Reading Time: 2 minutes It seems there is lots of confusion about Berkshire (NYSE:BRK.A, BRK.B) options (paper) loss in its Q1 earning report, especially among individual investors. First, let me quote Buffett’s take on those options in his recent annual shareholder letter (link to letters): “The second category of contracts involves various put options we have sold on four

Reading Time: 2 minutes Here is a link to Q&A transcript of Berkshire Hathaway 08 shareholders meeting. I believe this is more comprehensive than CNBC’s live blog I posted earlier. Berkshire first quarter earning It went down more than 60% over same period a year ago (PDF). But the number does lie sometime, because this is mostly from paper

Reading Time: 2 minutes (Update) Meet the Buffetts (NBR Susie Gharib interview with 3 Buffett children, Howard, Susie, and Peter). Working with Buffett (NBR Susie Charib interview 3 CEOs working for Berkshire subsidiaries). Berkshire shareholder meeting at its early days Quote from CNBC: Buffett: It’s a gathering of partners. And, you know, we have a lot of partners, but

Reading Time: < 1 minute I printed out the CFA exam admission ticket yesterday, the test will be hold on June 7. Still got to read up the economics (my least favorite topic). So far I have read “financial management and statement analysis”, “quatitive methods”, “equity analysis and portfolio management”, and I’ve almost completed the “Options and derivatives”. Another thing

Reading Time: < 1 minute A bit long. It was a talk Buffett gave to MBA students at the Business school at University of Florida, in 1998 (10 years ago). But I promise it’s both fun and educational 🙂 Chinese translation (中文) English (PDF) (24 pages). Google Video (88 minutes) original link here. He talked about “chewing gum business” in

Reading Time: < 1 minute Buffett is in the news again yesterday. This time he is playing sidekick (financing) to help Mars to buy Wrigley (NYSE:WWY), the chewing gum company. One interesting Buffett comment I heard from CNBC is “I have doing taste testing of the Wrightly gum for 70 years”. Fun aside, Buffett and value investing have also been

Reading Time: 2 minutes The future of food I watched the movie (documentary) The Future of Food in the weekend, via the NetFlix “instance play” feature. This 2004 documentary is about the genetic engineered seeds, and its effect on farmers and our daily food. I remember a few years ago there was a lot talk about genetic modified food,

Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s the NBA playoffs season again, and I watched the two games between Phoenix Sun and San Antonio Spur lately. As you may know, I am a big fan of Phoenix Sun/Nash. But they disappointed me again this year: they lost 2 games in a row. The main reason is that Phoenix is pretty much

Reading Time: < 1 minute In last two days China Mobile (NYSE:CHL) and Syngenta (NYSE:SYT) released its Q1 results (Bloomberg: CHL result, SYT result). Both are doing very well lately. Today CHL got an upgrade from Zacks. But let’s not got too excited on the stocks, as a general rule. Also keep in mind sometimes we could use the analyst

Reading Time: 2 minutes (Update Apr 24) The trading tax bullet worked, at least for a day. The Shanghai composite index went up 305 points, or 9.29%. Similar performance from Shenzhen. All but two stocks in the two markets went up, many went up 10% (the limit). See the below picture for more details. (The thumbnail above is clickable,