Berkshire Hathaway’s
third-quarter equity holdings, due to be disclosed late Tuesday, could show more sales of
General Motors
stock, a disappointing investment for Warren Buffett’s conglomerate.
Berkshire Hathaway (tickers: BRK.A, BRK.B) also was a buyer of about $1 billion of financial stocks in the period, according to a securities filing. Investors should find out what they were in the quarterly 13-F filing that Berkshire and other big investors file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing comes 45 days after the end of the quarter.
It wasn’t an active quarter in terms of buying and selling stocks. Purchases totaled $1.7 billion and sales came to $7 billion, according to Berkshire’s recent 10-Q report.
So far this year, Berkshire has been a net seller of about $23 billion of stocks, compared with $49 billion of net purchases in the first nine months of 2022, based on the 10-Q. Berkshire’s Class A shares ended Monday at $531,288, down 0.1% on the session.
Some elements of Berkshire’s sales and purchases are already public knowledge. It sold about $2 billion of
Chevron
(CVX) and about $500 million of
HPInc.
(HPQ), its previous filings show.
Berkshire’s largest holdings—Apple (AAPL),
Bank of America
(BAC),
Coca-Cola
(KO), and
American Express
(AXP)—were unchanged in the period, according to the 10-Q.
Berkshire accumulated a position in General Motors (GM) in the mid to late 2010s. It held about 60 million shares at the peak.
It reduced the GM holding by more than half to 22 million shares on June 30 from 50 million at the end of 2022 and may have sold more in the third quarter. Berkshire often moves out of positions over several quarters.
GM hasn’t been a notable winner for Berkshire given a cost basis of about $30 a share. GM was up 0.2% to $26.90 Monday but is down 20% so far this year, trading where it did in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.
Berkshire watchers believe the GM position was initiated by either Todd Combs or Ted Weschler, who oversee about 10% of Berkshire’s roughly $350 billion equity portfolio, rather than by Buffett, who runs about 90%. The Berkshire CEO has never been a big fan of what he calls a hypercompetitive and capital-intensive auto industry.
Berkshire’s latest 10-Q filing indicated that Berkshire bought more than $1 billion of financial stocks in the period, but the document didn’t indicate which shares. The 13-F should clear that up.
Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com
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