“Warren Buffett has revealed that Berkshire Hathaway’s stake in Apple is twice as large as previously disclosed at more than $18bn but said that the iPhone maker’s share price is now so high that it is no longer an attractive investment,” Stephen Foley and Adam Samson report for The Financial Times.
“In a television interview to mark the release of his latest annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, Mr Buffett said that he had personally bought more than $8bn of Apple shares in January,” Foley and Samson report. “Berkshire is now one of Apple’s top five shareholders with a stake worth $18.2bn.”
“Mr Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick that he would not normally discuss his trading activity but he could talk about Apple ‘since we’re not buying it now and it’s at a price different than I would buy it now,'” Foley and Samson report. “He said: ‘We can change our mind tomorrow. We have not bought Apple since the earnings report came out because it shot up some then. One of the fellows in the office has about 10m shares and I have, for Berkshire’s account, 123m.’ The ‘fellows in the office’ are Mr Buffett’s investment deputies, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, former hedge fund managers who now manage more than $10bn apiece, one of whom was responsible for the first purchases of Apple stock last year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: And, the winner is…
Never have the advantages of having some young blood in the office been quite so evident.
Carl Icahn must be kicking himself 🙂
But… but… Warren doesn’t buy stocks of companies he doesn’t understand.
Now that AAPL is at a price that Berkshire Hathaway will no longer buy, they publicly announce that they own a lot of AAPL stock so that the lemmings will rush in. Because if Warren owns it the stock must be good. So, we can expect a short bump in the price again followed by a swift exit by Warren.
What you say could happen, but it’s not something to worry about. If Warren sold his stock at a time when AAPL was doing well ( unlike Carl Icahn did ) there may be a brief dip in AAPL as a reaction, but any dip would only be short-lived.
Icahn sold a hell of a lot of shares about this time last year and made sure that everybody knew about it, which could mean that he was also shorting AAPL at that time, but as we have seen, AAPL has climbed quite well in the last year.
The bottom line is that while people can try and manipulate the price to a certain extent, the real driver for AAPL is the performance of the company itself and the fundamentals of the company govern the longer terms prospects.
Forever the optimist you are.
Be Fearful When Buffet is Greedy and Greedy When Buffet is Fearful.
MDN’s take: “Never have the advantages of having some young blood in the office been quite so evident.”
Not quite, MDN—Buffett stated that he himself made the choice to invest in AAPL:
http://fortune.com/2017/02/27/warren-buffett-apple-shares/
“He also owned up to the fact that Apple is one of the legendary investor’s own stock picks, and not one chosen by his lieutenants.”
Wrong.
“The ‘fellows in the office’ are Mr Buffett’s investment deputies, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, former hedge fund managers who now manage more than $10bn apiece, one of whom was responsible for the first purchases of Apple stock last year.”
Only the choice to increase BRKA’s AAPL position was Buffett’s, not the original purchase to get into AAPL.
Why not read my citation instead of making things up, “Brutal Truth”?
Hmmm, silence from the “Tim Cook should forget about his political causes and just fix Apple” crowd……
We should cheer on Slow Pipeline Cook now that one of the worlds richest people decided to put some pocket change into the biggest US corporation? Why? Buffet is just placing a bet that Apple will continue to ignore its users and instead spend more billions on stock games to please Wall Street. That is what Cook does.