berkshire’s balance sheet, noting that the company’s $504.5 billion in shareholders’ equity is more than any other American company. Berkshire’s insurance float—the difference between an insurance company’s cash collected from premiums and the claims it must pay out—stood at $165.1 billion at the end of the first quarter, while cash and Treasury bills were $127.7 billion. That’s a lot of ammo for potential acquisitions or interest income.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Berkshire bought back about 9,600 class A shares in the first quarter, worth about $4.4 billion. That was faster than the first-quarter pace of buybacks, but slower than Berkshire’s repurchases in 2020 and 2021.</p></body></html>","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>A Full Recap of Everything Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Said at Berkshire’s Annual Meeting</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nA Full Recap of Everything Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Said at Berkshire’s Annual Meeting\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n<a class=\"head\" href=\"https://laohu8.com/wemedia/1012688067\">\n\n\n<div class=\"h-thumb\" style=\"background-image:url(https://static.tigerbbs.com/150f88aa4d182df19190059f4a365e99);background-size:cover;\"></div>\n\n<div class=\"h-content\">\n<p class=\"h-name\">Dow Jones </p>\n<p class=\"h-time\">2023-05-07 07:50</p>\n</div>\n\n</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<html><head></head><body><p>The Q&amp;A session at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting ended early on Saturday, after back-to-back three-hour sessions of questioning for the conglomerate’s management.</p><p>CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairmen Charlie Munger, Ajit Jain, and Greg Abel addressed queries from shareholders about Berkshire’s business performance, their thoughts on macroeconomic issues and the recent banking turmoil</p><p>Buffett, 92, and Munger, 99, sprinkled in genial anecdotes and grandfatherly advice for Berkshire’s younger shareholders. Attendance was high at this year’s so-called “Woodstock for Capitalists,” after a relatively muted 2022 confab following two year of virtual meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic.</p><p>Berkshire’s first-quarter results were released earlier on Saturday morning, showing a 12.6% rise in operating profit, to $8.1 billion, and a faster pace of buybacks compared with the fourth quarter of 2022.</p><h3>Berkshire Won’t Be Investing In Automakers, Buffett Says</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) isn’t likely to invest in shares of automakers like General Motors (GM) or Ford Motor (F), CEO Warren Buffett said at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday.</p><p>“Charlie [Munger] and I have long felt that the auto business is just too tough,” Buffett said, adding an anecdote about Henry Ford’s challenges in the industry in the early 1900s.</p><p>Buffett said that there are too many global competitors for the automaking business to generate attractive returns. It’s also in the midst of a transition to electric vehicles, which imposes huge capital costs and risks in the near term before it becomes clear which companies will be successful and which won’t.</p><p>Berkshire prefers the auto dealership business, where it owns 78 dealerships across the U.S. Those generate more than $8 billion in annual revenue, making Berkshire among the largest dealership groups in the U.S.</p><h3>Buffett Says Berkshire Remains On the Hunt for an ‘Elephant-Sized’ Acquisition</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) has nearly $130 billion in cash and Treasury bills on its balance sheet. There’s ongoing speculation about what the company might do with all that dry powder.</p><p>At Berkshire’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday, CEO Warren Buffett said that he would rather do a deal for a large company than sit on the cash, earning interest, but that it all depends on the prices available. Things are generally expensive these days.</p><p>“If we could buy a company for $15 billion, $75 billion, $100 billion, we could do it,” Buffett said. He noted that it’s more complex to buy a publicly traded company due to the longer timeline, shareholder vote, and other rules. But there just aren’t that many private companies of that scale available.</p><p>Buffett spoke about opportunities that emerged during the global financial crisis in 2008, including deals to buy shares in several troubled banks at attractive prices, and said that he expects Berkshire to get similar calls in the future.</p><p>“There’s no one else quite like us who can [do a deal] under the right circumstances,” Buffett said.</p><p>In the meantime, Berkshire is earning close to 5% on its T-bills. It has also been buying stock in recent years.</p><h3>Cash Is Not Trash, Buffett Says</h3><p>Buffett is watching currency in circulation, calling it &#34;one of the most interesting figures&#34; to consider and calling out those who previously said &#34;cash is trash&#34; back in 2007 and 2008.