Subject: Re: BRK, the VL is out, if you can read it.
Philosophically, it seems that shares of stock should be a representative value of their proportion of the business. That dictates that a quantitative approach should be optimal to discover a share's present value.

Purchasing stock requires "excess" assets over what is required to live at one's accustomed standard of living. Despite all the hair-burning political rhetoric, it seems that, whether due to programs like IRA's, increased retained earnings, along with a constant drumbeat of owning stock to be for "the common man like you" (and as a way for the poor to effortlessly become wealthy - in the same vein as a lottery) has made purchasing of stock to be socially more likely than in the past.

For better or worse, the increase of funds flowing into the market, frequently into companies which have popular names, rather than with due diligence, as well as into "general market" ETF/funds, has inflated the price of shares across the board. When the commodity being purchase are the shares of the company, rather than their represented value of the company, you set up a competitive bidding scenario which does not reflect the underlying value of the shares - in essence, inflation of the share prices. When this happens across a particular market, there are few places to hide in that environment - and time to explore other venues.

That's not to say that American companies are without value, but rather to say that their shares, as the commodity offered for sale may not be, in general, worth the money they cost.

The stock you own doesn't have to be sexy. Back, in 2009, when the southern EU countries were under financial stress and I noticed that the Spanish bank Santander was being mauled. Looking at their annual report, it seemed that only 15% of their business was in Spain and their dividend yield was somewhere off the charts (relatively speaking, so I decided to pick up a few chip's worth of their ADR and set it on auto-DRIP. I guess others recognized the same thing and, when the stock had nearly tripled in price, about six or eight months later, I gave in to the market's request for my shares and sold out. Good timing as the price then crashed, but I kept my eye on the stock as it seemed to be chugging along despite the gyrations of its share prices. I bought back my position in 2020 as, despite its operations still boringly chugging along, it was priced for extinction. Since then, despite the dilution of the DRIP, the position is up well over 200%. OK, nothing to brag about compared to those who bought the eight or ten tech stocks which knocked it out of the park over the same time frame, but not bad for a boring European bank. Frankly, its P/E ratio is back to 9, so it is time for me to do another due diligence dive to make sure the shares have retained an expectation of maintaining their value into the future.

For a company to be successful it has to execute its business well. For the shares of a company to continue an upwards price trajectory, it has to execute what the market perceives to be its business well. They may not be the same goals, and the market price is frequently biased by factors outside of the company's controllable system - inflation, recession, meme-mania, whatever. Currently, there is a huge amount of cash in the system struggling against the bonds of uncertainty and the market may be becoming increasingly fragile. That's the US market, but it seems that global equity markets are still very linked as they all swim in the same money bit.

Jeff