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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (15813)	8/5/2002 12:48:10 PM
From: kodiak_bull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

GF: No, first of all it's not special treatment. You need to rethink why securities disclosure is there. We have disclosure primarily so that other investors are aware when an acquiror acquires (or disinvests) a significant interest in a company so that they don't sell out in a sudden uprush, which is why we have 5% disclosure requirements etc. [Edit: "So the SEC helps him keep his acquisitions secret from other investors until he's fully loaded on the cheap." Why shouldn't any investor be able to buy quietly on the cheap? That's what I try to do. I have no requirement to disclose when I put in a bid or try to sell some shares. We want people to do their own analysis and make decisions and try to get fully loaded on the cheap. Do you feel somehow entitled to Warren Buffet's best ideas? If so, by what rationale? ] Normal investors like you and I don't have to disclose when we've bought 5000 shares of RIG. Why? Because we're just investors. The market might like to know that some guy named Gottfried who already has 5000 shares is about to buy another 3000, but you wouldn't like it (there could be all sorts of indicators running off those volume figures) since it would pump up the price against you. All real investors like to buy and sell anonymously. Warren and Berkshire are really just another set of normal investors, not like KKR or Icahn at all. And it's not the takeover disclosure rules that Warren doesn't like (it wouldn't matter, he has to comply with those) but disclosure requirements put on Berkshire Hathaway to disclose what shares it purchased on a quarterly basis. Now, the only parties truly interested in that would be Berkshire's holders, but they don't give a flying @#$% about what Warren buys and they're happy to keep that information quiet as long as possible. It's the guys at Salomon and Munder and Morgan Stanley who want to feed (like parasites) off Warren's ideas. Warren's buying carpet companies, let's buy $20 million basket in carpet companies. Warren's buying copper companies, okay, let's plow $50 million into copper companies. The only beneficiaries of this second kind of disclosure are the parasites at the big arb trading desks who can't think for themselves. Who gets punished? The guy (and his company) who came up with the analysis in the first place, Warren and Berkshire. For the record, I don't own and never have owned any BRK. Kb