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">&#34;The Federal Reserve balance sheet has gone from $800 billion to $2.2 trillion and most of that&#39;s in $100 bills overwhelmingly. … I would really like to know where all of that is,&#34; he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">&#34;Anyone who thinks cash is trash ought to look at the Federal Reserve balance sheet,&#34; he added. &#34;It is just astounding the way $100 bills have spread. … Believe me, cash is not trash.&#34;</p><h3 style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett knocks down speculation Berkshire would take full control of Occidental</h3><p>Buffett said Saturday that Berkshire Hathaway won&#39;t take full control of Occidental Petroleum, the energy stock where it has amassed a stake above 20%.</p><p>&#34;There&#39;s speculation about us buying control, we&#39;re not going to buy control. … We wouldn&#39;t know what to do with it,&#34; he said.</p><h3 style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett says he’ll stick with Bank of America</h3><p>Buffett says he’s keeping his Bank of America holdings <em>— </em>but that he doesn’t know what’s in store.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“We do remain with one bank holding ... , but we originated that deal, with Bank of America. I like Bank of America, I liked the management and I proposed the deal for them. So I stick with it,” said Buffett.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">He said that the recent crises in the banking sector have reaffirmed his belief that the American public and lawmakers fail to understand the banking sector.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“But do I know how to project out what’s going to happen from here? The answer is I don’t, because I’ve seen so many things in the last few months, which really weren’t that unexpected to me to see. But which reconfirmed my belief that the American public doesn’t understand our banking system.”</p><h3 style=\"text-align: start;\">It’s a joke to think of ‘tokens’ as the world’s reserve currency, Buffett says</h3><p>People may be losing faith in the dollar, but that doesn’t make it bitcoin’s moment to shine, Buffett said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Forget about all the toys – it’s a joke to think of any tokens, that’s madness,” when it comes to the reserve currency of the world, he said. “But it’s also madness to just keep printing money.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett was responding to a question about the current dedollarization trend and warned about the extent to which the U.S. has been printing money.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“It’s easy for America to do a lot, but if we do too much it’s very hard to see how you recover once you’ve let the genie out of the bottle,” he said. “People lose faith in the currency and they behave in an entirely different manner than they do when they feel … they’re going to have something with roughly equal purchasing power. It changes the economy.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Munger criticized it more sharply, saying “at some point printing money to buy boats will become counterproductive.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Still, Buffett stood by the dollar: “We are the reserve currency, I see no option for any other currency to be the reserve currency,” he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Bitcoin gained popularity among investors in 2021 because of its potential to act as an inflation hedge, after the U.S. printed trillions of dollars in Covid-19 stimulus. Many have let go of that narrative after bitcoin dropped more than 60% in 2022 amid persistently high inflation.</p><h3>Buffett Says Streaming Remains a Challenging Business, Sticks With Paramount</h3><p>CEO Warren Buffett addressed Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) investment in Paramount Global (PARA) at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha on Saturday. The media company is in the midst of an expensive transition from legacy businesses in cable TV and movies to a streaming future.</p><p>Paramount shares dropped 28% on May 5 following a disastrous quarterly earnings report that included a large loss and a slash to the company’s dividend.</p><p>“It’s not good news when any company cuts its dividend dramatically,” Buffett said.</p><p>He noted that the streaming business remains challenging, with numerous competitors keeping prices low. It’s easy to cancel a streaming subscription and hop to a competing service.</p><p>“There are a bunch of companies who don’t want to quit,” Buffett said. “Who knows what will happen with pricing.”</p><p>Berkshire became the largest holder of Paramount stock last year, with a stake of around 15%. Shares are down by about half since Berkshire began buying in the first quarter of 2022.</p><h3>Buffett Faults Bank Risk Taking, Calls for More Active FDIC</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett sees excessive risk taking at banks as the root of the 2023 banking turmoil. He called for more conservative banking practices and better communication from regulators at Berkshire’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“The situation in banking is what it always was,” Buffett said. “Fear is contagious. Sometimes the fear is justified, sometimes it isn’t.” Buffett recalled that his father, Howard Buffett, lost his job during a bank run in the Great Depression.