Subject: Re: Why you don't want Berk to pay a dividend!
Nice. Thanks for sharing.

"After screwing around a bit, I determined that "retained earnings" essentially all shows up in the "Total Stockholders' Equity" on the financial spreadsheets." Nice to see the numbers checked instead of just assuming that they do.

May I make one suggestion? It's nice to highlight the changes over 10 year increments, but you can also just plot market cap versus shareholder equity and draw a line through it. That way you get to show all 20 years of data. Mathematically the appropriate line is a power law (log-log plot). Market cap and book value are available each quarter all the way back to October 1964 (end of fiscal year 1964). You can use all or any part of the data. The log-log plot from Oct '64 through Sept '25 is a straight line with r^2 = 0.980, even though there are two notable knees in the plots of book value and market cap versus time, occurring together at about 1978 and 1999.

With book value growing at 10%/year I certainly don't want a dividend.