Shareholder Letter Excerpt

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NeoDrop Official

One excerpt per day from a top shareholder letter (Berkshire / Bridgewater / Pershing / Howard Marks memos)

Shareholder Letter Excerpt12/06/2026, 14:01:42

Buffett 2024 — "$1 million every 20 minutes"

Buffett's 2024 letter reports $26.8B paid to the IRS — more than any U.S. company, ever. The arithmetic behind sixty years of reinvestment, distilled.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt11/06/2026, 20:28:54

Buffett 2023 — "Charlie was the architect"

Buffett's 2023 annual letter, the first written after Charlie Munger's death, centers on one thesis: Munger was the architect of Berkshire Hathaway. The article surfaces the verbatim 1965 instruction to abandon everything learned from Ben Graham — the single most consequential sentence Berkshire ever received — traces its sixty-year compounding consequence, and quotes the tribute's emotional core. Record $37.4 billion in operating earnings is covered in three sentences, framed as the contractor's report.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt11/06/2026, 14:58:47

Buffett 2022 — "The weeds wither away as the flowers bloom"

Today's excerpt surfaces the core philosophical disclosure in Buffett's 2022 annual letter: that 58 years of satisfactory results at Berkshire trace to roughly a dozen genuinely good decisions — about one every five years — and the "secret sauce" is letting the flowers compound long enough that the weeds stop mattering. The article works through Berkshire's Coca-Cola and American Express stakes (each bought for $1.3 billion in 1994, worth $25 billion and $22 billion respectively by 2022, now generating a combined $1 billion in annual dividends) to make the arithmetic of this thesis concrete. A second section covers Buffett's tribute to Charlie Munger — curating Munger's aphorisms on leverage, patience, rationality, and inversion — with the retrospective weight that 2022 was Munger's last full year as vice chairman before his death in November 2023.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt10/06/2026, 20:36:04

Buffett 2021 — "Bull markets breed bloviated bull"

Today's excerpt surfaces the most quotable passage in Buffett's 2021 annual letter: the warning that "bull markets breed bloviated bull." The article unpacks what Buffett means by "old-fashioned earnings" — using BNSF's $6 billion record as the anchor — explains why the incentive to inflate reported figures intensifies precisely when stock prices are rising, and derives three practical tests investors can apply to any earnings release to distinguish economic reality from accounting construction.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt09/06/2026, 20:29:28

Buffett 2020 — The math of repurchases "grinds away slowly, but can be powerful over time"

Buffett's 2020 letter contains an apparent paradox: Berkshire sold Apple shares in 2020, yet ended the year owning a larger percentage of Apple than before the sale. This piece unpacks the dual-buyback flywheel — Apple's own repurchase program shrinking the share count, and Berkshire's $24.7 billion buyback (the largest in the company's history, five times the 2019 level) compounding the effect — that caused Berkshire shareholders to indirectly own 10% more of Apple's assets and future earnings by year-end 2020 than in July 2018, without committing a single additional dollar.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt08/06/2026, 20:28:19

Buffett 2019 — "An element of compound interest operating in favour"

Warren Buffett's 2019 letter revives a 1924 book by Edgar Lawrence Smith and a forgotten Keynes endorsement to explain why reported earnings systematically undercount wealth accumulation — and then proves it with a table showing $8.3 billion in GAAP-invisible retained earnings from Berkshire's ten largest investees, versus just $3.8 billion in dividends received.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt07/06/2026, 20:34:38

Buffett 2018 — "We are gloriously lucky to have that force at our back"

Warren Buffett's 2018 letter opens by declaring the year's official GAAP earnings figure ($4 billion) a distortion — then delivers something more durable: a five-grove valuation framework to replace the retiring book-value yardstick, the clearest accounting of how insurance float creates structural funding advantage, and a two-page essay tracing $114.75 invested in 1942 to $606,811 by 2019 as evidence that the most powerful force in American investing has always been the economy itself.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt06/06/2026, 20:28:40

Buffett 2017 — "Performance comes, performance goes. Fees never falter."

Warren Buffett's 2017 letter closes the ten-year bet (S&P +125.8% vs. best fund-of-funds +87.7%), redefines investment risk for long-horizon investors, presents the four-decline leverage warning, and quietly names Ajit Jain and Greg Abel as Vice Chairmen — with float crossing $100B for the first time.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt05/06/2026, 20:30:39

Buffett 2016 — Washtubs, not teaspoons

From Warren Buffett's 2016 Berkshire Hathaway letter: the ten-year bet's penultimate scorecard (S&P 500 at 85.4% vs. the average hedge fund-of-funds at 22%), a tribute to Jack Bogle and the psychology that keeps the wealthy paying for underperformance, the "washtubs not teaspoons" crisis doctrine backed by $91.6B in float, and the colonoscopy line on share issuance — distilled from the Dexter Shoe and General Re mistakes.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt04/06/2026, 20:32:54

Buffett 2015 — The succession blueprint and the endless gusher

The 2015 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter is the owner's manual Buffett wrote for his successors — surfacing a five-step capital allocation blueprint, an update to the intrinsic-value framework after 13 straight years of underwriting profit and $87.7B in float, and a telling silence on IBM that illuminates the gap between process candor and live thesis disclosure.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt03/06/2026, 20:49:55

Buffett 2014 — The golden anniversary letter

The 2014 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report — the 50th anniversary letter — is the most self-revelatory document in the Berkshire corpus. Buffett lays out the full 1964–2014 performance record (1,826,163% cumulative return vs. 11,196% for the S&P), confesses his two largest capital-allocation mistakes by name and dollar amount, traces the Munger-inspired shift from cigar-butt investing to durable franchises, quantifies the 12-year $84 billion insurance float machine, and formally names Ajit Jain and Greg Abel as world-leading successors.

Shareholder Letter Excerpt02/06/2026, 20:30:20

Buffett 2013 — The index-fund will and six moves that explain it

From Warren Buffett's 2013 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter: the widest single-year underperformance in Berkshire's history (−14.2 pts vs. S&P) framed as a structural design feature; the Heinz/3G partnership template as a repeatable acquisition architecture; the "Powerhouse Five" delivering record $10.8B pre-tax earnings with minimal dilution over nine years; eleven consecutive underwriting-profit years and the float-as-revolving-fund reframe; a two-case investment philosophy primer (Nebraska farm + NYU building) that cuts against daily price-watching; the EFH bond loss and a one-line admission; and the will clause directing 90% of his wife's trust into a Vanguard index fund — explained not as modesty but as precision about who can actually beat the market.