👤 Alice Schroeder

📝 Description

Alice Schroeder was an equity analyst (at PaineWebber and later Morgan Stanley) who became prominent for her exhaustive analysis of Berkshire Hathaway. She eventually became the author of Buffett's authorized biography, The Snowball.

🔗 Connection to Berkshire

The Analyst Report: In 1999, Buffett praised Schroeder for publishing the first comprehensive "toolkit" for investors to evaluate Berkshire, particularly its complex insurance operations and the value of float.
Insurance Expertise: Buffett noted that Schroeder, an accountant by training, understood the insurance business and its metrics (like the cost of float) with first-class precision.

💡 Key Mentions

1999 Meeting: Buffett explicitly recommends her report to shareholders as a useful guide for calculating the company's value, marking a rare instance of a CEO endorsing a specific analyst's work.

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📚 Historical Mentions & Citations (1)

Click a reference document below to expand and read the exact paragraph(s) containing this concept in the archive.

🎙️

1999 MeetingExcerpt Available

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AUDIENCE MEMBER: Like, many others, I read Alice Schroeder’s analysis of Berkshire Hathaway with great interest this last year. And she described her analysis as a toolkit for investors. And I’m wondering if you see any substantial flaws in any of her toolkit. And in particular, the float-based valuation model that she put together. What are your views on that? WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, no. It reflects no change in our attitude toward stock price. I mean, we are concerned about building the intrinsic value per share of Berkshire at the highest rate we can, consistent with a couple of other principles that we’ve set forth. And we hope very much that the stock price stays in a zone that is not too wide around intrinsic value — that there’s is going to be some zone of some sort, because intrinsic value itself is not precisely calculable. And in addition, you wouldn’t expect it to track it penny for penny. But we don’t want it to go crazy in either direction in relation to intrinsic value. When we made the deal with General Re, that attracted more analyst attention and institutional investor attention because General Re’s shareholder base was overwhelmingly institutional. So, institutions had to decide whether they were going to continue with their investment or clean it out. And we knew we would end up with more institutional ownership, subsequently. Alice Schroeder asked me, prior to the merger meeting, she said there were a group of institutions that were coming to the meeting, which I liked.

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