With respect to Buffet who has talent and is not a total fraud he gets a large fraction of his outsized returned in trades not available to you and me. Off market placements for example. Do you think your returns would have improved if you could buy Goldman Sachs at a 20% discount to market? Yeah me too.

Marketing and promotion is one way he gets those offers you and I don't. (No not the only way, he has billions to invest too, but his name helps). Having the highest share price for a single unit of stock is something else to talk about and color a story if you're reporting it. He's very good at this promotion. His annual letter was a previous generation's version of Elon Musk's tweeting, hiring onion writers, flame throwers and so on that gets Elon so talked about.

It's a skill, a talent. Finding the opportunities and exploiting them in a way that doesn't significantly blow back at you. Buffet executes it brilliantly. Something to consider in your own business. Is there something else you can exploit like that which would make for a paragraph in the story of your company?

https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/2008-b...

The 'Buffett halo' is worth paying for.

Even BRK.B would be 50x more its current price but it had to be split when they bought Burlington Northern with stock to accomodate BNSF shareholders.

The major difference is voting power. Economic interest is pro rata, but voting is much different (not that it matters in the current environment). That, and BRK issues direct tender offers to BRK.A holders.

One example is BNSF. Most railroads are on warpath to increase operating margin as much as possible. Cutting routes, laying off staff, and neglecting customer satisfaction are the norm. Imagine being laid off after your company has had its most profitable year ever. These actions are being dictated by institutional investors. BNSF is the only major railroad not taking on precision railroading. It's possible that this will be a failure on BNSF's part, but Berkshire is willing to take the bet and act differently from everyone else on the idea that this will be better long term. Institutional investors are not interested in that.

I have a feeling it's a rigged industry, and has very powerful lobbyiests. (That part after the comma is true in California.)

I'll start:

1. age 50

2. no moving violations.

3. bare bones legal minimum in CA. (15-30-5)

4. $550 year, with a Covid credit of $6.30

5. I'm with Mercury.

(I looked into pay per mile, but I don't have a computer in my vechicle.)

Also, auto insurance has the lowest profit margins of any type of insurance.

  - type / year / color of car (gives price and your attitude)
  - how many km driven / year (no risk if it stays always on your drive!)
  - where is it parked

Gender famously matters too - a 18/M is (statistically) likely to be a worse driver than a 18/F. Rates reflect this. Having once been a 18/M, I have no trouble believing this.

That said, it's very difficult to compare across states. Car insurance is regulated at the state level, so inevitably different states (or territories, or DC, etc.) have made different choices over time. You can do a dollars-to-dollars comparison between any two states but there's a good chance the elements of the policies and liability rules aren't the same.

I suspect there's also some adjustment to premiums done for how much it costs to repair things where you live. Medical care, building repair, and car repair are all things that likely come up a lot on claims. If you're some place where these are twice national averages, you might have higher premiums than you would in a place where these cost half the national average. In addition to the chance of a loss varying by location.

29, Clean record for 7+ years, 2013 honda civic, $1140 a year with Geico, in DC/NoVA.

Car insurance is extremely regulated and transparent. If you think you’re getting ripped off, go to a different website and shop around.

If you borrow money for the car, the lender might require coverage for the car itself. I pay for $500k bodily injury and $100k property damage liability only coverage for $40 per month per vehicle for 10k miles per year.

I had Geico on the east coast at a similar price ($50), but they were more expensive on the west coast so I switched to Amica.

1 speeding ticket

Full coverage

1080 a year

Toyota

Also you are technically and legally a shareholder even if your broker holds the shares on your behalf as is usually the case these days, and attending any shareholders meeting is a legal right whatever the size of the shareholding.

Although just now they are online due to covid but I'm sure the physical meetings will return.

If you do hold 0.001 shares with a broker and you want to go you should request with them to be sent the annual report, also a legal right, and that'll have the invite card. Or if not you can phone Berkshire and ask for one.

Haven't "sophisticated" investors been conned, suckered, and fleeced as long as stocks existed and even before?

From participation in the South Sea Bubble (the original "bubble") to the Tulip Craze to Bernie Madoff to Enron to cryptocurrencies and beyond.

Not to mention that deep pockets don't necessarily equal sophistication (even when they spend enormous sums to hire professionals to manage their money), and the fatter your pockets the juicier a mark you're going to make for people whose lives are dedicated to funneling money from your pocket to theirs.

That said, Berkshire has always been on the side of the little guy in a sense, even if they're a bit condescending about it -- Warren Buffett has been very vocal about investing in index funds (even putting a tiny bit of his money where his mouth is and challenging fund managers to beat it) this whole time and it's been a good strategy over a very long time frame.

Now, one of the things that no one tells you about the stock market is that a LOT of players make money by front-running and middle-manning the whales (index funds, pension funds, etc), so you'd maybe think it was a trap to just make the whales bigger, but in general the strategy of just investing in broad index funds has been good regardless for individual investors.

Another thing that's been made pretty clear in the previous year is that governments will bail out businesses first in crises. One of the really crazy things that Warren mentioned was just how wide "spreads" (difference between pristine debt aka bonds and debt from struggling companies aka junk bonds) got in march of 2020 -- near/surpassing 2008. He joked that Berkshire couldn't even have floated debt in that market, which is why the Fed doing what it did was necessary. The usual arguments of businesses as "job creators" is maybe valid in some sense, but capitalism without repercussions/negative feedback is what we seem to be trying to drive hard to. Companies that are not prudent with their cash and record profits for the last 10 years of extremely loose fiscal policy should be punished. We expect individuals to save for a rainy day, why don't we expect companies to do so?

Voting rights.

You can skip ETF management fees and just look up their latest SEC filing. Here is a pie I made in M1 (which you can invest with the click of a button if you have an account) which is similar to their public holdings but with tech stocks (Apple and SNOW) removed: https://m1.finance/6rAREGn34Ai2