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For more on Berkshire Hathaway's upcoming shareholder meeting and what to expect, we have Bill Stone now, Chief Investment Officer at the Glenview Trust Company. Bill, it is good to see you. So Berkshire earnings on deck. I'm curious Bill, what are you looking for? What do you expecting to hear?

So I think the big picture is it's kind of easy to predict. And you talked a little bit about it earlier, the cash pile. So just because of the $330 some billion cash pile, uh you are guaranteed essentially to have a a very large amount of interest income. Uh and that's probably the biggest thing that will likely overwhelm everything else. Then you got to look at, okay, how many catastrophe losses did they have from the LA fires? Um again I think the cash pile will overwhelm that or the income uh and they probably did some pretty good underwriting otherwise. After that, I'm going to be delving into really the status of Geico. They've started to seemingly get growth again out of that business. Um so we'll I'll be interested to hear if that continues and where it kind of stands in its turnaround. And then lastly, well, maybe two things. Uh BNSF, uh they've done some good work in making that railroad more efficient. I want to hear where that is. And then really last but not least, Berkshire Hathaway Energy which is obviously a big piece. They're up against relatively easy comparisons, so that actually should look pretty good as well.

Bill, as an investor, are you disappointed that there hasn't been more active investment going on?

That's always a hard answer. But I think um yes, I mean, in a sense, I would love him to have gotten more opportunities uh on one hand. Um, but you know, he's picky and that's been a good thing over time. You know, I think he's still waiting for another big opportunity obviously, like always. And he's got the cash to do it. So, you know, I think most likely we're not going to hear anything uh at this meeting about something big they did. I guess it's always possible, but uh I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Uh also, Berkshire has not bought back any stock since May 2024 per Barrons. And of course, the Oracle value investor price conscious, but what do you see ahead in terms of potential capital turn, Bill?

I I don't think you're going to see any buybacks in this quarter either. I think that's you know, I say it's not a disappointment, it is. I mean, I loved the stock was way more attractive. Uh I say for investors when you had kind of that double barrel move of, you know, growing operating income within Berkshire Hathaway and then buying back shares. Uh it was really potent. Now you really just have to at the moment anyway, uh count on the growing of operating income which I think they will continue to do. Uh it's just that, you know, you'll have to It's kind of like a lot of things. You have to wait for better opportunity uh in in Berkshire to see that uh go, uh get get back to buying back shares. Like it's again it's uh, since we already own a lot of Berkshire, you don't really want to root for that, but uh it'll take the stock kind of falling, or at least earnings kind of running for a while without the stock going up for that to happen, I think.

Bill, you know, there's a lot of anticipation about Buffet maybe weighing in on the macro environment, right? On tariffs, etc. What do you want to hear from him or what would you ask him on that front?

You know, I guess I would try and be as sneaky as possible. I guess it's not really sneaky is not the right word, but I I suspect he's going to try and not answer you know, politically speaking, but I think if you ask him what's the impact of tariffs on Berkshire Hathaway's businesses, you might get the actual answer, right? Like I think he tries to be very diplomatic about it. If Charlie Munger was still here, uh you might get a more uh straightforward answer. Um, so I think that's the way I would go at it if I had a chance to ask him.

Bill finally, Bloomberg had a good piece today how the Buffett indicator. So this measures the ratio uh total value of the US stock market divided by the the total value of US GDP. Bottom line, Bill, it's at its lowest level since early September, so perhaps signaling equities are relatively cheap here, Bill. I'm just curious how closely do you follow that Buffett indicator?

I don't because I don't think he's spoken about it for quite some time. I think he's uh you know, to be honest, kind of uh left that behind. And I think there's good reasons for that. I think with particularly US companies, let's just focus on that being so international. It's not particularly helpful to look at it versus just US GDP. You got what? Something like 40% of revenues for S&P 500 coming from overseas, so um I'm not sure, like I said, I don't recall him talking about it in quite a number of years, um so I'm suspecting, you know, he may not really be focusing on it either.

Bill, thanks so much. Have fun this weekend.

Thank you, I will.