Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders

I’m excited to announce the release of a book I’ve been working on for about 6 months now, and first started in 2010.

It’s a compilation of every letter Warren Buffett wrote to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. I first created it a few years ago for myself and friends. Last year I got Buffett’s endorsement — plus a few non-public letters — to publish the book for the benefit of fans and shareholders of Berkshire.

Here is the official page with all the details. There you can find a more detailed description, plus some sample pages and a chart detailing the performance of Berkshire’s insurance operations. (For any programmers out there, the chart was created with D3. You can check out the development version on GitHub.)

Features of the book:

• Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letters from 1965 to 2012 (706 pages), including the 11 earliest letters not available on Berkshire’s website
• Tabulated letter years so you can easily flip to the desired letter
• Topics index
• Company index
• Person index
• Charts of:
  • The growth in Berkshire’s book value and market price relative to benchmarks
  • Insurance float and performance
  • The operating businesses of Berkshire

The entire book is paginated, and has easy-to-flip-to labels for each letter’s year.

It is available for pre-order now. The first batch will be sold at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting on May 4 in the convention center. The rest of the copies will be available on Amazon on May 7.

Future projects

• The obvious next step is to publish a digital version, easily readable on iPads or potentially Kindles. This is normally an easy transfer, but that’s not the case with this book due to the many tables that have to be converted. So no timeline on this but it will be forthcoming.
• A book of letters to the partners of Buffett Partnership, Ltd., Buffett’s hedge fund he ran from 1957 to 1970. This will be a similar format to the Berkshire book, with indexes, page numbers, etc.