Kevin Carpenter

All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news! Including: New Buffett quotes in the WSJ and NYT, PacifiCorp unloads some Oregon assets, Apple CEO Tim Cook on retirement rumors, Kraft Heinz gets healthier, and more. kingswell.io/p/the-berkshir…

Morningstar analyst Greggory Warren on new Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel's first letter to shareholders. "He did a good job, from the outset, of explaining Berkshire. What has made it successful — the core priorities, the core values, the culture."

Charlie Munger: "I'm an accidental guru. I didn't set out to have an audience of people coming in and asking me questions about every damn subject in the world. It just kind of happened by accident and I went along with it because I think it did more good than harm."

Warren Buffett: "I have to understand the business. [There are] a lot of businesses I can't understand." "When I say I can understand [a business], it means I have a pretty good idea what it's going to look like ten or fifteen years from now. That's understanding a business."

Peter Lynch: If you can't explain to an 11-year-old in a minute or less why you own a particular stock, you shouldn't own it and should just buy a fund instead.

Charlie Munger: "Lots of luck if you're an impulsive person who has to be gratified immediately. You're probably not going to have a very good life — and we can't fix you." "The demand for immediate gratification is the way to ruin — and it may also give you syphilis." 💀🤣 "It's obvious that deferred gratifiers do better over the long pull than these impulsive children who have to spend money on Rolex watches and other folly."

Warren Buffett: "We essentially regard [shareholders] as our partners and we try to tell you exactly what we would want to know if you were running the place." "We won't tell you a [intrinsic value] number because we don't know the number. We have a range in our mind ... Charlie and I would not come up with exactly the same range, but they would be pretty close."

Apple CEO Tim Cook on retirement rumors. "I can't imagine life without Apple."

Charlie Munger: "It's a long process. Rationality is something you get slowly and has a variable result — but it's better than not having it." "You can just see how awful it is when people get into these furies of resentment and anger and [being] sure they are right about everything."

Warren Buffett: "If there is one key to what I do, it's that I look at every share of stock as being a part of a business." "I don't think about the price action of the stock, what people are saying they're gonna earn next quarter, or anything of the sort." "I try to look at what the whole business is selling for — and then [ask myself] do I want to buy this tiny little piece of that business at that price?"

In just a few short pages, Berkshire Hathaway’s annual proxy statement both celebrates the conglomerate’s unique culture and lays out the roadmap for preserving it long into the future. kingswell.io/p/a-closer-loo…

Morningstar analyst Greggory Warren on Todd Combs leaving Berkshire Hathaway. "He did a fantastic job at GEICO. I don't think he got enough credit from investors for what a monumental task he had to deal with [there]."

Charlie Munger: "I'm not sure, if I were starting out in your world, how well I would do. It would be a lot harder than it was to get ahead." "Easy money will always attract wretched excess. It's like a bunch of animals feeding on a carcass."

Warren Buffett: "Any time we find anything that makes sense to us, we will do it. The harder part is to make sure that we don't do something when we don't find something that makes sense. That's the bigger worry."

Peter Lynch: "People are very careful — they spend hours to get $50 off an airplane flight. They look at everything. And [then] they'll put $10,000 in some crazy stock they heard about on the bus."

Charlie Munger: "99% [of people] will be in the bottom 99%. That's just the way it's going to work." "In my generation, the nerds who were patient and rational eventually did well — who lived within their income and worked at being sensible and when they saw an opportunity grabbed it pretty fiercely. I think that will work for the new nerds of the world."

Warren Buffett: "We've had a lot of speculative activity in all kinds of things over the years in markets — and it frequently doesn't come to a good end." "But it will [still] be with us 100 years from now just as it was with us 100 years ago." "If you own [stocks] on borrowed money and they go down one day, you don't get to play out your hand."

Apple CEO Tim Cook: "I saw in Steve [Jobs] something I had never seen in a CEO before. He had a passion for product that was so unique and refreshing." "I was taken in the first meeting with him and I wanted to throw caution to the wind and join [Apple] despite the condition of the company."

Charlie Munger: "A natural part of the modern economics system is that old moats stop working." "Moats have been breached time after time after time ... Imagine all these great department stores being on the edge of extinction. Imagine all those monopoly newspapers going down. Look at the strength of the American auto industry now compared to what it was in 1950."

Warren Buffett: "If I were to give advice to somebody about how to have a marriage that would last and they could only seek one quality in their spouse ... would you look for humor, intelligence, or looks? No, what you really want in your partner is low expectations."