Friday File: Berkshire and some Mini-Berkshire Hopefuls (past and future?)

Here’s a short list of things I’m not going to talk about this week, but do have rattling around in my brain:

Whether the Fed should cut short-term interest rates, and whether or not that will have any meaningful impact on longer-term rates (like mortgages), or might spur inflation to kick back up more aggressively. Whether the President should be setting tax rates for individual companies. Whether the Federal Government has any business taking even more control over my old home city of Washington, D.C.   Haven’t lived there in 15 years now, and it’s a far safer and wealthier city than when I moved there in the early 1990s… but it still rankles how little say DC residents have always had, as playthings in so many ideological experiments pushed by Members of Congress of both parties who represent and live in other places. How much crazier and more unpredictable things might become in this country in the years ahead, when the next President, whoever that might be, follows in President Trump’s footsteps and asserts the right to rule by whim and executive fiat.  And, perhaps most importantly… Whether or not my Detroit Lions will finally win a Super Bowl — I’m thinking maybe by mid-September?

I don’t have control over or unique insight into any of that stuff, but I guess I needed to get it off my chest… so for now we’ll just stick with things we can understand and hope to include in our investment analysis and planning.

When in doubt, start with Warren Buffett

We’ve got another quarter in the books for Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B), though I can’t say this particular quarter really presented us with any new or interesting information. The biggest mysteries out there were whether or not Berkshire might try to buy CSX to join in the “cross-continental railroad” competition after the proposed Union Pacific/Norfolk Southern merger…. and what Berkshire might have been doing with its investment portfolio, since there was a “secret” holding bought in the quarter and not disclosed, and also some net selling, probably from their Bank of America position.

That all got cleared up with the release of the 13-F quarterly portfolio disclosure late yesterday, so we now know that Berkshire sold a little more Apple (AAPL) and Bank of America (BAC), along with less consequential sales of Charter (CHTR) and T-Mobile (TMUS), bought a little more Chevron …