Buffett Watch -- Buffett And Bonds -- May 11, 2024

Locator: 47115INV. 

Before we get started, the "northern lights" as seen from Portland, OR, last night. We didn't see these with our eyes, but our iPhone cameras picked them up:

Bismarck Tribune also got some photos:

*****************************
Buffett And Bonds

Link here.

The article was not worth reading, on so many levels.

Warren Buffett is no fan of the bond market even with the increase in yields this year. Berkshire Hathaway has a tiny bond allocation in its investment portfolio, which mostly supports its huge insurance business.

This contrasts with most insurers, who keep the bulk of their assets in bonds. Berkshire CEO Buffett favors stocks and cash—mostly U.S. Treasury bills. As Barron’s has written, individuals can emulate the Buffett strategy in their own portfolios by holding stocks and cash rather than stocks and bonds.

Berkshire held just $17 billion of fixed-income securities at the end of the first quarter, against about $363 billion in stocks and $182 billion in cash and equivalents, mostly Treasury bills, according to Berkshire’s 10-Q released in conjunction with the company’s earnings report this past Saturday.

Posted it for the archives, but a relatively worthless article.

***************************
Reuters Today

********************
The Physics Page

Link here.

This seems to be an incredibly important article for any high school senior planning to get an engineering / physics degree and headed for Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, etc.

Also here.

Synopsis:

• At a fundamental level, the matter we know of is largely composed of quarks, like the up and down quarks, which make up protons and neutrons: the particles at the heart of every atom’s core. 
• Quarks and gluons, operating under the strong force and the rules of quantum chromodynamics, make up all the known hadrons, baryons, and mesons in existence, providing us with a huge spectrum of particle states. 
• But, in theory, there should be another kind of bound state never observed before: glueballs, which are quarkless composite particles made of bound gluons alone. At last, in 2024, we may have found our first one. 

The "glueball":

In theory, at least according to quantum chromodynamics (our theory of the strong nuclear force), there should be multiple ways to make a bound state of quarks, antiquarks, and/or gluons alone.

• You can have baryons (with 3 quarks each) or antibaryons (with 3 antiquarks each).
  

• You can have mesons (with a quark-antiquark pair).
  

• You can have exotic states like tetraquarks (2 quarks and 2 antiquarks), pentaquarks (4 quarks and 1 antiquark or 1 quark and 4 antiquarks), or hexaquarks (6 quarks, 3 quarks and 3 antiquarks, or 6 antiquarks), etc.
  

• Or, you can also have states made of gluons alone — with no valence quarks or antiquarks — known as glueballs.

In a radical new paper just published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the BES III collaboration just announced that an exotic particle, previously identified as the X(2370), may indeed be the lightest glueball predicted by the Standard Model. Here’s the science of the claim, as well as what it all means.

And where was this particle found? Beijing.

The greatest “factory” ever constructed for investigating the J/ψ particle is located in Beijing at their electron-positron collider, known as the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III), which began taking data in its modern form in 2008.

In its first year, alone, BES III accumulated some 226 million events that created J/ψ particles, and as of the end of 2023, that cumulative number now exceeds 10 billion J/ψ particles.

Therefore, even rare events and resonances that emerge from these decays can now be probed. A few exotic states have been discovered as well: a class of particles known as XYZ mesons, which are now known to include exotic states such as tetraquarks.