 Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls and children of all ages, you're now tuned into the Prince of Investment coming to you guys and girls live from a beautiful city in state of Denver, Colorado. Don't forget to hit that like subscribe button and share button. And as always, I don't have a lot of time and I definitely know you guys and girls don't have a lot of time, so we're going to jump straight into it. So ladies and gentlemen, right here, I did this episode, I want to say to ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and children of all ages, welcome to the Prince of Investment. I'm your host Prince Dice coming all the way live from a beautiful city and state of Denver, Colorado via Honolulu, Hawaii. Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to hit that like subscribe button and share button. And as always, I don't have a lot of time and I definitely know you guys and girls don't have a lot of time, so we're going to jump straight into it. As you guys and girls can see Berkshire Hathaway with hail May 6th about a month ago in Omaha, not a month ago, a couple weeks ago in Omaha, Nebraska. You've seen everybody talk about it. And you guys and girls know I've been going to Berkshire for seven years now. I started back in 2017 going to Omaha, Nebraska. And I was there for a 2017 meeting, the 2018 meeting, the 2019 meeting. Then we all know what happened in 2020, 2020, kind of around me a little bit, but we all know what happened in 2020. So they didn't have a meeting in 2020. They did not have a meeting in 2021, but they had a virtual, they just did it online. I think they had the same venue, but Warren and Charlie Walker just got up and just spoke. They didn't say anything. They just got up and spoke. So 2021 and 2020 didn't have anything. 2022 was the return. I was there for that. It was a little sticky in 2022 because you know, you still had the COVID restrictions. You had to be vaccinated. You had to have a vaccination app, not the clear app to make sure you was clear to come in. The vibe was a little bit off, but it returned in 2023. So in 2023, we're back. Here we are. This is like the first time we was really back without the COVID run, without anybody getting scared about anything, without, you know, we just kind of felt like, Hey, we're finally back. Now me personally, I wasn't back all the way. I had a crazy schedule that week. First, I started out. I was in DC at the Jell-Off Boys and Girls Club awarding stocks and books to kids. So congratulations to those kids graduating the Wesley learns book program teaching kids about investing credit and insurance. And then soon after I left the Boys and Girls Club, I drove down to DC to see a good friend of mine's retired from the United States Navy. I spoke at his retirement ceremony. And when I got done with that, I immediately got onto the plane and flew to Omaha. So I got into Omaha about nine to 10 o'clock at night. By the time I landed, by the time I got my hotel, by the time I got my rental car, by the time I got to my room, grab something to eat, I think I laid it down, laid down about one o'clock in the morning, Omaha town, because you know, I had had a little layover down in Atlanta before I went to Omaha. So the first day was extremely tough day for me. Anybody who hasn't been to Berkshire, the doors open at seven, if I'm not mistaken, in the meeting, I think you start off with the movie, which starts off about eight o'clock, a private movie that they show. So it goes off on seven o'clock in the morning and it then goes to eight o'clock, right? So this is when they open up the door. So people would be out there around five, four, three, two o'clock in the morning, two o'clock in the morning, because of the seats are first come, first served. There's no assigned order. Of course, they have some reserved seats for a chairman and, you know, people who's high up in the business. But other than that, they don't have any, you know, it's just kind of open for shareholders. And they don't allow you to save seats and then look for seats, things like that as well. So the thing about it is, you know, I didn't get there that early, because it was one o'clock in the morning about the time I laid down. I got up about six or seven. Finally had to get my suit out of my suit. Now, my suit out of my suitcase, not my suit out of my suit. Get my suit out of my suitcase. Finally got everything, you know, straightened out, made myself presentable, took a shower, took a shower, had a little snack in the morning, and pressed out my suit and got on my way. So I got there a little late and I did my run arounds, right? I didn't get a chance to do any interviews this year. I didn't do not one interview, which is anybody that really follows me every year. I do interviews, I do documentaries, stuff like that, right? And I didn't get a chance to do one, two, three, four, five days. I was three days I was there. No interviews, zero, none. I didn't really have the time