It has taken a year of falling inflation rates (OK, 10 months), but CPI inflation has now dropped from the 9.52% we saw in July of 2022, which was the highest inflation in decades, to 4.05% in May of 2023. That’s still too high for the Fed to endorse, but it’s a level we can […]
Lots of readers have been chiming in with questions about the latest Luke Lango pitch for his “SUPRMAN” stocks for the tech melt-up, and I don’t have any other big portfolio moves or updates to share at the moment, so today I’m focusing my Friday File on trying to answer some of those questions… The […]
This week, we’ll start out with the most boring news. U-Haul (UHAL) reported its results this week, and we saw the slowdown that probably most people anticipated… but it was a little worse than I expected. The challenge with all companies that go through a boom and bust cycle, like U-Haul did with the surge […]
NVIDIA (NVDA) is now the most extreme story I’ve seen among large company stocks in at least 20 years, with the possible exception of Tesla (TSLA). I’m going to dig into this for a long time today, so if you can’t tolerate any more NVDA blather you might want to scroll down a bit… Yes, […]
These are unpredictable times for the economy, as we deal with persistent inflation and higher interest rates and what seems to be unfolding as an office real estate crisis and head into the debt ceiling deadline and prepare for what will undoubtedly be a knock-down, drag-out budget fight, and perhaps a government shutdown, in the […]
It’s a perfect time to update my thinking and valuation rationale for Markel, in part because they just announced that they’re changing their name to more clearly call attention to their increasingly diversified conglomerate of businesses: Markel Corporation has now become Markel Group (still MKL as the ticker, and Markel Corp. is still the name […]
I made some relatively small portfolio moves that I think will boost the quality of my holdings over the long term, on the margins, but we’ve also got a bunch of quarterly reports to consider… so let’s start out with one of our more speculative high-growth stocks… Toast (TOST) is one of our “unprofitable but […]
I posted these notes separately from the rest of this week’s Friday File, since they were getting a bit long — you can see my other comments and transactions for the week here. Boston Omaha (BOC) is getting a lot more interesting as it lingers around $20, and there was indeed a good crowd of […]
My goal is to be a rational long-term investor, and to find companies that I can hold for long periods of time, with the likelihood that they will grow and become more valuable, compounding in value and growing my family’s wealth. That’s not the only investing I do, of course, I am prone to occasional […]
Maybe we’ll get a real banking crisis, after all? I bet Warren Buffett will spend a lot of time answering questions about banks at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting tomorrow… and who knows, maybe he’ll also reveal that Berkshire has done something big to help save some regional banks, though that would be a surprise […]
A set of mostly solid earnings reports from “big tech” helped the market feel a little more comfortable this week, though the continuing struggles of First Republic (FRC) and challenges at similar banks are also giving investors plenty of jittery feelings about a banking crisis. Personally, my guess continues to be that we won’t have […]
Earnings season has been rolling for a couple weeks now, but we don’t own the stocks that mostly report early (like the big banks), so we’ve had to patiently wait for new information to come in… and that starts, just barely, this week, with the reports from Intuitive Surgical and Crown Castle… things will pick […]
Warren Buffett made another CNBC splash with an interview with Becky Quick this week, mostly talking about buying more shares of the big Japanese trading houses/industrial conglomerates (Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Itochu, Marubeni and Sumitomo), which are still pretty cheap (PE in the 6-8 range) and have done very well since he first put on those positions. […]
Now that we’re about a third of the way through 2023, I checked back on the 2022 spreadsheets… and it’s looking like all is kind of right with the world: Teaser stocks are back to being, on average, lousy investments, after slightly beating the averages for a while during the 2021 excitement. There are some […]
Deposits continue to fly out of banks in search of better yields, the political world is fascinated by scandal and intrigue and ignoring most everything that matters, commercial real estate is really starting to freak investors out as the yield curve remains stubbornly inverted, signaling a likely recession by next year, and yet the stock […]
OK, so no more banks have failed just yet, even First Republic (FRC) is holding on so far, and the Fed increased interest rates by a quarter point, which freaked people out a little bit because they wanted the Fed to “pause” while we see how the Treasury copes with the stress of the first […]
This is the week for the small fry. Those of us who don’t have savings accounts with $250,000 in them, and don’t have to worry about big corporate payroll cash, get to celebrate that we avoided a scare as some regional banks started to collapse like dominos, with investors and CFOs looking around in some […]
I’m headed in for carpal tunnel surgery today, so I might not be able to type my usual long missives for a little while… and that means you get your Friday File a day early. Hopefully the recovery will be quick and easy, as my doctor expects, and my fingers will be dancing on the […]
This week I’ve got one sell in the Real Money Portfolio, and one new entry-level buy, but we’ll save that good stuff for a bit later — I’ll start with some thoughts on the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter, including a slight adjustment to my “buy” prices, and a couple earnings-related updates from other companies, then […]
The good thing about earnings season? It gives me some meat to chew on, which means I spend a lot less of my time focusing on the largely pointless exercise of wondering where interest rates will go, or trying to predict the course of the global economy. We got a few earnings reports from some […]
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