Fire movement extinguished?

[Lootman]

Better than me. I had 6 shares in AMZN and sold one of them when they hit $3,200. It was getting nuts.

Likewise I sold 5 of my 35 AAPL shares when they hit $420 (man). At a $1.9 trillion market cap, something has to give. Interestingly BRK has become a proxy play on Apple. My 100 shares of BRK.B amount to a significant position in Apple. As does my 200 grand position in a S&P 500 index fund with 7% in Apple.

I bought my Amazon shares last December. I'd just read Brad Stone's book about Amazon "The Everything Store" (an excellent read) and decided to try to extend my circle of competence.

So I bought Amazon, to force myself to follow it, despite not having a clue how to value it. That goes against all of my investment philosophy. Amazon is a truly superb business, but I'm still struggling with the valuation.

Amazon's forward P/E ratio is something like 125. But then it was 100 when I bought it a few years ago, and the stock has gone from $800 to $3,200 in that time. Conventional metrics do not seem to apply when you have world domination within your grasp.

I'm increasingly convinced that Berkshire Hathaway is seriously undervalued. It's not just the undervaluation of its Apple stake, the rest of the portfolio and the operating companies. It now has a big conglomerate discount; the sum of the parts exceeds the whole by a lot.

e.g. Berkshire's railroad BNSF is a little bit bigger than Union Pacific (UP is my largest shareholding) and they operate in the same part of America so there aren't too many geographical differences to worry about (West Coast rails have a massive advantage over trucks, their only competitor).

Currently UP's market value is $116 billion, Berkshire's is $484 billion. The rest of Berkshire is worth a lot more than $368 billion

Berkshire announces results at the end of this week. If Warren agrees with you that BRK is undervalued then he presumably should have been buying back stock, although he sets a high bar for that. The B shares are around $200 versus $230 earlier this year, so the market isn't convinced.

Re Apple, after the 4 to 1 stock split at the end of this month, My Apple shares will be about the same price as I paid for them

[MaraMan]

I first became interested in FIRE well before it was called FIRE when I started reading the Living Below Your Means board in 2001 when I was still in debt.

Nearly two decades later I am FIREing at the end of this month and can hardly wait.

Gostevie

I am another who remember your posts and you were then, and remain, an inspiring story that certainly helped me along the same road.

MM

[Joe45]

I'm hardly on FIRE: I'm 58 and have exactly 8 months to go before retirement. I do have concerns as to how I'm going to fill my time, although since the pandemic hit, my workload has all but dried up, so I'm becoming accustomed to twiddling my thumbs, and stretching tasks out.

Once I retire and (hopefully) the health crisis is largely behind us, I have plans to travel, play golf, cycle and keep fit. I may in due course have an opportunity to pick up some consultancy-type work that I can do from home for a couple of days a month.

With a portfolio of low-cost global equity & bond tracker funds, I've fared pretty well through the crash. I count myself very fortunate.

[tjh290633]

I'm hardly on FIRE: I'm 58 and have exactly 8 months to go before retirement. I do have concerns as to how I'm going to fill my time, although since the pandemic hit, my workload has all but dried up, so I'm becoming accustomed to twiddling my thumbs, and stretching tasks out.

Once I retire and (hopefully) the health crisis is largely behind us, I have plans to travel, play golf, cycle and keep fit. I may in due course have an opportunity to pick up some consultancy-type work that I can do from home for a couple of days a month.

With a portfolio of low-cost global equity & bond tracker funds, I've fared pretty well through the crash. I count myself very fortunate.

Most people find that they have so much to do, once retired, that they wonder how they found time to go to work.

It is often said that being retired is a full time job.

TJH