Everything You Need to Know About Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A)(NYSE:BRK.B) might simultaneously have the easiest and most difficult bull case theses for prospective shareholders.

Easy: Warren Buffett allocates capital more intelligently than any other investor of the last 100 years. Under his leadership, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders have enjoyed nearly unparalleled success over the last 50 years. With the greatest investor of all-time at the helm, shareholders can sit back and trust him to guide the ship.

Difficult: Berkshire Hathaway is an American conglomerate that owns large insurance businesses, railroads, and utilities outright, along with large stakes in American banks, Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), and Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO).

Here to help us cut through the noise and wrap our heads around the incredibly complex business model of the world's largest holding company is Kyler Hasson, a portfolio manager at Delta Investment Management.  Hasson can be found at his blog, Concentrated Compounding, and on Twitter with takes that I always find both entertaining and thoughtful.

Hasson discovered Buffett's annual shareholder letters early in his investment journey and has been a shareholder for years. Of Berkshire Hathaway, he says the best way to think of it might be as "a collection of generally high-quality businesses financed in a quite conservative manner … with the common theme sort of being that conservative structure and intelligent capital allocation."

As for valuing such a large and intricate business, Hasson admits to keeping a large spreadsheet summing up the value of all its parts, but that many shareholders seem to be able to get just as good of a sense of knowing when shares are particularly expensive or cheap by tracking the company's price-to-book ratio.

We also discuss why Buffett missed out on the tech sector's incredible gains of the last decade and what the future might hold for Berkshire Hathaway shareholders after Buffett and Munger are no longer leading the company.