Monday, March 03, 2008

Warren Buffett's Derivative Positions

Kirzner Fervor: Warren Buffett's Derivative Positions:
"Berkshire Hathaway recently released its chairman's letter to the shareholders. Chairman Warren Buffett, opposed to many of the absurd and overlevered uses of derivatives, has used derivative positions over several years to take large positions. The most recent letter describes their current contracts which are divided among writing credit default swaps and puts on equity indices and leftover currency positions."
What timing! We just did a case study on Buffett today and watched a clip from his video with Bill Gates. I definitely recommend reading the article (as well as watching the video).

thanks to Kirzner Fervor for this link!

2 comments:

Financy Reagan said...

In a related story ~ Warren's brother Jimmy is an extremely enthusiastic proponent of derivatives, tearing asunder their already strained relations and making this Thanksgiving the most awkward since JImmy told their father he wanted to be a tropically themed singer/songwriter.

FinanceProfessor said...

Gee I wondered what Jimmy Buffet's thoughts on derivatives were. Thanks . :) I think they are actually cousins. See:
http://platform.blogs.com/passionofthepresent/2007/05/berkshire_share.html