this year because of my schedule to line everything up. But I walked around the showroom floor. I didn't get there on Friday. I got there Saturday morning. I usually get there three days early. So everything was off me to actually get there, but everything seemed to be back in full swing. You know, you had the Dairy Queen booth, you had the Dural Cell Battery booth, you had the typical booths you always have, and you had the CEOs that was around making that round. So everything seemed to be pretty good and it was kind of back. So now we're going to jump into the actual meeting in a minute. Y'all stay tuned until your actual meeting what was said, what I heard takeaways I had there. But one of the things I noticed as well is by me jumping around from DC, driving three hours of Norfolk, then jumping off of the plane from Norfolk to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to Omaha, then traveling, then getting set up by the time I got to Omaha, Nebraska, ladies and gentlemen, it was, you know, I was extremely exhausted because that week was an exhausting week. And I didn't have anything lined up for interviews because I didn't really have a chance to get there early like I usually do. I would usually get there like on a Thursday, get settled before the rush comes, a Wednesday sometimes, and settle and be there for four or five days, almost a whole week, just hanging out in Omaha, meeting people during interviews, talking to people and things like that. Now, I will say this year, more than ever, one of the first things I noticed is Greg Abel. Greg Abel is the successor of Warren Buffett. And the thing about Greg Abel is Greg Abel is he was shown a lot this year. They started to bring him out about two years ago, but they showed him a lot this year. You know, Charlie Munger is 99, if I'm not mistaken, and Warren Buffett is 93, if I'm not mistaken. So he's getting up there in age and you're talking about Charlie Munger, he is getting, you know, definitely he's almost 100 years old, but he was there. But anyway, everybody was excited. Why? Remember those banking crisis we had? Who remember Silicon Valley Bank? We woke up one day, SVP, I think it was the 14th largest bank in America that most of us probably never heard of, unless you're in the venture capital world, blew up. This company blew up and did what, ladies and gentlemen, blew up, went all over the place, and nobody knew what would happen. Nobody knew what was going on. Then here comes First Republic. Then here comes another bank. So then the FDIC jumped out there, hey, everybody calm down. Why did this happen? What did Warren think of this? He set a very key note. This key note stuck with me because it goes to today. Today, we just heard everybody talking about the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling. Will they raise the debt ceiling? Will the debt ceiling be lower than where the debt ceiling will do this, right? He said a very famous thing in true Buffett fashion. He said fear is contagious. When people get scared, that's what have a run on banks. Run on the banks are, you know, when everybody runs to the banks and I get the money out for the most part. But what causes? What's the DNA of a run on a bank? The DNA of a run on a bank is everybody getting scared at one time. Long story short, Warren leads us in traditional fashion and saying never bet against America. And another thing is his stock that he holds, a master stock that he holds is Bank of America. He sold a lot of his companies. He showed us soldiers JP Morgan that he had for 25 years, but he kept Bank of America. The thing that made Bank of America so interesting is it is the bank that everybody ran to. When everything started to collapse, everything started to go left. Everything started to not look so good. Everybody ran to Bank of America. That stuck with me as an investor to go, hmm, Bank of America is a safe haven and it pays dividends. Let's take a look at this. If you look into the financial industry, as usual, as we get into more deeper things of what happened and what Warren said at Berkshire and actual financials of the company, I had this eerie feeling this year at Berkshire, but what would happen if Warren Buffett passed away? What happened to the Berkshire Hathaway stock? But we lose trust. I know they got the successor. They got a successor plan. They have already noted that Greg Abel is taking over, but how will shareholders really receive Greg Abel? I don't think I've seen Greg Abel speak that much. I don't think I've seen Greg Abel talk that much. I don't think I've seen Greg Abel say anything for the most part, right? Greg Abel is someone that I don't know. I don't know what investors trust. I know he came from the Berkshire Hathaway energy sector. But when he gets in, like Warren, he gets in and he talks about his mistakes that he made and things that he missed out on and his thoughts on Tesla, things like that. But it leaves people the question of Warren is allowed to make