Morningstar had the following summary for Berkshire after Q3 in the article titled "Berkshire Puts Some Capital to Work"
On the investment side, it appears Berkshire put roughly $11 billion of its cash hoard to work in equity securities this year. This isn't overly surprising given the tumult in the markets, and chairman Warren Buffett's excellent track record of deftly deploying capital in times of financial stress. In spite of this, though, Berkshire still has more than $40 billion of cash on its balance sheet. While we recognize that roughly $10 billion is required for insurance regulatory purposes, Berkshire still has about $30 billion available for additional investment. We suspect that over time, this will be deployed into business acquisitions or situations requiring an injection of liquidity.
Since this article does an adequate job of summarizing the quarter for Berkshire, we will look at the areas this report doesnt cover.
The book value grew by 3.98% from Q2 to Q3 and by 10.9% for the first nine months of the year. So the stock is clearly on its way to better SP500 in book value growth for the year. Having beaten SP500 in four of the past six years in book value growth alone, (business value growth is greater ) looks like this is another year where Berkshire is going to out perform SP500.
The other metric to look at is operating cash flow. Last year, this came in at 10.195 billion dollars. This year in the first three quarters, this is at 11.351 billion dollars. The run rate is about 40% higher than last year. This excludes gains from investments which is a huge part of Berkshire's cash flow.
Despite investing heavily in equities in the quarter ( and the year ), the gushing cash flow continued to add to the liquidity of the balance sheet.
The intrinsic value of BRK A share is now in the 147 - 152K range when conservatively valued in my opinion. This should grow to 153-158K range by end of this year.
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