Daily Journal (DJCO): Value, Growth, and Munger’s Legacy.
A forgotten Munger vehicle quietly compounding in software with a margin of safety.
Daily Journal Corporation is a weird stock. Part newspaper relic, part software company, part Munger investment vehicle. Most investors skip right over it because the story doesn’t fit neatly into a box. That’s usually where things get interesting.
I’ve known about DJCO for years, hard not to when you follow Munger and Berkshire closely. But I never paid much attention to the actual business. It was just Charlie’s quirky side project, a vehicle for his stock picks that happened to own some newspapers and software.
The long-term track record is actually pretty good. Up about 1,100% since 2000, which works out to roughly ~10% CAGR over 25 years. Most of that came from the big run between 2010 and 2021. Since then it’s given back about 40% from the peak and been choppy.
Over the past month, trading volume has randomly spiked—no news, no filings, just a sudden jump in activity that hasn’t really cooled off. For a stock that usually trades a few thousand shares a day, that’s unusual. It got me curious again.
So I figured it was time to give the company another look. It’s been a while.
Under the hood, DJCO is basically three things: Journal Technologies (court management software), the newspapers (Daily Journal and some legal publications), and the stock portfolio (about half a billion in public equities, mostly picked by Munger).
The newspapers are a rounding error. What matters is the software and the portfolio. Most people start with the portfolio because most of the positions are public and you can mark them to market. Except not all of them are disclosed. There are two mystery holdings buried in there that the company doesn’t have to report. That makes the math more interesting than it looks.
The Portfolio
This is where most investors anchor their valuation, and it’s not wrong. DJCO owns chunks of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Alibaba, and US Bancorp. Plus two mystery foreign positions they won’t disclose.
Thanks to some solid detective work by @Wabuffo and others on Twitter, those mystery positions are almost certainly Tencent and BYD. The trading volumes and correlation patterns basically give it away.
If true, and I think it is, that makes DJCO one of the few ways to own top-tier Chinese tech at a discount without actually buying Chinese stocks directly.
The market is pricing in a lot of pessimism for Chinese equities. I don’t think that’s right. Over a 2 to 3 year horizon, I’m willing to bet these positions will be worth considerably more than they are today. Munger accumulated these when everyone else was running away. He was usually early, but rarely wrong. The risk/reward on Chinese tech at these levels is compelling, and DJCO gives you that in-direct exposure.
Here’s what the portfolio looks like as of today (November 10th, 2025):