Berkshire Hathaway and The Phantom of the Opera
Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting was yesterday. Buffett generally kicks off the meeting by briefly talking about markets and long term investing. This year's talk was anything but brief that could be because of the Zoom annual conference. Like a lot of performers, he feeds off the audience, and he couldn't do that this year.
Here are my three takeaways from the meeting:
Never bet against America
Never bet against America
Never bet against America
On a serious note:
Multiple times he referenced the great depression of 1929. I don't like that. He even said that people in the year 1930 didn't know they were in depression until much later. He recommended "The Great Crash, 1929."
book by John Kenneth Galbraith. The book should be arriving on my doorstep sometime next week.He sold all his stake in all the American airlines at a significant loss. He said that he made a mistake in accessing the airline business. He also said that what we're going through right now was a low probability event, but it happened, and it will change the airline business forever.
The world will take some time to recover from the pandemic economically, but in the long run, there is no other asset class than equities. Buy SPY and forget about it.
Here is a great twitter thread that summarises the 5+ hour event in some 40 tweets.
There will be more analysis and opinions that will come out next week from some brilliant people on this year's meeting. I'll be looking out for those. I know one thing with high certainty, he was more bearish yesterday than he was last year.
Onward,
K and I finally completed watching The Phantom of the Opera. We started watching a few weeks back when it was streaming on YouTube to raise money for COVID-19 but couldn't get through it in one sitting.
We watched the recorded version of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the play.
The production was terrific, and the songs were epic.
After the show, I looked up the composer Andrew Webber. It was sad to see some of the allegations against him for plagiarism. I still think the composing of The Phantom of the Opera is fantastic, but it's slightly tainted.
This video shows some of the other songs he plagiarized.
You be the judge if it's just coincidence. One thing that's not a coincidence is that he is currently the wealthiest composer in Britain, with net worth more than a billion dollars. That's more than Sir Paul McCartney.