mistakes. He's 93 years old. He's the greatest investor in American history, if not the world of our time. And people are like, hey, Warren buys it. It's a good thing. If Warren sells it, maybe I should too. That's the notion in the investing world. But if Warren passes away today, tomorrow, things like that, well, will shareholders lose trust into Warren? I mean, it's a Berkshire Hathaway. You know, you're talking about it, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, in the next 10 years, it'd be pretty shocking and astonishing if we have Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger still here in the next 10 years. And even though Warren has said it a million times, I'm not running the day to day. I have Ted and Todd Combs. I think it's Todd Combs, Ted Combs, Ted and Todd Combs and all the great people behind the scenes that are running Berkshire on the day to day. They may check things with me. I'm not doing this much. Will shareholders take that? See, many Berkshire shareholders bet on Berkshire because they feel as though, hey, it's a good bet. It's Warren Buffett's company. He's at the helm, right? But we all know the market doesn't trade off of fundamentals. You can have awesome fundamentals. I've seen companies where they've had amazing fundamentals, but their stock is trading low, inefficient market. I've seen some companies who have horrible fundamentals. Stock is trading high. High multiples, depending on what people feel, what people think. We all know the market is ran by emotions, not by fundamentals. And what will happen? What will people think? What will people say if Warren Buffett is no longer there? That was my biggest question this year. And I felt like Warren wanted to let everybody know he was in, everybody was going to be in good hands. But once something happens to him, you're 93 years old, I don't know if he has a terminal illness or whatever, but we all know that eventually something's going to take you out of life. Whether you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, kids, teenagers, we all are not going to be here. We're all just living here to have an experience we don't know when that will happen. But as you already know, as you increase your age and you're 70 something years old, then that increase your probability of something happening to you even more, right? So that's always been my question, ladies and gentlemen. What will happen to Warren? What will happen to Berkshire once Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are no longer? And you have the two new faces of Berkshire led by Greg Abel. And now Greg Abel is speaking in front of the world. Well, people trust him. Now Warren is like everybody's grandfather. He's like the old grandfather, if not great grandfather to many investors. What would be said and done when he's done on here where we really trust him? Now, Warren said a bunch of things. He talked about his earnings. He talked about some of the bread, the bloodlines of his companies. He talked about the US economy, how he felt about it, how he felt things would be in 2023 and so many more things, right? And I want to get into those. But before we get into those, I want to take a break, a very big break, not a break break, but a quick break, a very quick break. Why did I say big break? I'm going to take a very quick break and after that break, we're going to come back with more of the Prince of investment right here with Prince Dykes. Now, the first thing I learned a long time ago by attending Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings was how does Warren Buffett move when he make acquisitions? They said, sometimes this kind of blew my mind when I heard this for the first time. You could buy things, you can buy things with cash and you can buy things with stock. When I saw that Warren brought things with stock, I was shocked, right? I was shocked. I was like, wow, that makes sense. You can buy things with stock instead of buying things with actual dollars. So the notion was when Warren buys things with stocks, he believes his stocks are overvalued. When he buys things with cash, he thinks his stock is undervalued. When he buys back his own stock, he thinks his stock is undervalued. When he buys things with stocks instead of buying it with dollars, he believes maybe his shares are overvalued. Now, is that true? I don't know. But that was a very interesting nugget that someone gave me while sitting in the press box many, many years ago. So here's the thing. Works right out the way. Somebody asks about dividends. Why don't you pay dividends? Warren says he doesn't believe in double taxation. The company is taxed on the earnings and he gives it to the shareholders and the shareholders, they pay another tax on their dividends. So that's like double taxation, right? So Warren's not a big component. He says, I much rather give you more value by buying stocks when I believe they're undervalued, buy our stocks when I believe they're undervalued. Now, how