May the 4th be with you. Warren Buffett announces tops 👅 and flops 🙅 during Stockchella (Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting). 

In other news…Cheres' Wall Street Happy Hour 🍸, why I bonds are a hot investment right now 🔥 (+ Birkin comps), the gov wants to cancel PoW mining ❌, and our new Discord hangouts series: Soft Sundays 🎧

Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting, which is kind of like TradFi (traditional finance) Coachella in Nebraska 🌽, took place last weekend. It’s the time when Warren Buffett and crew air out dirty laundry & talk investment strategies:

The Beef

🪙 Bitcoin. Grandpa Buffett is still skeptical, since the assets aren’t tied to anything tangible. He went as far to say that he wouldn’t pay $25 for all the bitcoin in the world. Sheeeeesh.

🏛️ Robindaddy. BH Vice Chairman Charlie Munger is excited about the downfall of Robinhood, calling its PFOF (payment for order flow) and gambling-like practices disgusting. “Now it’s unraveling. God is getting just.”

🌱 ESG. Berkshire Hathaway is notably anti-bureaucratic, with limited corporate employment and reporting structure. Making BH an ESG investment would require extra reports and resourcing. Plus, they still want to invest in oil and gas. 

The Sweets

🎯 Value investing. Buffett is known for value investing — choosing stocks based on belief in the underlying company’s potential. He stands by this long-term, market-agnostic philosophy, shunning short-term picks and market timing.

🎮 Activision Blizzard. BH initially purchased $1B of stock because they believed it was undervalued. After Microsoft announced their offer to purchase the company, BH doubled down on their investment in hopes that the deal would go through. BH now owns about 9.5% of the company.

💖 Self-love. A teenager asked how to hedge inflation, and Buffett replied with wholesome, grandfatherly advice: Be the best you can be at something you’re exceptionally good at. “The best investment is one that develops yourself. No one can take away the talent you have.” 

👉 Watch the full meeting here

Events Calendar & Updates

🔮 Upcoming 

• Wall Street, Happy Hour: We're hosting a little tete a tete where you'll have the chance to meet your fellow retail investors across stocks, crypto and NFTs. It's the '20s in New York's Financial District, after all...RSVP here.

🧓🏼 Passé 

• Soft Sundays 🎧 on Cheres Discord: For our Sunday lovers, we introduced a brand new series. We plugged in our earphones, vibed, and chatted with the community. We chatted all the way from product building, investing in NFTs, to Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Apply to our VIP program here.

Quick News Bites

ℹ️ I Bonds are the new alt investment

With stocks on the decline 📉, it’s time to look into alternative investments. For the more adventurous, maybe that means hodling crypto or NFTs or buying a Birkin or two 👜. But if you’re looking for more stable investments or are a tradfi king (guilty ✋), it’s time to look into I Bonds. Series I savings bonds, aka I bonds, are inflation-protected bonds backed by the federal government. They’re nearly risk-free, and are offering a historically high ✨ 9.62% interest ✨ through at least October.

“Ok sweaty, this sounds too good to be true.” Nah b, let’s break it down for ya.

👇How are I bonds interest-protected? 2x/year, the bond’s interest rate is recalculated to reflect current inflation rates 🎈. As inflation increases, the bond’s interest rate also increases. Likewise, as inflation decreases, the bond’s interest rate decreases — which makes it best to keep these investments during periods of high inflation.

What’s the catch? There’s not really a catch 🪝, but there are a few drawbacks:

• 1 year minimum holding period + lose 3 months of interest when you sell in <5 years

• Interest rate changes every 6 months

• Purchases capped at $10k (+ $5k using tax returns) a year

• Have to buy through TreasuryDirect

🗒️❗ Important note: TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) another great interest-protected investment that offers more flexibility, but less stability than I bonds.We won’t get into it (yuh) here, but you can compare/contrast TIPS and I bonds on the balance.

👉 Read more about I bonds

Boom boom PoW 🥊: The government is fighting proof-of-work ops

House Democrats are nervous about the impact of blockchain tech on Mama Earth 🌎. A group of legislators asked the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to investigate crypto mining facilities for compliance with electronic waste disposal policies, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental protection regulations, especially in relation to proof-of-work (PoW) tech. 

Jack Dorsey, Michael Saylor, and others in the web3 world penned a rebuttal 🤺. They pointed out that the letter conflated power plants ⚡ and mining data centers 🖥️ — and most mining centers are operated separately from power plants. The tech giants argued that PoW data centers are basically the same as any other data center operated by Amazon, Google and etc., and regulating data centers usage would be disastrous. Dorsey and friends shifted the blame to power plants, stating that the facilities that power the data centers are the true polluters, so regulation should focus on energy generation instead.

Meanwhile, New York is looking to curb PoW operations on their own 🗽. The state senate is reviewing a bill that would place a 2-year moratorium on permits for new PoW mining centers, as well as renewed permits for applicants seeking facility expansion, where the facilities are primarily powered by fossil fuels 🦕. (tl;dr: If the bill passes, there’ll be no new operations powered by fossil fuels for 2 years.)

This bill might determine the fate of the crypto/defi/web3 industry, which is largely centralized around NYC 🍎. If it passes, we might see an exodus of companies to states friendlier to mining like Florida ☀️ and Texas 🤠, and a new industry hub might emerge.

👉 Read more on the House letter and NY bill