A little over a year ago I went to one of those free trading seminars provided by companies that want you to sign up for their coaching or training.

The concept they were teaching was day trading and so it did not interest me very much, but a couple things the speaker said were very interesting. The guy’s name was Tom Busby.

He said that once a stock breaks a hundred $ level for the first time it zooms up 10%.  For example, once a stock breaks through $100 it is going to $110. When it breaks through $200 it is going to $220, etc.

I had heard this before somewhere so I started looking it up. It turns out that Jesse Livermore mentioned this in one of his books. Livermore was probably the best trader of all time.

So now with two reference points I decided this was something worthy of looking into. [...]

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has set the date for a shareholders meeting related to its planned acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

In a preliminary proxy statement filed this morning with the SEC, Berkshire gives notice that a special meeting of shareholders will be held at 9:30a on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at Omaha’s Holland Performing Arts Center.     

Shareholders are being asked to approve a 50-for-1 split of Berkshire’s Class B shares, without splitting the higher-priced Class A shares.

That split would bring Class B shares down from about $3300 each (at today’s price) to roughly $66 each.

In an interview with CNBCjust after the Burlington deal was announced about a month ago, Buffett told us:

“I’m not big on stock splits. But by having this split, it enables anybody that has as little as one share of BNSF to opt for the tax-free exchange… So those small shareholders can have exactly the same availability [...]