Stockpickr: Trade Like the Berkshire Board

Although Microsoft(MSFT Quote) is obviously Gates' top holding, it's important to note that Gates and the Gates Foundation invest their money through Cascade Investment, which has a diverse group of value-oriented holdings.

For instance, Buffett just bought a railroad, Burlington Northern Santa Fe(BNI Quote), and has announced he is building positions in two others. Meanwhile, Cascade owns a Canadian railway, Canadian National Railway(CNI Quote). Check out the Cascade Investment page on Stockpickr for a full list of their investments.

Microsoft seems fairly priced at around $29 a share. Unlike when shares were at $22 earlier this year, it doesn't seem like a no-brainer to buy them here. Everything depends on Vista sales over the next year, how Xbox sales and games for the Xbox ramp up, and if Microsoft figures out how to monetize the MSN Internet portal.

My guess is that when Gates is sitting around during lunch breaks at Berkshire board meetings and starts chatting with Sue Decker, chief financial officer of Yahoo!, interesting things can happen. And I'd speculate that a tighter relationship will develop between Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Another name in the Berkshire Hathaway board of directors portfolio is Convera(CNVR Quote). Donald Keough, formerly the president of Coca-Cola(KO Quote), sits on the board of Berkshire Hathaway and the board of Convera. Convera can be thought of as the Google of the enterprise software world. It provides software that can search through disparate corporate databases for various types of data to analyze.