hc:
WHY do msft,aapl, goog, etc pay a dividend? WHY? Ignorant management? WHY?

OK I'll bite.

Because their shareholders aren't as smart as BRK shareholders?

Snark snark snark, sorry I'm guilty. But I did moderate my answer, my first thought was "pandering?" But then I realized that when management does something you agree with it is because they are smart, but when they do something you don't agree with it is pandering. So all I do is label myself as someone who doesn't want the dividend.

Don't you think if there was as much demand for a dividend paying BRK share that an ETF would have opened up which owned more or less nothing but BRK and paid a dividend? It would be a sorta fun and probably fairly simple exercise to design the ETF so that it generated about 0.5% a year in cash of which 0.25% could be thrown as a dividend and the other 0.25% could be the management fee. The ETF might find something clever like arb'ing .As and .Bs to raise a small income, and/or using their large position in BRK as a boat anchor to support making a market in options to generate the income.

It would be interestingly amazing if such an ETF could maintain parity in its share price with BRK itself. Then indeed the ETF would have a consistent 0.3% higher return than BRK and I guess would grow until it held a significant fraction of all BRK shares. But more likely that ETF share price and the BRK share price would be two lines that mostly tracked each other but deviated on average by about 0.5% per year, year after year.

Anywhoo what do you think? Does the fact that there is nothing like this in the market suggest that the giant sucking sound of demand for dividend from BRK can only be heard by dogs? Or will we someday have a series of ETFs that give a tailored dividend payout, a fund for 0.3%, a fund for 1%, a fund for 2%, etc?

Are there really enough people with enough money and enough interest in BRK that would invest in BRK if it threw 0.3% dividend who wouldn't invest now? Or is this just a chimera enabling a higher posting volume for hc?

Inquiring minds may not want to know, but I do.

R:)