Herb Greenberg's big event on Thursday; Berkshire Hathaway passes $500,000; Carson Block's Latest Short Target Is a Columbia Law Professor; General George Patton's motivational speech

1) My colleague Herb Greenberg has a knack for pissing off some of the wealthiest people on Wall Street...

With a more than 40-year career as an investigative journalist, Herb's exposés on fraud and hype have led to CEOs going to jail.

Herb has received death threats... he has been subpoenaed... he has had his phone records stolen... and he has been attacked by everyone from Michael Kors to the founder of Overstock.com. But this Thursday, at 8 p.m. Eastern time, he's taking it a step further...

In a special event, Herb will explain how the huge volume of buying and selling we've seen this year has opened a "backdoor," the likes of which we haven't seen in two decades... and how you can take advantage.

This is quickly becoming the biggest untold investment story of 2022, so I'll be joining Herb as well for the big event so we can break the news. Trust me, you won't want to miss it... You can save your seat right here.

2) Though the number is meaningless, it's nevertheless worth noting this remarkable milestone: the A-shares of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) surpassed a half million dollars a week ago, closing Friday at $512,991. The stock is up 13.8% this year, which is a stark contrast to the 6.4% loss for the S&P 500 Index.

Here's some fun trivia about that number:

Buffett's unparalleled investment returns and his refusal to split the Class A shares make them by far and away the most expensive stock in the world, per data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. For context, Swiss chocolate maker Lindt & Sprüngli (LDSVF) comes in a distant second, with a home exchange price of about 108,200 Swiss francs (or $115,078).

Here are some other ways to put BRK-A's $504,000 stock price in perspective. A single Berkshire Class A share is...

• 1.23 times the median sales price of a house in the U.S. (~$408,100).
• 2.5 times the average annual wage of an American CEO (~$198,000).

• 130,208 McDonald's hamburger Happy Meals.

Buffett first purchased shares of the then-struggling New England textile maker on December 12, 1962 for $7.50 each. That's a 68,389-bagger in one lifetime – what a lesson in the power of compounding! Here's another an interesting bit of trivia from a couple of years later:

Buffett was just an investor in the business like any other until a dispute arose. The management of the company offered to pay Buffett $11.50 for his shares, but later lowered the amount.

"The tender offer came out a few months later and it was at $11.375, an eighth of a point cheaper," Buffett says. He felt cheated.

"That made me very mad, so I just started buying more stock," He continues. "I just felt that I had been double-crossed by the management. In May of 1965, I bought enough so we controlled the company, and we changed the management."

The famously rational investor admits the tender offer came roughly five days after his father, Howard Buffett had died in 1964. "Whether that had affected me or not, I don't know," he says.

Since then, Buffett has built one of the world's great businesses, a diversified, cash-rich conglomerate that is now the sixth most valuable company in the U.S. stock market.

I continue to think it's America's No. 1 retirement stock for reasons I discussed in three recent e-mails:

• Berkshire Hathaway's fourth-quarter earnings report and share repurchases (February 28)
• Highlights from Warren Buffett's annual letter (March 1)
• Two estimates of Berkshire Hathaway's intrinsic value (March 2)

3) Following up on February 25 e-mail, in which I wrote:

A major impetus for the misguided investigation into activist short sellers (which I've covered here, here, and here) was a 2018 paper written by Columbia Law professor Joshua Mitts, "Short and Distort," in which he claimed that anonymous short sellers were engaged in "manipulative stock options trading."

Yesterday, one of the primary targets of the investigators' wild goose chase, my friend Carson Block of Muddy Waters, released a report, "Distorting the Shorts," that decimates Mitts and his conflicted, wrongheaded "research."

Today, the Wall Street Journal published an article about this battle royale, Carson Block's Latest Short Target Is a Columbia Law Professor. Excerpt:

A federal criminal investigation into short sellers has spawned a behind-the-scenes feud between a law professor whose research is helping to guide prosecutors and one of the most prominent investors in their sights.

Carson Block, known for public broadsides against companies he suspects of fraud, has been waging a campaign to discredit Joshua Mitts, a Columbia University law professor who has been aiding the U.S. Justice Department in its investigation into whether short sellers use illegal trading tactics to drive stock prices down.

