Warren Buffett 'sBerkshire Hathaway sold a net $2 billion of stock in the third quarter.- The investor's company boosted its share buybacks to $7.6 billion in the period.
Warren Buffett's $4 ramped up its buying and selling of
Buffett's conglomerate - which owns scores of businesses including See's Candies and Geico, and holds multibillion-dollar stakes in Apple, Coca-Cola, and other public companies - spent $1.4 billion on stocks and sold $3.4 billion worth in the period. For comparison, it bought about $1 billion worth and sold $2.1 billion of stock in the second quarter.
The latest transactions mean Berkshire sold about $2 billion of stock on a net basis last quarter, lifting its net stock sales for the nine months to September 30 to $7 billion, its $4.
Berkshire also spent $7.6 billion on share repurchases last quarter, after slowing its rate of buybacks from $6.6 billion in the first quarter to $6 billion in the second quarter. It repurchased just over $20 billion of its stock in the first nine months of this year.
Despite the more aggressive buybacks, the company's cash pile swelled to a record $149 billion, up from $144 billion in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Berkshire's revenue climbed 12% to about $71 billion as many of its businesses rebounded from the pandemic. However, a sharp decline in investment and derivative gains meant its net income slumped by almost two-thirds to below $11 billion.
Buffett said at Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting in May that he would happily deploy around $80 billion of Berkshire's cash. Yet near-record stock prices, fierce competition for acquisitions from private-equity firms and SPACs, and Berkshire's rising stock price making buybacks less enticing, have come together to make it $4.
Buffett and his team have reacted to the challenge by broadening their horizons. Over the past year and a half, Berkshire has invested in technology companies such as $4e and $4, a $4, and a $4.
On the other hand, Berkshire has concentrated its portfolio. It has $4 in JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, the $4, and several other companies since the market crashed in spring 2020. It will reveal the contents of its US stock portfolio as of September 30 later this month.
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