Poll: Are you buying?

Stocks A to Z
1

Berkshire or whatever.

  • No, have no cash
  • No, it’s too early
  • Yes, nibbling
  • Yes, with a large part of my cash
  • Yes, all in

0 voters

2

Price down to $282.14 per B as I type.
(as is usual on sharp selloff days, the A shares aren’t hit quite as hard)

Remember that amazingly cheap deal in spring 2000 when Mr Buffett said he first considered buybacks because it was so darned cheap?
Measured by ratio of price to peak-to-date published book-per-share, it was cheaper than this for only 17 days that May.
That was it for the entire 20 year stretch 1998-2008.

How times change. Typical valuations in recent years have been very much lower.
It has been this cheap or cheaper on that metric around 19.5% of the time since the credit crunch.

Jim

11 Likes
3

That was it for the entire 20 year stretch 1998-2008.

Sorry, rather obvious typo: 10 year stretch.
You probably know what I meant.

Jim

4 Likes
4

Remember that amazingly cheap deal in spring 2000 when Mr Buffett said he first considered buybacks because it was so darned cheap?

Unforgettable, as on 5.May 2000 I bought my very first Berkshire shares.

Today I found out what not to do when you want to start “nibbling”: By putting in an order to buy BRK calls which was too cheap to be immediately executed. To then do the same with another one, also not executed. And lastly with a third order, also too cheap to be executed. Leaving all those in, in the hope one of them might be executed — and finding at the end of the day that all three were.

So much for “nibbling” :slight_smile:

8 Likes
5

(as is usual on sharp selloff days, the A shares aren’t hit quite as hard)

B: -3.5%
A: -3.7%

6

I certainly don’t know if BRK gets cheaper than today but my nephew (he’s 14) asked me two weeks ago what to do with his first saved money and today we bought a couple of B shares. He just finished Peter Lynch’s ‘Learn to earn’ and seems to have indeed learned something worthwhile :wink:

3 Likes
7

I was happy to add near end of day today.

8

BTW, I bought back the Jan. 23 $370 covered calls that I sold in december. Timing could obviously have been better but it worked out quite nicely nonetheless. I’m still short the $430 calls. I expect them to expire worthless.

https://discussion.fool.com/as-my-current-covered-calls-at-305-t…

9

(as is usual on sharp selloff days, the A shares aren’t hit quite as hard)
B: -3.5%
A: -3.7%

My usual warning: you can’t meaningfully compare the ratio of the last trade prices at any given moment.
The A shares don’t trade frequently enough for that to be meaningful, so you’re often comparing a current B price to a stale A price.
(and closing prices sometimes have their own oddities)

If you look at the midpoint of bid and ask of each class while the market is open, it’s clear the B shares sold of a fair bit more than the A shares for most of the day.
Or look within a second after an A share trade, harder to do.

Jim

2 Likes