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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)
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Author: ValueOrGoHome   😊 😞
Number: of 21944 
Subject: Re: Repurchase price
Date: 02/27/23 10:42 AM
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No. of Recommendations: 4
In December Berkshire repurchased shares at a P/B of 1.48 (using Dec 31 BV). That's an all time high. Since Buffett has stated that he would not repurchase shares at a "mere" (his word) 5% discount to IV, it leads me to infer that his conservative IV estimate is at least 1.56x BV.

When the repurchase price was 1.2x book value, someone did a similar backward-looking analysis and asked Buffett why he didn't buy when the share price was below 1.2X book. He answered that he didn't think the price *did* dip below 1.2 times book, he said he'd been watching it very closely. It didn't dip below 1.2 the book value for the last published quarter, so Buffett was right, but the stock traded below 1.2x BV for the following report.
I'm sure Buffett has his finger on Berkshire's pulse and knows if anything catastrophic is happening, but I doubt he's asking all 56 subsidiaries to prepare the accounting and report the information required to figure out Book Value on a schedule more frequently than the quarterly numbers that need to be reported. It's simply too much work for too little gain. That means that the BV he had to go by for repurchases in December would have been BV reported at Q3 2022 - supplemented with information that nothing terrible happened since then.
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This community has written 21,448 posts about Berkshire Hathaway. The article-length ones it recommended most:
BRK: Why Not XOM? · 62 recs · 2024
Second quarter comments · 60 recs · 2023
Berkshire's Profit Contributors · 57 recs · 2023
Summary of 2Q 2026 · 54 recs · 2026
3Q Summary · 53 recs · 2024
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