Twenty-six unused chairman cards sat in a side drawer in Omaha on Sunday after Warren Buffett left the Berkshire Hathaway chair. His son Howard took the seat. The drawer is what the shorts now call the real tape.
They talk about an orphaned float, which in plain words means stock with no remaining grown-up left to bless it. They keep lining this handoff up against the last calm stretch before 1929. Orderly succession, in this reading, is just a slow bank run with better manners.
Reports confirm Buffett already quit as chief executive at the start of the year. The chair was the last title on the door. Shorts call that a liquidity event in a person, meaning the last bid walked out of the building.
This is how every crash looks in the first hour. Someone new sits down and the fridge still has the old name on the soda.
A strategist at a fund that only shorts family handoffs said that, and asked not to be named because the position is still on. They will not buy the shares back until the soda goes flat.