Prosecutors have subpoenaed trading records and electronic communications of several hedge funds, and FBI agents seized Mr. Block's phone in October, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Since then, Mr. Block, the founder of Muddy Waters LLC, has publicly accused Mr. Mitts of academic shortcomings, privately urged Columbia to investigate him and challenged the professor's findings in a research paper of his own. It is a tactic from Mr. Block's investing playbook: Launch an attack highlighting alleged corporate wrongdoing, get regulators – in this case, Mr. Mitts's bosses at Columbia – to take notice, and see if any of the claims stick.

Block tweeted these comments about the article:

My belief remains the same: Professor Mitts has been paid to produce and peddle bogus "research" by scummy companies looking to shut down criticism from activist short sellers.

4) In my March 7 e-mail, I wrote about donating money to Ukrainians by booking Airbnbs (ABNB) there (sadly, an opportunity that's no longer possible), and shared the message I sent to the host, who told me that one of his employees had left to join the resistance:

Stay strong, know that the entire world is behind you, and may your employee kill many Russians!

A handful of my readers e-mailed me to take issue with those last six words. Here's one:

What I'm talking about is your expressing joy for their death. Many Russians, including soldiers, oppose the invasion once they know what's really happening. Thousands have been out protesting in a country that is very dangerous to do so.: 13,000 detained since this started. A lot of Russian soldiers were conscripted and are barely fed and subject to violence; they don't want to be there any more than a random sample of American 19 year-olds.

Putin has even talked about conscripting the detained war protestors to go fight. Can you imagine?

So, hate Putin and his regime. He doesn't care how many die on either side. Be glad Ukraine is fighting hard and Russia is not achieving what it thought it could. But joy? It's more complex than that.

Maybe we should be offering protection for those who surrender.

Here was my reply:

The Ukrainians are offering Russian soldiers amnesty and kindness to those who surrender. Mass defections of Russian soldiers would certainly be the best way for Ukraine to win. But I'm not holding my breath...

As the Allies stormed across Europe, liberating the continent and the death camps, Hitler conscripted lots of young Germans to supplement the ranks of his depleted army.

The Allies were killing thousands of them every day in late 1944 and 1945.

Does your heart bleed for the Nazi soldiers as well?

Mine doesn't. While I consider myself a pacifist, I'm also a realist.

War is hell. I view it as one of the great achievements of mankind that there are far fewer wars and far fewer related deaths in recent decades than at any point in the past few thousand years.

But if you're in one, you need to win, which generally means killing lots of the enemy's soldiers (along with their hardware) until they surrender or sue for peace.

The only way we stopped Hitler was by destroying his armed forces. The more of his soldiers we killed, the better (see below for General Patton's views on this).

Russia didn't pull out of Afghanistan until the Mujahideen (with our support) sent enough Russian soldiers home to their families in coffins. The more, the better.

Similarly, while not joy, I do feel grim satisfaction when I read of Ukrainians decimating Russian forces (here's a recent article along those lines: Ukraine Is Wrecking Russian Tanks With a Gift From Britain).

This is the only way to stop Putin and roll back his invasion (and, importantly, deter other militaristic authoritarians from similar attacks – most importantly, China invading Taiwan).

So, as harsh as it sounds, I hope the Ukrainians shoot down Russian planes, destroy Russian tanks, and, yes, kill Russian soldiers (who don't surrender) until the invaders have been repelled.

My views are best captured by General George Patton, whose speech to his troops in World War II, memorialized in the movie Patton, is considered one of the greatest motivational speeches of all time. You can watch/read the sanitized movie version here and here's what he actually said. Excerpts:

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

...Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we're going up against.

...Sure, we all want to go home. We want to get this war over with. But you can't win a war lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to get the bastards who started it. We want to get the hell over there and clean the goddamn thing up, and then get at those . The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. So keep moving. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bit*h Hitler.

When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually. The hell with that. My men don't dig foxholes. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have or ever will have. We're not just going to shoot the bastards, we're going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy by the bushel-fu*king-basket.

Some of you men are wondering whether or not you'll chicken out under fire. Don't worry about it. I can assure you that you'll all do your duty. War is a bloody business, a killing business. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them, spill their blood or they will spill yours. Shoot them in the guts. Rip open their belly. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it's not dirt, it's the blood and gut of what was once your best friend, you'll know what to do...

There will be some complaints that we're pushing our people too hard. I don't give a damn about such complaints. I believe that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that.

Best regards,

Whitney

P.S. I welcome your feedback at WTDfeedback@empirefinancialresearch.com.