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Yet Another Reason Not To Sell Your Berkshire Hathaway Shares

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by Felix Salmon
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Jun 04 2008 12:00am EDT

Yet Another Reason Not to Sell Your Berkshire Hathaway Shares

This is almost certainly the wost investment in Berkshire Hathaway of all time - or, on the flipside, "a pretty unethical way to make a buck". Either unethical or extraordinarily lucky, anyway.

Someone, somewhere, for some reason, had a bid in to buy 50 of Berkshire Hathaway's B shares at just under half the market price. Obviously, no one expects such a bid to be filled. But filled it was - something which can happen when "the day's sell orders burn through other, higher, limit orders, and the brokers aren't actively trading". The result? $115,050 in instant profits for the buyer, and a nasty shock for whomever it was who simply decided to sell his shares without setting a lower limit to the price he was getting.

The really crazy thing is that these are the B shares we're talking about - the shares which were specifically issued by Berkshire Hathway so that there would be something more liquid and tradeable than the wildly expensive A shares. So much for that idea, it would seem.

(Via Dealbreaker)

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