Subject: Re: Selling BRK pre/post meeting?
Jim, do you like the "wheel" system of regularly selling calls and puts around a core holding of BRkB?

I looked it up.
I'm not a fan of "systems", as a rule.

For Berkshire, it would entail having a pile of cash most of the time, which means you're not really invested in Berkshire that fully, you're mainly going for option premiums, which much of the time would be a lower return.

I guess the biggest problem is knowledge. If you know how to value one or several firms well enough to know what would constitute a good entry price, then there are other better ways to make a buck. Compounding that is that writing a put at a price that would get you a good entry point is going to produce a very low rate of return, potentially for a very long time.

I did run a related "system" of my own for a long time. (and restarted recently, at a smaller scale). Cash-backed put writing, with modest leverage. Since vanishingly few positions are ever assigned if you're keeping an eye on the positions to make sure they all have passable prospective rates of return, you don't really need $1m in cash to back up $1m in nominal value short puts. Even a small amount of leverage turns a ho-hum return into quite a nice one. I did it only with firms for which I had a reasonably informed opinion of value. It's a good match for "deep value" investing, as when a position takes a long time to turn up in price (or is a permanent value trap) it's actually good for you. I found the return from the portfolio to be roughly half way between [what the underlying stocks were returning] and [10%/year]. The two problems are (a) it's a whole lot of work, and (b) there are times when prices are too high and/or option premiums too low that it just isn't worth while trying. You know this in advance since you can see the prices before you enter positions, but it does mean you have to have something else to do that year.

Jim