Buffett to give employee $1M a year for perfect Sweet 16 bracket

Even though he campaigned a year ago for Trump’s Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, Buffett said Monday he isn’t up for regular fault-finding with the Republican president.

Shares of Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) have risen as much as 10% since I last issued my buy recommendation on January 24, during which I predicted BAC stock will reach $28 in the next 12 to 18 months, delivering 25% returns.

The expansion of Mr Buffett’s investment team at Berkshire has allowed the company to diversify its portfolio of equities, even as it shrinks in importance for the business as a whole.

Buffett says it is a mistake to mix up political decisions with investing ones.

His Squawk Box session was at the “event center” in the Nebraska Furniture Mart store.

Buffett predicted that Apple would beat his own conglomerate to become a trillion dollar company, and jokingly offered to swap with Tim Cook.

Earlier this month, Berkshire reported that it had doubled its stake in Fort Worth-based American to 8.79 percent and acquired a $2 billion investment in Dallas-based Southwest, giving it a 7 percent stake in that airlines.

The Berkshire chairman and CEO said that he’ll pay any of his employees $1 million dollar a year, for life, if they correctly pick the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16 in this year’s company bracket. “I would say it would be unlikely”.

Buffett also said his investment ideas don’t coincide with his politics.

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Buffett devoted most of his letter to detailing the evolution of Berkshire and the performance of the Omaha, Nebraska-based company past year. We have not bought Apple since the earnings report came out because it shot up some then.

Overall, Buffett told the television network, Berkshire has spent about $20 billion on stocks since just before the US election in November, adding that he thinks the USA market is cheap with interest rates at current levels.

Operating earnings for 2016 increased to $17.58 billion from $17.36 billion a year ago.

He said “1,000 monkeys would be just as likely to produce a seemingly all-wise prophet” as 1,000 highly paid professionals.

While Buffett said Apple’s iPhones are great, he still carries a basic flip phone.

“He is a hero to them and to me”, Buffett added. “The continuity of the product is huge”.

Buffett has previously claimed that he’s not a tech investor, but said in an interview with CNBC that he’s bullish on Apple’s powerful brand and capital-deployment strategy.

Ted Weschler is known for being interested in American Airlines. Nonetheless, he said it was extremely hard to time the market and that stocks could plunge tomorrow. But he thinks they now are performing better after “a bad century”.

“To get biblical”, he wrote, “I know the height and the depth and the length and the breadth of the energy flowing from that simple four-letter word-fees-when it is spoken to Wall Street”. Auto insurers like Berkshire’s Geico division will lose financially as accidents and insurance rates decline.

Apple stock, which already ranks as the best-performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, closed Friday at $136.66. The unique proposal would replace the current 35 percent corporate income tax with a 20 percent tax on domestic sales and “border adjust” it by levying it on imports but not exports.

So who was to blame for the reporting change?