As always, there is a volume of speculation after the much anticipated release of the quarterly changes in holdings report from Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A). While leaving all the deep analytical number crunching for greater minds than my own, I'd like to take a look at what Warren Buffett could be telling us through his company's latest form 13F.

Why has Warren Buffett swallowed Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI) while letting go of Norfolk Southern (NSC) and Union Pacific (UNP)? Being the master of due diligence, Mr. Buffett has most likely determined that BNI is the most attractive of the three. The future of rail transport is all but guaranteed to shine, and I believe that Mr. Buffett has exited the other two rail companies simply to avoid conflict of interest issues.

There has been a recent avalanche of press coverage regarding the alleged engineering problems being experienced by Toyota Motor Company (TM). Pretty much all of that press coverage depicts a company that is writhing in shame on the one hand and that is desperately looking to retake a foothold within itself on the other. My initial reaction to the knee-jerk downward pressure on TM that seems to be the result of this situation is: Really, you have got to be kidding.

First of all, how many of the people who might be reading this blog found themselves taken aback by the announcement that some automobiles were being recalled? Yes, I understand that the potential vehicle problems are serious. Yes, I understand that the situation affects literally millions of vehicles. However, at its root, this is just another recall of just another manufacturer's product. It's hardly an earth-shattering event.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) reported, as has become usual the past few years, terrific results. However, analysts are becoming skeptical.

The terrific results

• Revenue and earnings up 35% and 31%, respectively
• Return on equity was 38%, a massive number
• Trading and principal investments were up 35%
• Equities were up 26% -- principal trading

Planet earth results

• Equity commission up 3% -- up essentially the rate of inflation
• Assets under management grew 6% -- roughly in-line with money supply growth
• Employees up 2%

What these numbers tell you is that Goldman makes most of it money from taking risk. Especially in the fixed income, currency and commodities businesses or what is now called the FICC businesses.

The so-called FICC business you will be hearing a lot more about during the next year or possibly the next few days. That is where all the subprime and prime mortgage trading occurs. All the major Wall Street firms now group their businesses this way. This is where all the leverage trading occurs for the house account.

As we started blogging about a few months ago, be careful of the major brokerage firms. They reported tremendous results during the earlier part of this decade primarily due to fixed income profits. This is now coming to an end. Unless stock commissions go through the roof, these companies are going to have a tough time growing earnings.

Yahoo!, Yahoo!, what did you do?

While I busy myself composing a nursery rhyme about Yahoo!'s deadly warning of an hour ago, I'm looking at the red numbers on my monitor. (What rhymes with "Project Panama"? Ooh, I can just rhyme with "unforeseen delay.") Yep, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is not looking good, down $3.57, or 12.3%, and flirting with its 52-week low of $24.91. Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) down 4%, or $16.54, to $398.15 (break on through to the other, other side!). eBay investors are slamming their portfolios, too, selling off eBay to the tune of a drop of 82 cents, or 3%, to $26.02.

Yahoo!'s position as bellwether certainly has a storied history; I remember oh-so-well those heady days in early 1999 when I sat in Jeremy Siegel's finance class at Wharton and watched Yahoo! soar to ever-dizzier-heights, rising and falling $100, $200 a share in a single day. It was crazy, and the company always lead the market. That was long before the advent of a public Google; and it's interesting to see how Google and Yahoo! are interacting now that the two of them share a sector on the NASDAQ.

Yahoo! is to blame, that's for sure. It's the company's failure to grab revenue from the ever-luscious but hard-to-handle local classifieds. It's the terrifically unreliable growth. More than anything, it's the "confusion and delay" caused by the unknown future of Project Panama.

It's all Yahoo!'s fault.