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett praised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for the greater stability of the banking system offered by the regulators’ deposit insurance, but said that it needed to better communicate with the American public to prevent further potential bank runs and potentially consider guaranteeing 100% of deposits until the current turmoil has passed. That’s especially relevant today, when digital banking makes deposits less “sticky,” he said.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett faulted management at First Republic Bank—which was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. last month before its takeover by JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—for concentrating its balance sheet in low-yielding assets that lost value as interest rates rose over the past year.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett placed signs reading “Available for Sale” and “Held-to-Maturity” on the table in front of him and Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice chairman, to laughs from the audience. Those are terms that refer to the accounting treatment of securities on a bank’s balance sheet.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I’m old fashioned,” Munger said. “I liked it when banks didn’t do investment banking…I think having a lot of investment bankers trying to get rich isn’t a good thing. I think bankers should be more like engineers, thinking about what could go wrong.”</p><h3>Abel Says He’ll Continue Buffett’s Approach to Share Buybacks</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman Greg Abel, Warren Buffett’s appointed successor as CEO, will continue to buy back stock when it appears cheap and the best use of the conglomerate’s cash.</p><p>Berkshire bought back $4.4 billion of stock in the first three months of 2023, up from $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.</p><p>“Greg understands capital allocation as well as I do…and I expect he’ll make those decisions under the same framework that Charlie and I do,” Buffett said.</p><p>Buffett is all about intrinsic value, and seeks to buy back Berkshire stock when its price falls below that estimate. He has praised companies like Apple (AAPL) for using excess capital to repurchase shares. He has also criticized management teams for buying back their company’s stock at inflated prices in the past.</p><p>“When the opportunity presents itself, we’ll want to be an active purchaser of Berkshire shares,” Abel said. “It’s great for our shareholders to be able to own a larger share in all of Berkshire’s businesses.”</p><h3>Insurance Profits Are Up at Berkshire, But Jain Worries About a Florida Hurricane</h3><p>Pricing is strong and improving in catastrophe insurance after a tough decade and a half for the category, Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman in charge of insurance operations Ajit Jain said at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday. Those are policies that insure homes and businesses against natural disasters including earthquakes and hurricanes.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">That has helped to drive better underwriting profits at Berkshire’s reinsurance businesses.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Jain warned that the company’s exposure was “unbalanced,” however, with particularly large concentration in Florida. Across all of Berkshire’s insurance operations, the conglomerate could see a loss of up to $15 billion if there’s a majorly destructive hurricane in Florida this year—if there isn’t, it could mean a profit of up to $7 billion, Jain estimated.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Jain said that the recently acquired insurer Alleghany, which Berkshire bought last year for about $11.6 billion, would continue doing business as it had before the deal.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“We treat our operating units independent of each other,” Jain said. “Alleghany will keep doing what they’re doing and they’ve been very successful at it.”</p><h3>Berkshire Hathaway Is Taking Part In the Energy Transition</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Greg Abel addressed the conglomerate’s efforts to boost its participation in renewable energy generation at the conglomerate’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha on Saturday.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“There’s no question there’s an energy transition going on,” said Abel, who oversees Berkshire’s non-insurance businesses, including Berkshire Hathaway Energy. He said the utility company is working to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% in 2030 relative to 2005 levels.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Berkshire Hathaway Energy is investing in windmills and other clean energy generation, plus extending transmission lines to more renewable energy sources, which by their nature are more distributed than traditional power plants.