Subject: Re: meaningless predictions
Here's another magic 8-ball number--

A wild guess as to how many buybacks there will have been in Q4.
October: 200 A-share equivalents
November: 115
December: 100

This is based on a rather dodgy formula trying to correlate how many shares are purchased each month based on the average P/B during that quarter.

As an aside, I note that Mr Buffett has shown a strong preference for A shares lately relative to B shares. Since the buybacks seem sometimes to be limited by liquidity, this is a bit surprising.
In the last 18 months for which we have the data, the ratio of average price paid during months that both A and B shares were purchased was 1530:1.

Jim