Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Buffett’S Derivatives: Disruptive Financing At Low Cost, Florencia Roca, Juan Carlos Sanchez Meyer

Journal of New Finance

The well-established methodology for valuing options, the Black & Scholes formula, has been successfully challenged by Warren Buffet; who not only has been critical of the formula for the case of long-dated options, but has also applied a different approach in multi-billion derivative contracts. We study Berkshire Hathaway’s Equity Put transactions from a value-investing point of view. We show that Buffett is not using them as speculative investments, but as a disruptive -and cheap- financing source. We uncover Buffett’s methodology for valuing long-dated Equity Puts as long-term loans.