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“It’s a very, very good business opportunity for us,” Abel added.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett said that the United States’ approach to renewable energy is overly fragmented, with different rules and regulations state by state and no society-wide organized effort. He drew a comparison to the World War II-era coordination between the federal government and American businesses to reorient the nation’s industrial economy to support the war effort.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“The capital is there, the people are there, the objective is obvious, we just don’t seem to be able to do it in peacetime,” Buffett said.</p><h3>Buffett and Munger Disagree on the Future of Value Investing</h3><p>Legendary value investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger see divergent paths for value investors in the coming years. The Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) managers were responding to shareholders’ questions at the company’s annual meeting in Omaha on Saturday.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I think value investors are going to have a harder time now that there are so many of them competing for a diminished set of opportunities,” Munger said. “My advice to value investors is to get used to making less.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Charlie has been telling me the same thing the whole time we’ve known each other,” Buffett said. The two first met over dinner in 1959.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett sees more opportunities than his long-time partner. “What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things,” he said. “...And there’s been a great increase in people doing dumb things.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">The 92-year-old value investor noted that Berkshire’s current scale can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, with many potential opportunities too small to move the needle for the $719 billion conglomerate.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">A long-term investing horizon is still key to realizing value in investing, Buffett said. “I’d love to be born today, start out with not too much money, and turn it into a lot of money,” he said. “I’m sure Charlie would too.”</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“I’d like my big pile [of money] to stay just the way it is,” Munger quipped, to laughs from the crowd. He has a net worth of approximately $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.</p><h3>Buffett, 92, and Munger, 99 Aren’t Particularly Bullish on AI, Robotics</h3><p>A shareholder asked Berkshire Hathaway&#39;s Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to share their thoughts on artificial intelligence and robotics and which businesses stood to be disrupted most. “I thank you for asking Charlie that question,” Buffett, 92, demurred.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Munger, 99, noted that he was impressed by the level of automation at BYD (ticker: BYDDY) factories in Asia. But, “I think regular old intelligence works just fine,” Munger added.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“There won’t be any AI that will replace Ajit [Jain, Berkshire vice chairman],” Buffett quipped. He went on to warn about the potential risks of AI technologies, drawing a parallel to the development of the atomic bomb.</p><h3>Buffett’s Vice Chairmen Discuss Berkshire’s Businesses</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett kicked a question about the company’s subsidiaries’ performance to his deputies.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Geico is coming off a strong first quarter, with an underwriting profit of $703 million, versus a loss of $178 million in the year-ago quarter.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Ajit Jain, who oversees Berkshire’s insurance operations, said that Geico is working to close the gap with competitors on its employment of telematics, or usage-based insurance, which adjusts customers’ rates based on how they drive.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">“Geico’s technology needs a lot more work than I thought it would,” Jain said, noting that the company uses more than 600 distinct tech platforms.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Greg Abel, who oversees non-insurance operations and is in line to succeed Buffett as CEO, spoke about BNSF. He said there was “more work to be done” on making the railroad more efficient and productive and that he was aware of most competitors moving to precision-scheduled railroading.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">2022 was a “reset” year for the business, Abel said, that will set it up for better long-term growth.</p><h3>Buffett Agrees With Regulators’ Decision to Protect Failing Bank Deposits</h3><p>The 2023 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting’s first question had to do with the past few months’ banking-industry turmoil.