does Warren figure out our stocks are undervalued or whatever? We don't know. But it could be assumed that he's using a discounted cash flow model. How do we decide the value of a company? We look at the EBITDA, we look at the multiple, we compare you to company comparables and we come up with our future assumptions of what you would do. Look at your future growth. This company is growing at 5, 10, 20% rate and it has 5, 10, 20% rate of growing in the future. And you can kind of date it back to say, hey, well, this company today should be trading at this price. Is it trading at this price or not? If it's trading below that price, then it's seeing it's having value. If it's trading for all that price, it seem to be trading at a premium. You don't buy. They would gain by low and sell high. But how does our brain do it? We buy high because when a company is high, the news is good. Everybody's talking about it. All this company's just done this always blah, blah, blah. Everybody loves to buy it. Then when the news goes bad, everybody loves to sell it. So these fundamentals are very easy to be said, but it's hard to be heard. On set again, easy to be said, but hard to be heard. What I mean to say about that is that, hey, guys, look at the company and look at the financials and look at the balance and cash flow and income statement and evaluate the company and see what the company value is and look at the shares outstanding, then you should come up with a share price. And if that share price is $50, you go to the public market, you see it trading under $50. That meaning that this company is trading below its value. Right? And hey, you're getting good value. You can go out and purchase the company. Easy said, but when do we see this happen? When the companies are trading below their value or when companies are tanking, the news is not good. The news is horrible. The world is coming to an end. We have debt ceiling. We got a pandemic. We got failure of government closing. We didn't pay our bills. Credit rate and decrease. I mean, you've heard it all if you hang around the financial media. But guess what? The financial media loves to speak about it because it is what people like to hear. If I made a video right now and put it up on YouTube and made a podcast and I said five reasons why the US economy is going to do great in 2023 versus if I made the exact same content and said five reasons why the US economy will collapse by the end of this year. Everybody is going to tune into the five reasons why the US economy will collapse because people like to be scared, especially the financial news and media. People want to hear good stuff about all the economy is going to know they like to be scared. They turn the TV up and see what's going on. It's a countdown to the debt ceiling. It's a countdown to the default. It's a countdown to coronavirus cases. It's a death calendar. It's a death calculator counter on CNN at the peak of the pandemic. Why do you show that? Because we love to be scared. We love to be feared. We love to, oh my God, I need to pay attention to what's going on. So the thing about it was here's one of the things he spoke about on a financial end that was very intriguing. He said everybody spoke about banks. He said he would love to own banks. I'm thinking at one time they own a bank, but they had to get rid of the bank in 10 years. So he said he loves banks. He loves the idea of the finances of a bank, but he spoke about Berkshire being his own bank. What does that mean? The insurance business. The insurance business does not, is not predicated upon stocks going up or down. Right? I mean the insurance business, I mean not stocks, but economy, economic corrosion. Economy is doing bad. Insurance business is pretty good. Economy is doing good. Insurance business is doing pretty good. Economy is going sideways. Insurance business is doing pretty good. The insurance business stays consistent, consistent and consistent, ladies and gentlemen. So with that being said, that's their bloodline. They don't have to worry about employees and customers and things like that. Because guess what? Every mom, no matter what the economy is doing, we're all going to have car insurance, homeowners insurance, life insurance, healthcare insurance, some type of insurance. And that's a good business to be in because every month that you pay your insurance, this money is going to warn. He can take that money. And I think he owned their own Geico and other insurance companies. They can take that money. And once they have that money, they can go out and invest that money and go buy another company and go do this with another company and go do that with another company. Right? So that's the insurance business that he spoke about. They're creating and have all this float capital. He's sitting on $135 billion, if I'm not mistaken, that was in cash. Think about that, $135 billion. What is, I don't know, if you just threw that in the savings accounts, that's millions