Sections
1. Berkshire Stock Holdings
2. 16-Year Financial Tables
3. The Furniture Business
4. Annual Meeting Notes
5. Valuing Berkshire
6. Insurance Float
Client Letter Comments on Berkshire Hathaway
Client Letter June 2001
Sit on Your Ass Investing?" Is this the time for buy and hold forever? Or should we be studying what worked in the sixties and seventies? In a roller-coaster market maybe you want to think about getting off and getting on.
Magazine Articles
- "The Berkshire Bunch", This is an article from October 1998 Forbes Magazine. It gives background information and net worth figures on some long-term Berkshire investors. Be sure to read the sidebars.Dr. Angle, now 71, recalls, "He brainwashed us to truly believe in our heart of hearts in the miracle of compound interest."Persuaded, she and her husband, William, also a doctor, invited 11 other doctors to a dinner to meet young Warren.Buffett remembers Bill Angle getting up at the end of the dinner and announcing, "I'm putting $10,000 in. The rest of you should, too." They did. Later, Carol Angle increased her ante to $30,000. That was half of the Angles' life savings.Dr. Angle still practices medicine, as director of clinical toxicology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. But she doesn't work for the money. Her family's holdings in Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway have multiplied into a fortune of $300 million.
- "The Warren Buffett You Don't Know" Business Week story from July 1999 that contains some very interesting comments about Warren Buffett as a corporate manager.Buffett knows the sort of self-motivated, hands-on exec he covets wouldn't tolerate being pushed around by Omaha. And Buffett's respectful treatment of his managers has instilled in them an ambition to 'make Warren proud,' as one puts it. 'Somehow, Warren has been able to keep a diverse cast of characters working harder for him than they did for themselves,' Goldberg says. 'I see it every day—and I still don't know how he does it. But I do know that all of us feel this incredible responsibility to him.'"
Charlie Munger
- November 10, 2000 Speech to the Philanthropy Round Table" The "wealth effect" from rising U.S. stock prices is particularly interesting right now for two reasons. First, there has never been an advance so extreme in the price of widespread stock holdings and, with stock prices going up so much faster than GNP, the related "wealth effect" must now be bigger than was common before. And second, what has happened in Japan over roughly the last ten years has shaken up academic economics, as it obviously should, creating strong worries about recession from "wealth effects" in reverse.
- Speech to Harvard Law 1995 The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" "Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment—and lord knows I've created a good bit of it—I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with."
Best Berkshire Sites
Berkshire Hathaway Home Page
BRK News Email news service by Futile France
Futile Finance
SteadyGains.com
Sandman's Place By The Sandman
Sandman's Outstanding Investor Digest List. Excellent list of references to Warren, Charlie, and Berkshire but requires membership in Motley Fool and a subscription to Outstanding Investors Digest.