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">CEO Warren Buffett said that regulators made the right decision to intervene to protect depositors at banks including Silicon Valley Bank, which failed in March.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Had they not, “it would have been catastrophic,” Buffett said.</p><h3>Buffett Talks First-Quarter Results, Berkshire’s Balance Sheet, and Buybacks</h3><p>Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ran through the company’s first-quarter results, which were released on Saturday morning. The conglomerate’s operating profit after taxes was up almost 13% year over year, to $8.1 billion.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Buffett attributed the gain to a higher return on the company’s stock portfolio, better interest income on its cash holdings, and a higher insurance underwriting profit.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">He continued with an overview of Berkshire’s balance sheet, noting that the company’s $504.5 billion in shareholders’ equity is more than any other American company. Berkshire’s insurance float—the difference between an insurance company’s cash collected from premiums and the claims it must pay out—stood at $165.1 billion at the end of the first quarter, while cash and Treasury bills were $127.7 billion. That’s a lot of ammo for potential acquisitions or interest income.</p><p style=\"text-align: start;\">Berkshire bought back about 9,600 class A shares in the first quarter, worth about $4.4 billion. That was faster than the first-quarter pace of buybacks, but slower than Berkshire’s repurchases in 2020 and 2021.</p></body></html>\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BRK.B":"伯克希尔B","BRK.A":"伯克希尔"},"source_url":"","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1128633960","content_text":"The Q&A session at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting ended early on Saturday, after back-to-back three-hour sessions of questioning for the conglomerate’s management.CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairmen Charlie Munger, Ajit Jain, and Greg Abel addressed queries from shareholders about Berkshire’s business performance, their thoughts on macroeconomic issues and the recent banking turmoilBuffett, 92, and Munger, 99, sprinkled in genial anecdotes and grandfatherly advice for Berkshire’s younger shareholders. Attendance was high at this year’s so-called “Woodstock for Capitalists,” after a relatively muted 2022 confab following two year of virtual meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic.Berkshire’s first-quarter results were released earlier on Saturday morning, showing a 12.6% rise in operating profit, to $8.1 billion, and a faster pace of buybacks compared with the fourth quarter of 2022.Berkshire Won’t Be Investing In Automakers, Buffett SaysBerkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) isn’t likely to invest in shares of automakers like General Motors (GM) or Ford Motor (F), CEO Warren Buffett said at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday.“Charlie [Munger] and I have long felt that the auto business is just too tough,” Buffett said, adding an anecdote about Henry Ford’s challenges in the industry in the early 1900s.Buffett said that there are too many global competitors for the automaking business to generate attractive returns. It’s also in the midst of a transition to electric vehicles, which imposes huge capital costs and risks in the near term before it becomes clear which companies will be successful and which won’t.Berkshire prefers the auto dealership business, where it owns 78 dealerships across the U.S. Those generate more than $8 billion in annual revenue, making Berkshire among the largest dealership groups in the U.S.Buffett Says Berkshire Remains On the Hunt for an ‘Elephant-Sized’ AcquisitionBerkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) has nearly $130 billion in cash and Treasury bills on its balance sheet. There’s ongoing speculation about what the company might do with all that dry powder.At Berkshire’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday, CEO Warren Buffett said that he would rather do a deal for a large company than sit on the cash, earning interest, but that it all depends on the prices available. Things are generally expensive these days.“If we could buy a company for $15 billion, $75 billion, $100 billion, we could do it,” Buffett said. He noted that it’s more complex to buy a publicly traded company due to the longer timeline, shareholder vote, and other rules. But there just aren’t that many private companies of that scale available.Buffett spoke about opportunities that emerged during the global financial crisis in 2008, including deals to buy shares in several troubled banks at attractive prices, and said that he expects Berkshire to get similar calls in the future.“There’s no one else quite like us who can [do a deal] under the right circumstances,” Buffett said.In the meantime, Berkshire is earning close to 5% on its T-bills. It has also been buying stock in recent years.Cash Is Not Trash, Buffett SaysBuffett is watching currency in circulation, calling it \"one of the most interesting figures\" to consider and calling out those who previously said \"cash is trash\" back in 2007 and 2008.