Takeaways from Berkshire Hathaway 2024

It's springtime in Omaha. It can mean only one thing, the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting is back in town. It is a relatively unusual event in the financial calendar. Whilst obviously the primary purpose is to discuss how Berkshire Hathaway has been performing over the past year, it also has somewhat of a festival vibe (although admittedly without the singing and the dancing). It has historically been an opportunity for Warren Buffett and his late business partner Charlie Munger to impart their wisdom about life and investing which they accrued over many decades, responding to various questions from the audience. Admittedly the Berkshire Hathaway approach to investing is far removed from any sort of quant based investing as you can get. However, from a personal perspective, there is a lot to learn from the way that both Buffett and Munger have approached investing, even for quants. I'll attempt to summarise some of my takeaways from attending the event, although, for brevity I have not included all of the discussions which took place during the event.

This shareholder meeting was sadly the first one since the passing of Charlie Munger, and the event began with a film honouring his life, intersplicing clips of Charlie in younger days alongside those of him during various shareholder meeting, as well as some more light hearted clips with both Buffett and Munger. The film received a standing ovation from the audience. Throughout the meeting, Buffett recalled his time with Charlie, and in touching moment, he called out Charlie's name to answer a question in a slip. Alongside Warren Buffett, sat Greg Able, vice-chairman of non-insurance operations for Berkshire Hathaway and Ajit Jain, Vice Chairman of Insurance Operations for Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett began official proceedings by discussing the performance of Berkshire Hathaway over the past quarter comparing it to the same quarter in 2023. It was a better than average quarter for insurance but he noted this did not mean that it was possible to take insurance earnings multiplied by 4 to extrapolate across the rest of the year. Railroad earnings were down modestly and Buffett suggested they should be earning more given current traffic conditions. Indeed the theme of the relative underperform of the railroad business versus competitors came up during the Q&A session as well.

One the big talking points was the Berkshire Hathaway selling some of its holdings in Apple. The question was asked at exactly the same point that there was a live camera panned over to Tim Cook...

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