Joshua Kennon's Personal Blog

Oct52011

Morningstar Berkshire Hathaway Valuation Commentary

Morningstar Says Berkshire Hathaway’s Intrinsic Value Is $89 Per Class B Share. I Think They’re Wrong.

Case Studies & ProfilesBy Joshua Kennon October 5, 2011 5 Comments

I’ve told you in the past that Berkshire Hathaway appears to be trading at the lowest valuation in nearly a decade. Recently, Morningstar revised its intrinsic value estimate for the Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares, stating they believe the stock has an intrinsic value of $89 per share (equal to $133,500 per Class A share since it takes 1,500 Class B shares to equal a single Class A share). I find this interesting for several reasons. First, Morningstar’s intrinsic value calculations are often reasonable, in my opinion. On more than one occasion, we’ve been within a single percentage point after I had valued a firm and then cross checked third-party estimates as part of the process to see if there were major disagreements. But in this case, I just think they’re wrong.

Oct22011

The Perfect Cinnabon Cinnamon Roll Recipe (10 Years in the Making)

Food and BeveragesBy Joshua Kennon October 2, 2011 296 Comments

Most people don’t know the exact Cinnabon cinnamon roll recipe but for a decade, both Aaron and my mom have been intermittently attempting to crack the code, making various tweaks to their pastry-baking-marathons. They’ve been close but never hit upon a recipe that was indistinguishable, in our opinion, from the Cinnabon franchise version.

Sep302011

The Power of Punctuation

Random FactsBy Joshua Kennon September 30, 2011 2 Comments

An English professor walked up to the chalkboard and carefully wrote out the following sentence, informing the students it was their responsibility to punctuate it correctly. “A woman without her man is nothing” All of the males in the class wrote: “A woman, without her man, is nothing” All of the females in the…

Sep302011

Building a $250,000 Coca-Cola Portfolio By 35 Through the Coca-Cola Direct Stock Purchase Plan

DividendsBy Joshua Kennon September 30, 2011 7 Comments

Aaron and I were sitting in a sandwich shop trying to flavors in the new Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, when I began to wonder what it would take to build a $250,000 stake in a company like Coke by the time a person reached 35 years old. It was a fun academic thought experiment.

Sep292011

Questions for Investors and Their Investment Portfolio - Image © Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Thinkstock

The Two Questions An Investor Should Ask Themselves Before Investing Money

Portfolio ManagementBy Joshua Kennon September 29, 2011 2 Comments

Before you invest a single penny of your money into a potential stock, bond, project, or other asset, there are two questions you should ask yourself. These two questions could have saved a lot of investors from asset bubbles and bankruptcy court. #1 – Does the Investment Offer an Adequate Rate of Return All Things…

Sep282011

Berkshire Hathaway Share Repurchase Program Announcement

Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors Approves Share Repurchase Plan

StocksBy Joshua Kennon September 28, 2011 Leave a comment

I’ve made no secret of the fact I’ve been a net purchaser of Berkshire Hathaway shares for the past year. The valuation seemed (and still seems) absurdly low relative to intrinsic value. Apparently, the Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors and management agrees.1 The company is now looking at itself as the best use of the firm’s cash.

Sep262011

Mail Bag: The Ethics of Gingerism, Racism, Serosorting, and Discrimination in Relationships, Dating, and Sex Due to Assortative Mating

Mail BagBy Joshua Kennon September 26, 2011 2 Comments

Today’s mail bag question deals with the ethics of the mental model called assortative mating. This refers to the phenomenon whereby individuals choose to engage in relationships with others who are like themselves (positive assortative mating) or dissimilar (negative assortative mating). There are strong economic arguments that the perceived rise in income inequality is due to assortative…

Sep242011

Intuitive Thinking Versus Reflecting Resoning

Do You Rely on Intuition or Reflective Reasoning When Drawing Conclusions?

PsychologyBy Joshua Kennon September 24, 2011 10 Comments

There is a quick test that can help you determine if you rely on intuition or reflective reasoning (intellect) when making decision. Answer the following question as quickly as possible: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Do you…

Sep192011

What Does It Feel Like to Fly Over Planet Earth?

SpaceBy Joshua Kennon September 19, 2011 2 Comments

This clip has gone viral over the Internet, generating nearly 700,000 views since it was posted. It shows what it would feel like to fly over Earth if you had a spaceship. Watch of for the lightning and thunderstorms. We live on a beautiful planet. The original poster of the video had this to say:…

Sep192011

Wendy’s Brilliantly Relies on Mental Models from Psychology to Reinvent the Classic Wendy’s Cheeseburger

Case Studies & Profiles, PsychologyBy Joshua Kennon September 19, 2011 5 Comments

Wendy’s recent commercial introducing the remade cheeseburger named after founder Dave Thomas is one of the best examples of marketing and psychology I’ve ever seen. It’s brilliant; mental models applied in a constructive way. I’m not going to take the fun out of it, but be on the lookout for some of the clues…

It’s always odd to try and fit your life story into a few lines but here is the short version: My name is Joshua Kennon. I’m 36 years old. My husband, Aaron, and I met and fell in love as teenagers. Neither of us ever even dated anyone else – we knew we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. After graduating from high school, we moved from the Midwest to the East Coast where we studied classical music and a wide range of liberal arts.

Later, we returned to the Kansas City area to be near family. During this period, which spanned nearly thirteen years and lasted from our early twenties into our mid-thirties, we started several Internet companies and spent much of our time semi-retired, managing our own wealth thanks to the financial independence those businesses helped us achieve. I also wrote a lot during those years. In fact, the odds are good that you’ve directly or indirectly encountered me many times without realizing it. For nearly 17 years, I was the Investing for Beginners Expert at what was then known as About.com. I am the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Investing, 3rd Edition.

Due to requests from family and friends to manage their capital alongside our own wealth, Aaron and I decided to exit retirement and launch Kennon-Green & Co.^®, a fiduciary global asset management firm that specializes in helping affluent and high net worth individuals, families, and institutions invest their capital around the world. In 2018, as part of our journey to have kids through gestational surrogacy, and the spin-up of Kennon-Green & Co., we moved to Newport Beach, California.

These days, we spend our time running and growing the firm, as we plan on it being the institution through which we pass on our own family’s wealth to our future children and grandchildren. The experience, particularly meeting such incredible people, has been one of the most rewarding of our lives. It’s a rare thing to have a career that allows you to not only do what you love for a living, but to do it with people you admire, respect, and like. We feel like two of the most blessed guys in the world.

This personal blog is a place where I talk about some of the things that interest me – cooking, finance, entrepreneurship, politics, history, economics. I’m really proud of the community we’ve built, in no small part because the typical reader around here is exceptional. Please note that in preparation of the launch of the asset management business, and to better protect our family’s privacy, Aaron and I removed thousands of articles, posts, and comments from this blog, reducing it to a fraction of its former size. This means if you are looking for something that existed prior to us coming out of retirement, the odds are good it simply isn’t available anymore.