\"The Federal Reserve balance sheet has gone from $800 billion to $2.2 trillion and most of that's in $100 bills overwhelmingly. … I would really like to know where all of that is,\" he said.\"Anyone who thinks cash is trash ought to look at the Federal Reserve balance sheet,\" he added. \"It is just astounding the way $100 bills have spread. … Believe me, cash is not trash.\"Buffett knocks down speculation Berkshire would take full control of OccidentalBuffett said Saturday that Berkshire Hathaway won't take full control of Occidental Petroleum, the energy stock where it has amassed a stake above 20%.\"There's speculation about us buying control, we're not going to buy control. … We wouldn't know what to do with it,\" he said.Buffett says he’ll stick with Bank of AmericaBuffett says he’s keeping his Bank of America holdings — but that he doesn’t know what’s in store.“We do remain with one bank holding ... , but we originated that deal, with Bank of America. I like Bank of America, I liked the management and I proposed the deal for them. So I stick with it,” said Buffett.He said that the recent crises in the banking sector have reaffirmed his belief that the American public and lawmakers fail to understand the banking sector.“But do I know how to project out what’s going to happen from here? The answer is I don’t, because I’ve seen so many things in the last few months, which really weren’t that unexpected to me to see. But which reconfirmed my belief that the American public doesn’t understand our banking system.”It’s a joke to think of ‘tokens’ as the world’s reserve currency, Buffett saysPeople may be losing faith in the dollar, but that doesn’t make it bitcoin’s moment to shine, Buffett said.“Forget about all the toys – it’s a joke to think of any tokens, that’s madness,” when it comes to the reserve currency of the world, he said. “But it’s also madness to just keep printing money.”Buffett was responding to a question about the current dedollarization trend and warned about the extent to which the U.S. has been printing money.“It’s easy for America to do a lot, but if we do too much it’s very hard to see how you recover once you’ve let the genie out of the bottle,” he said. “People lose faith in the currency and they behave in an entirely different manner than they do when they feel … they’re going to have something with roughly equal purchasing power. It changes the economy.”Munger criticized it more sharply, saying “at some point printing money to buy boats will become counterproductive.”Still, Buffett stood by the dollar: “We are the reserve currency, I see no option for any other currency to be the reserve currency,” he said.Bitcoin gained popularity among investors in 2021 because of its potential to act as an inflation hedge, after the U.S. printed trillions of dollars in Covid-19 stimulus. Many have let go of that narrative after bitcoin dropped more than 60% in 2022 amid persistently high inflation.Buffett Says Streaming Remains a Challenging Business, Sticks With ParamountCEO Warren Buffett addressed Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) investment in Paramount Global (PARA) at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha on Saturday. The media company is in the midst of an expensive transition from legacy businesses in cable TV and movies to a streaming future.Paramount shares dropped 28% on May 5 following a disastrous quarterly earnings report that included a large loss and a slash to the company’s dividend.“It’s not good news when any company cuts its dividend dramatically,” Buffett said.He noted that the streaming business remains challenging, with numerous competitors keeping prices low. It’s easy to cancel a streaming subscription and hop to a competing service.“There are a bunch of companies who don’t want to quit,” Buffett said. “Who knows what will happen with pricing.”Berkshire became the largest holder of Paramount stock last year, with a stake of around 15%. Shares are down by about half since Berkshire began buying in the first quarter of 2022.Buffett Faults Bank Risk Taking, Calls for More Active FDICBerkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett sees excessive risk taking at banks as the root of the 2023 banking turmoil. He called for more conservative banking practices and better communication from regulators at Berkshire’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting.“The situation in banking is what it always was,” Buffett said. “Fear is contagious. Sometimes the fear is justified, sometimes it isn’t.” Buffett recalled that his father, Howard Buffett, lost his job during a bank run in the Great Depression.Buffett praised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for the greater stability of the banking system offered by the regulators’ deposit insurance, but said that it needed to better communicate with the American public to prevent further potential bank runs and potentially consider guaranteeing 100% of deposits until the current turmoil has passed. That’s especially relevant today, when digital banking makes deposits less “sticky,” he said.Buffett faulted management at First Republic Bank—which was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. last month before its takeover by JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—for concentrating its balance sheet in low-yielding assets that lost value as interest rates rose over the past year.Buffett placed signs reading “Available for Sale” and “Held-to-Maturity” on the table in front of him and Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s vice chairman, to laughs from the audience. Those are terms that refer to the accounting treatment of securities on a bank’s balance sheet.