of dollars you're going to make annually just from your savings account, money sitting to the side. Also, Berkshire Hathaway is in the top 500 companies in America. Meaning it's an index fund. What does that mean when a company is an index fund? Every time you and I go purchase the index fund, you put money to your 401k that follows money into an index or whatever and invests into the S&P 500. Some of that money is going to Berkshire Hathaway. So think about how big is the actual stock market. Every time you invest, you're sending some money straight to Berkshire Hathaway. In return, they can sit on the capital, wait, make a big mammoth investment into a new company and those type of things. So also, I wanted to speak about another bloodline. He has Bank of America, Apple. He said, I don't know what Tesla would be, but I know what Apple would be in five years. Apparently, they're pretty bullish on Apple. So Apple is a big holding. Another big holding is Oil. Also, they're on Petronium. He didn't speak a whole lot about it because it's a public and traded company. But he said that, hey, they believe in it. They think they got great management and they had great position in the Persian Gulf for oil. So I was very surprised to see that. Oil had an amazing year in the summertime. Then it went to crap. The thing about oil all kind of reminds me of gold. Well, it is a black gold. And what it does is, the money and the economy is going down. I mean, it is just a spike. One summer, oil consumption will spike. Prices will just shoot up. Maybe not this summer, but next summer, two summers from now, oil will just shoot up. During the pandemic, oil prices were in the dumps. People wasn't traveling. The demand of oil was going down as the world was on lockdown. But last year, 2022, in the summertime, oil had a crazy spike towards the end of the year, tailed off. And now it's telling off beginning of 2023, but they have a large holding. So some people, that's one of the things I've looked at. I've always been a big component of owning Berkshire Hathaway. I mean, heck, I better. I know people at Berkshire, traveled to Berkshire, Omaha so many times. You know, I got an on the stop. But the thing about I've always been concerned with the new era, the new regime, I see this coming into place. I think his name is Ajata. Ajata is coming in there being, they're coming into place. And then you're seeing Greg Abel come into place. So that's like the new era that's going to be the new era, the new face of Berkshire Hathaway. And my concern is, if Buffett passed away, you know, what would this new era do? So they say, hey, they got a strong bloodline of insurance. And they said insurance company is better than banks. And they said they would actually own a bank, but because of the regulations, they can't own a bank. So also they got a very big position in Apple and in oil. So if you didn't want to invest in the Berkshire, but you want to invest into the things that Berkshire is invested into, have your public portfolio mimic them, you're probably going to have some Occidental oil, some Bank of America and Apple. That's a way to invest around Warren Buffett and instead of investing with them. If you're like me, who's concerned with if news come out today and say Warren Buffett passed away, what would happen? Like what would that, what would that do to the market and the economy? Because we all know even though Warren and Berkshire has strong finances, we know that we know the market doesn't trade off of finances and fundamentals. The market trades off of emotions. Everybody would be emotional and say, oh, the golden era is over and done. That's the things that makes me scared and things that maybe we want to look out for. But yeah, in true fashion, Warren Buffett said, don't be worried, never bet against America, never bet against America. And to keep investing and Charlie Munger to quote him, he just said, just hold the freaking stock. And I'm saying the word freaking to, I don't want to be explicit on this broadcast, but he would just say, and hold the stock. He believed Berkshire Hathaway was a good company. He's 99 years old and never bet against America and keep going with the tailwinds of America. Even though we just went through a banking crisis, fear will always be contagious. And when people become fearful, people like to sell things, run for the board, put all that money in the cash, and that's the time for you to go out and invest. So when Warren has a bunch of cash from the sidelines, that's the indication of bad time to come. Weren't you making acquisitions? Weren't you buying? So very interesting. Well, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Prince Dykes. That's going to conclude today's episode. Thank you guys and girls for turning into the Prince of Investment. And to the next video podcast, cartoon or whatever else craze you see me doing around the globe. Y'all already know my name is Prince Dykes. Peace, be safe, I'm out and thank you.