No. of Recommendations: 9
Any thoughts on IV? It seems like the Ops earnings being under trend could directly offset any haircut needed to the Apple position.
I track the value of Apple based on a multiple of its earnings rather than its stock price, as if it were a subsidiary, so the big run-up in book from that won't show up in my IV estimate.
So the growth in my IV estimate will be way lower than the growth in book value. (Apple's P/E averaged 12.5 in the five years to 2016 while earnings were rising at about 17%/year--I'd rather not be unpleasantly surprised if that should become the norm again!)
Same for a few smaller positions, too--I'll probably be shaving around $36 billion total off the market value as a cyclical adjustment when I assign a value to the equities portfolio. Q3 last year I took off only $11bn.
That's about all I know at the moment--most of my IV estimate inputs will require seeing the year end statements. I hope the utilities are doing better.
As for aggregate operating earnings, on an after-inflation basis they have been way below my expectations for about six quarters now, net income lagging at a rate of over $3000/share/year, so I'm hoping (yet again) for a pleasant surprise.
Actually I wrote the wrong estimate for Q4 for the operating earnings. That was my Q3 estimate.
My estimates for Q4 for the "smooth things" is around the range $4635 per share. Q4 is usually quite a bit weaker than Q3.
But this doesn't include a lot of things. Interest income. And whatever unusually good or bad things are happening in underwriting.
And of course a lot of the assets other than mark-to-market securities are now worth more in nominal terms due to inflation (measuring anything with smaller dollars will do that), even though their carrying values won't have budged. In that one sense, real book value growth is an underestimate of real IV growth for a lot of things.
But taken all together, I expect that it will have been a below-average year for real value growth aside from the bump in the market value of the equities.
At the moment I expect 2024 to be the same again for real IV growth: poorer than average. But up.
Jim
