Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway reportedly appeared to sell about $4 billion of Apple shares (AAPL) in the third quarter.
Berkshire also was a seller of financial stocks and a buyer of industrial stocks in the period, according to the 10-Q. Berkshire’s equity portfolio, which totaled $245 billion on Sept. 30.
Disclosures in the company’s 10-Q report were released Saturday in conjunction with the company’s third-quarter earnings statement.
Berkshire didn’t explicitly say that it sold Apple shares but an analysis of its equity holdings suggests that, Barron’s explained.
“Berkshire held $111.7 billion of Apple stock on Sept. 30, or about 965 million shares based on Apple’s closing price that day of $115.81. On June 30, it held $91.5 billion, or about 1.003 billion shares based on Apple’s split-adjusted stock price of $91.20 that day. This indicates a sale of about 38 million shares, or roughly $4 billion,” Barron’s said.
Berkshire’s 10-Q showed that Berkshire bought about $17.6 billion of equities in the third quarter and sold $12.9 billion, for a net purchase of nearly $5 billion.
Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway Ispent $16 billion buying back its stock in the first nine months of 2020, more than triple its previous annual record, Bloomberg reported.
The repurchases even surpass many of Berkshire’s biggest investments in recent years, including 2019’s Occidental Petroleum Corp. financing deal, and total more than Berkshire has ever spent in one year buying Apple Inc. stock.
The record buybacks, coupled with investments in Japanese trading houses and deals for natural gas assets, mark a shift from the start of the pandemic, when Buffett, 90, took a more cautious approach and even dumped his stakes in major U.S. airlines. The billionaire investor has long hungered for an “elephant-sized” deal to put huge sums of capital to work but has failed to find lucrative, large acquisitions in recent years.
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