Chart: 10-year trailing Graham (“Real”) P/E Ratio. Price of the S&P 500 divided by the 10-year average of earnings, inflation adjusted.
Current value (10/31/08): 15.9x

Chart: Profit Margin of U.S. Economy. Annualized corporate profits as a percentage of GDP. (A good reason why the Graham P/E Ratio is a better valuation measure than the TTM version.)
Current value (6/30/08): 9.40%

Chart: Bond Yield over Equity Yield. 10-year treasury yield minus inverse of Graham P/E Ratio (10-year average equity earnings yield).
Current value (10/31/08): -2.4% (equities yield 2.4% more than bonds)

Keep calm & carry on. Sound advice during the current bear market.

Forget about Mr. Market’s terrible mood swing. He is there to serve you, not to guide you. Why would he be offering such low prices for the businesses he owns? Who knows. Take advantage of his irrationality. If hearing it from me isn’t enough, listen to John Bogle. (Image credit: The Principles of Uncertainty)

The first version of the bailout bill (3 pages). The third version of the bailout bill (110 pages). And finally, the current version of the bailout bill (451 pages). It seems it is in the nature of politicians to needlessly increase complexity.

Warren Buffett’s interview with Charlie Rose. As usual, Buffett gives a great explanation of the current crisis. On the bailout bill: “It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.”

The best “story” of the events in the past few weeks is this article from the New York Times. My guess is that the full story won’t be revealed for at least another few years.

A great letter by Howard Marks on the bailout plan, the circumstances surrounding it, and what got us to this point in the first place.

I agree with Roger Ehrenberg in his post “Investment Banking 2.0“: the best thing for the financial industry is smaller, more nimble banks that aren’t part of large conglomerates. This forces more redundancy into the system and mutes the domino effect that a single bank’s collapse can have on the industry.

Berkshire Hathaway Letters (1983-1987)

Berkshire Hathaway Letters (2003-2007)

A word cloud is a visual representation of a group of words, with the size of each word weighted to how many times it appears. The above two examples use the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters for the 5-year periods ending in 1987 and 2007. You can see some often-used words between the 20-year period: business, earnings, value, company, insurance. Word clouds are a good representation of what subjects the author is focusing on.
Below are a few more examples: (all created at Wordle)

Continue reading… »

Derek from Stableboy Selections has posted two of the "missing" Berkshire Hathaway letters (1969 – 1977). The first is written by Ken Chace, the CEO that Buffett put in charge after he ousted Seabury Stanton. These go along with the previously released 1973 and 1976 letters, which I link to below.

Berkshire Hathaway 1969 & 1971 Shareholder Letters

1973 Shareholder Letter

1976 Shareholder Letter

In the 1976 letter, equity investments are listed, and GEICO accounts for 31% of total holdings. I don’t believe these include any equities purchased through Blue Chip Stamps. That’s a fairly large position for most modern-day funds. However, it doesn’t compare to the concentration of Buffett’s portfolio before he managed other people’s money: (in the 1950′s, courtesy of Robert Miles)

UPDATE: I reformatted both letters into PDF’s to make them a little more readable. For the PDF formats, follow these links: 1969; 1971

Yesterday the 13F’s were released for funds managing over $100 million. Below is a list of 3 picks that I found interesting:

1. Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc. (DPS)
Nelson Peltz (Trian), David Einhorn (Greenlight), Bill Ackman (Pershing)

In May, Dr Pepper was spun off of Cadbury Schweppes and traded in the $20-26 range until the end of the quarter. Shortly after the spin-off, I wrote this post citing Dr Pepper as a potential bargain. It looks like some large activist investors took my advice, loading up on DPS during the second quarter. (Peltz received shares from his Cadbury stake.) All together, the three managers own just over 13% of the entire company. In fact, I’m not sure why Pershing Square hasn’t been required to file a 13D/13G with over 5% of the company.

All three of these investors have been known to be activists. So, if they continue to acquire shares, one of them may attempt to influence management. One possibility for value creation is to sell or spin-off Dr Pepper’s bottling operations. This is a much lower margin, capital intensive business than selling syrup concentrate (their primary profit source). In 1986, Coca-Cola spun off its bottling operations as Coca-Cola Enterprises. Less than two years later, Warren Buffett acquired his stake.

2. American Express Company (AXP)
Ken Shubin Stein (Spencer), Glenn Greenberg (Chieftain)

Ken Shubin Stein made the case for American Express both at the Value Investing Congress and at Value Investors Club. The basic thesis is that American Express has a huge moat, and it’s price has be knocked down due to concerns about the economy and temporary issues with bad debt. It looks like these problems are either based on short-term sentiment, or are easily fixable by AMEX management. This is a typical Buffett-type investment, and has been named by some as a potential takeover target for Buffett himself (he already owns 13%).

3. Pfizer Inc. (PFE)
Bruce Berkowitz (Fairholme)

The Fairholme Fund’s acquisition of Pfizer shares is not surprising, and fits in with their recent theme of buying healthcare stocks. I could speculate the specific reasons for this purchase, but it’s probably best to hear it straight from Bruce Berkowitz:

$17 billion of free cash, which turns out to be over $2 per share of free cash for a triple-A quality company. This is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world trading under $20 per share.

[...] they are all worried about Lipitor and the new president. Lipitor doesn’t come off patent for another three years, and the company is dramatically changing. There is a new CEO with a wonderful strategy.

You will see Pfizer, in my opinion, do a lot more joint ventures. I think they will become almost like Exxon Mobil, which is really a merchant bank that has the distribution, size and cash to partner up with a lot of people around the world. Pfizer will do that. People just don’t realize the number of joint ventures they have and the power of their distribution channel.

Disclosure: As of its writing, we have no interest in any company mentioned in this post.