“I’m old fashioned,” Munger said. “I liked it when banks didn’t do investment banking…I think having a lot of investment bankers trying to get rich isn’t a good thing. I think bankers should be more like engineers, thinking about what could go wrong.”Abel Says He’ll Continue Buffett’s Approach to Share BuybacksBerkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman Greg Abel, Warren Buffett’s appointed successor as CEO, will continue to buy back stock when it appears cheap and the best use of the conglomerate’s cash.Berkshire bought back $4.4 billion of stock in the first three months of 2023, up from $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.“Greg understands capital allocation as well as I do…and I expect he’ll make those decisions under the same framework that Charlie and I do,” Buffett said.Buffett is all about intrinsic value, and seeks to buy back Berkshire stock when its price falls below that estimate. He has praised companies like Apple (AAPL) for using excess capital to repurchase shares. He has also criticized management teams for buying back their company’s stock at inflated prices in the past.“When the opportunity presents itself, we’ll want to be an active purchaser of Berkshire shares,” Abel said. “It’s great for our shareholders to be able to own a larger share in all of Berkshire’s businesses.”Insurance Profits Are Up at Berkshire, But Jain Worries About a Florida HurricanePricing is strong and improving in catastrophe insurance after a tough decade and a half for the category, Berkshire Hathaway’s (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman in charge of insurance operations Ajit Jain said at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Saturday. Those are policies that insure homes and businesses against natural disasters including earthquakes and hurricanes.That has helped to drive better underwriting profits at Berkshire’s reinsurance businesses.Jain warned that the company’s exposure was “unbalanced,” however, with particularly large concentration in Florida. Across all of Berkshire’s insurance operations, the conglomerate could see a loss of up to $15 billion if there’s a majorly destructive hurricane in Florida this year—if there isn’t, it could mean a profit of up to $7 billion, Jain estimated.Jain said that the recently acquired insurer Alleghany, which Berkshire bought last year for about $11.6 billion, would continue doing business as it had before the deal.“We treat our operating units independent of each other,” Jain said. “Alleghany will keep doing what they’re doing and they’ve been very successful at it.”Berkshire Hathaway Is Taking Part In the Energy TransitionBerkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Greg Abel addressed the conglomerate’s efforts to boost its participation in renewable energy generation at the conglomerate’s 2023 annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha on Saturday.“There’s no question there’s an energy transition going on,” said Abel, who oversees Berkshire’s non-insurance businesses, including Berkshire Hathaway Energy. He said the utility company is working to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% in 2030 relative to 2005 levels.Berkshire Hathaway Energy is investing in windmills and other clean energy generation, plus extending transmission lines to more renewable energy sources, which by their nature are more distributed than traditional power plants.“It’s a very, very good business opportunity for us,” Abel added.Buffett said that the United States’ approach to renewable energy is overly fragmented, with different rules and regulations state by state and no society-wide organized effort. He drew a comparison to the World War II-era coordination between the federal government and American businesses to reorient the nation’s industrial economy to support the war effort.“The capital is there, the people are there, the objective is obvious, we just don’t seem to be able to do it in peacetime,” Buffett said.Buffett and Munger Disagree on the Future of Value InvestingLegendary value investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger see divergent paths for value investors in the coming years. The Berkshire Hathaway (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B) managers were responding to shareholders’ questions at the company’s annual meeting in Omaha on Saturday.“I think value investors are going to have a harder time now that there are so many of them competing for a diminished set of opportunities,” Munger said. “My advice to value investors is to get used to making less.”