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)

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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

Tom Brown recently posted a rebuttal to Jason Zweig’s Wall Street Journal column. Geoff Gannon also wrote a great follow-up article with more on Benjamin Graham. I suggest reading all three articles.

In this post, I wanted to comment on a few aspects of Tom Brown’s argument, some of which I have been thinking about lately. The following is a quote from Tom’s post:

True value investors, by contrast, tend not to worry what might happen in the interim. Instead, they come up with their best estimate of a financial company’s intrinsic value by estimating the magnitude of likely losses along with its “normalized” earnings level two or three years out. They then compare that estimate of intrinsic value with the stock’s price today. Zweig says such estimates are impossible. I disagree.

I have always enjoyed Tom’s posts, but I can see a few problems with the above statement. (As a disclaimer, I know relatively little about financial companies, as they are out of my circle of competence. I hold no interest in any financial beside Berkshire Hathaway.)

First observation:
With highly leveraged financial companies, what happens in the “interim” can not only hurt you, it can kill you. Compare a bank to a retailer. Let’s say that you find a cheap retailer, where you estimate normalized earnings a few years out to derive its value. Assuming your estimate is correct, you should be able to ride out any short-term volatility to obtain the long-term value of the company. Like Tom says, that is the foundation of value investing.

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