11 Signs That Berkshire Is Built to Last (Fool)
Warren Buffett is known for being a long-term investor. And I mean long-term investor. In one of Buffett’s best-known quips, he said: “When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.” When we look at Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) , though, is it an “outstanding business” that investors can consider holding forever? I think so, and following are 11 reasons I believe Berkshire is built to succeed for years — and decades — to come. 11. Succession plans There are companies that talk about succession plans and there are companies that make succession plans. Berkshire is a company that has made succession plans. We’ve seen the company add investors Todd Combs and Ted Weschler into the mix, and Buffett has assured investors that there is an unnamed but ready-to-step-in operational replacement for the Oracle.
SORRY, YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TRADE LIKE BUFFETT (InvestorPlace)
Here’s a dirty secret of financial media: Putting Warren Buffett in a headline is pretty much guaranteed to give your article decent appeal. So it’s no surprise that everyone under the sun tries to derive meaning from even the slightest change Buffett makes — or more precisely, that his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) makes. A few years ago, Buffett liked railroads and Buffett liked banks. Last year, he started to like newspapers. And as I just wrote last week, Buffett doesn’t like gold and hasn’t for some time. But while interesting and good for clicks, this kind of oversimplification isn’t very helpful to investors. Because no matter what you’d like to believe, there is absolutely zero chance you’ll be able to trade like Buffett and Berkshire. The tools at your disposal simply are not the same.
Warren Buffett’s 10 Largest Stock Holdings (Fool)
The probability that you or I will be the next Warren Buffett is about 1 in 7 billion — the latter is roughly the population of the planet earth. And even that likely overstates our chances, given that Buffett is arguably not only the greatest investor alive today, but perhaps the greatest of all time. The fact that few investors will ever replicate his success doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t learn from him. And one of the best ways to do this is to simply examine his portfolio. With this in mind, the following infographic offers a cursory look at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) equity portfolio and how well its own stock has performed over the last couple decades.
IBM: A Disaster In The Making (Nasdaq)
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) is going to cost Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) a lot more than the $1.3 billion of paper profit that has vanished since last Friday. With a cost basis near $170 per share, it’s unlikely Warren Buffett can sell 68 million shares of International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) without driving the price below $170, but that’s what he should do: Sell IBM. The problem for IBM: Its operating model is built around selling on-premise computing – including so-called “private clouds” – but the $3.6 trillion IT industry is moving at an accelerating pace in an entirely different direction, to the public cloud, which is a low-margin utility model. As Adrian Cockcroft, CTO of Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) said, “there is zero revenue for traditional IT ” in the public cloud. Users pay low variable expense (prices have been dropping from cheap to super-cheap) with no capex. Question: How can International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) compete with cheap “rented” computing power? Answer: It can’t.
Israeli Billionaire Opens Industrial Park in Nazareth (BusinessWeek)
Israeli billionaire Stef Wertheimer, founder of the Warren Buffett-owned Iscar Metalworking Cos., opened an industrial park in Nazareth today that intends to provide manufacturing jobs for local Arab residents. The park’s aim “is to use the skills of the people of Nazareth and surrounding area,” to create export-oriented products, Wertheimer said. Unemployment and poverty rates for Israeli Arabs, who comprise about 20 percent of the country’s population, are higher than for the Jewish majority. The percentage of Arabs who participate in the Israeli labor market is about 41 percent compared with 60 percent of Jewish citizens, according to a 2011 report by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem research center. Slightly more than half of Israeli Arabs live below the official poverty line, according to the National Insurance Institute.
