No. of Recommendations: 15
Actually I intended to sell a little Berkshire today - but this I didn't take into account, raising the question whether to rather wait until next week.
May I ask what the ones here having closely followed Berkshire's actions and portfolio during the last quarter expect?
For whatever it's worth, I lightened up a bit yesterday. I sold about 4% of my holdings.
That doesn't mean it was a good idea. And recall that I live from my portfolio, I am not an accumulator.
The stock is in that twilight zone of being higher than the average valuation multiple, but lower than what it's probably worth.
I don't expect double digits in the next year. One of my models predicts one year returns around inflation + 4.6% from today's $352.60 per B, most of my other models expect a bit less.
I'll have fresher expectations after I read the statements tomorrow.
The main thing I'm going to be looking for in the quarterly statements is the after-tax operating earnings on the "steady things".
Rails, Utilities, Manufacturing/Service/Retail.
The last three quarters these have come out quite a lot below my model expectations based on trend and seasonality, so these units definitely have not been keeping up with inflation lately.
Perhaps part of that is a lag effect, part of it some supply-chain price problems, and part of it is just some cyclical weakness in the economy, but it's a trend that I hope will end.
If we expect extremely powerful pricing power from our collection of allegedly high-moat operating businesses, it isn't showing up so far in this bout of inflation.
Prior to these last three quarters (and 2020-Q1 of course) these things taken together were very easy to predict quite well.
Jim
