LA Times On Soros, Buffett -- February 17, 2016

Over the past week or so, I've received links from readers regarding investments by Soros and Buffett. I did not post them, mostly because I simply ran out of time. The Los Angeles Times, it appears, saw those same multiple articles, and consolidated them into their own article:

If the old investing adage is true that "the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets," then the time to buy into oil is now. The blood of oil investors is running thick indeed in the markets, so the smart thing to do may be to buy.

At least that seems to be the thinking of master investors Warren Buffett, George Soros and David Tepper, all of whom have just disclosed stakes in the Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan. Buffett's stake of 26.5 million shares, valued originally at $396 million, was disclosed in a public filing Tuesday. Kinder Morgan jumped by about 10% to $17.35 in morning trading on Wall Street on Wednesday, giving Buffett a paper profit of about $60 million. Until the recovery, the share price had fallen by about two-thirds in a year. 

Soros, who has been taking a generally bearish approach to the oil patch, has disclosed a Kinder Morgan stake of 50,700 shares, worth now about $887,000. Hedge fund manager Tepper's disclosed holding is about 9.5 million shares, worth about $163 million as I write on Wednesday. None of them hold a commanding stake in the company: Buffett's shares come to about 1.2% of the total outstanding and only about one-third of a percent of the $130-billion portfolio of his Berkshire Hathaway holding company.

Also in the Times, and absolutely awesome:

The architect John Lautner — Frank Lloyd Wright disciple, iconoclast and reluctant Angeleno — produced a number of strikingly unorthodox, gravity-defying houses in the decades after World War II. For pure drama, few can match the 1963 Sheats-Goldstein house just above Beverly Hills.

The living room, familiar to fans of the 1998 Coen brothers film "The Big Lebowski," where it belonged to a pornographer and loan shark played by Ben Gazzara, begins dark and cave-like, tucked under a coffered concrete roof. Then, as you move out toward the pool, the roof shoots skyward like an ascending airplane wing, bringing you face to face with a view that puts much of Los Angeles at your feet.

Now the house is poised to meet a much wider audience. James F. Goldstein, who bought the property in 1972 and has made improving and expanding it an expensive personal crusade, has agreed to donate it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The bequest, to be announced at a news conference at the house Wednesday afternoon, includes an endowment of $17 million for a maintenance fund, as well as a so-called skyspace artwork by James Turrell and a building adjacent to the main house holding an office and nightclub. The museum has estimated the total value of the gift at $40 million, though Goldstein called that figure "conservative."

"For me it ranks as one of the most important houses in all of L.A.," said Michael Govan, the museum's director and chief executive. "And as one of the most L.A. houses, because of its connection to the view, that long view toward the ocean."

My wife is relieved that Donald Trump did not buy it.

You can see a bit of the house in this scene. Unfortunately not in English, but perhaps that is just as well: 

"The House" in The Big Lebowski