Before the bell this morning, I said Berkshire Hathaway would climb today — because people feel uncertain.
Uncertain money doesn’t go looking for clever. It goes looking for understandable. Nobody has to explain a railroad. Nobody has to explain car insurance, or ice cream, or Coca-Cola. A data center’s energy bill takes a committee to model; a Dairy Queen takes one sentence. On a nervous day, the market reads like a contract: the money moves to the clauses it can actually parse.
Berkshire is printing all-time highs as I write this. I’ve held it for years — through the drift after Buffett’s retirement, when holding was the unfashionable trade — because the words underneath it never changed: real businesses, real earnings, real cash.
In the short run the market is a voting machine. In the long run, a weighing machine. Today the votes and the weight are the same thing.
Trading is language. Read the words carefully, and the tape makes sense.
— Dena Falken
Trader, entrepreneur, Berkshire Hathaway investor