“Charlie has been telling me the same thing the whole time we’ve known each other,” Buffett said. The two first met over dinner in 1959.Buffett sees more opportunities than his long-time partner. “What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things,” he said. “...And there’s been a great increase in people doing dumb things.”The 92-year-old value investor noted that Berkshire’s current scale can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, with many potential opportunities too small to move the needle for the $719 billion conglomerate.A long-term investing horizon is still key to realizing value in investing, Buffett said. “I’d love to be born today, start out with not too much money, and turn it into a lot of money,” he said. “I’m sure Charlie would too.”“I’d like my big pile [of money] to stay just the way it is,” Munger quipped, to laughs from the crowd. He has a net worth of approximately $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.Buffett, 92, and Munger, 99 Aren’t Particularly Bullish on AI, RoboticsA shareholder asked Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger to share their thoughts on artificial intelligence and robotics and which businesses stood to be disrupted most. “I thank you for asking Charlie that question,” Buffett, 92, demurred.Munger, 99, noted that he was impressed by the level of automation at BYD (ticker: BYDDY) factories in Asia. But, “I think regular old intelligence works just fine,” Munger added.“There won’t be any AI that will replace Ajit [Jain, Berkshire vice chairman],” Buffett quipped. He went on to warn about the potential risks of AI technologies, drawing a parallel to the development of the atomic bomb.Buffett’s Vice Chairmen Discuss Berkshire’s BusinessesBerkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett kicked a question about the company’s subsidiaries’ performance to his deputies.Geico is coming off a strong first quarter, with an underwriting profit of $703 million, versus a loss of $178 million in the year-ago quarter.Ajit Jain, who oversees Berkshire’s insurance operations, said that Geico is working to close the gap with competitors on its employment of telematics, or usage-based insurance, which adjusts customers’ rates based on how they drive.“Geico’s technology needs a lot more work than I thought it would,” Jain said, noting that the company uses more than 600 distinct tech platforms.Greg Abel, who oversees non-insurance operations and is in line to succeed Buffett as CEO, spoke about BNSF. He said there was “more work to be done” on making the railroad more efficient and productive and that he was aware of most competitors moving to precision-scheduled railroading.2022 was a “reset” year for the business, Abel said, that will set it up for better long-term growth.Buffett Agrees With Regulators’ Decision to Protect Failing Bank DepositsThe 2023 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting’s first question had to do with the past few months’ banking-industry turmoil.CEO Warren Buffett said that regulators made the right decision to intervene to protect depositors at banks including Silicon Valley Bank, which failed in March.Had they not, “it would have been catastrophic,” Buffett said.Buffett Talks First-Quarter Results, Berkshire’s Balance Sheet, and BuybacksBerkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ran through the company’s first-quarter results, which were released on Saturday morning. The conglomerate’s operating profit after taxes was up almost 13% year over year, to $8.1 billion.Buffett attributed the gain to a higher return on the company’s stock portfolio, better interest income on its cash holdings, and a higher insurance underwriting profit.He continued with an overview of Berkshire’s balance sheet, noting that the company’s $504.5 billion in shareholders’ equity is more than any other American company. Berkshire’s insurance float—the difference between an insurance company’s cash collected from premiums and the claims it must pay out—stood at $165.1 billion at the end of the first quarter, while cash and Treasury bills were $127.7 billion. That’s a lot of ammo for potential acquisitions or interest income.Berkshire bought back about 9,600 class A shares in the first quarter, worth about $4.4 billion. That was faster than the first-quarter pace of buybacks, but slower than Berkshire’s repurchases in 2020 and 2021.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":503,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0},{"id":9947494070,"gmtCreate":1683421076090,"gmtModify":1683425539528,"author":{"id":"4124843208961502","authorId":"4124843208961502","name":"Arvel","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"followedFlag":false,"idStr":"4124843208961502","authorIdStr":"4124843208961502"},"themes":[],"htmlText":"good write up&nbsp;","listText":"good write up&nbsp;","text":"good write up","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":8,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9947494070","repostId":"1128633960","repostType":2,"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":264,"authorTweetTopStatus":1,"verified":2,"comments":[],"imageCount":0,"langContent":"EN","totalScore":0}]}