“Apple was Berkshire Hathaway’s biggest holding at the end of the fourth quarter,” Mark O’Hara writes for Market Realist. “Markets were surprised when Berkshire’s 13F revealed that the company sold some Apple shares in the quarter. However, Buffett later clarified that the shares were sold by a different investment manager at Berkshire.”
“In the fourth quarter, a broader market sell-off — coupled with China’s slowdown concerns — took a toll on Apple. The stock tumbled more than 30% in the quarter. The company’s market capitalization also fell below $700 billion for the first time since 2017,” O’Hara writes. “In an interview with CBNC, Buffett said Berkshire Hathaway’s average buying price for Apple ‘is about $141 or something like that.’ In response to a question about whether he would buy Apple ‘at $160 or something,’ Buffett replied in the negative. However, he did say, ‘I’m always interested in lower levels in a number of stocks we own.'”
O’Hara writes, “Apple is trading above $200 now, and the company’s market capitalization is approaching the $1 trillion mark.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Something tells us Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is going to be just fine regardless.
That said, there certainly was a tidy profit to be made in Q4 2018 for those who followed Buffet’s own advice: Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Apple is ridiculously undervalued currently. AAPL is on a deep discount sale for the holidays. — MacDailyNews, December 13, 2018 (AAPL intraday low: $169.55)
If you can spot overreactions in the market, you can profit from them. — MacDailyNews, January 4, 2019 (AAPL intraday low: $143.80)
SEE ALSO:
Warren Buffett says he’s holding $52 billion in Apple shares, would buy if the shares got cheaper – February 25, 2019
Berkshire Hathaway trimmed Apple shares slightly to 249.6 million shares in Q418 – February 14, 2019
$452 billion goes poof: Apple’s market value decline since peak easily exceeds the value of nearly any U.S. company – January 4, 2019
OMG! Those BH investors must really be suffering from losing all that money. If so many idiots hadn’t dumped their Apple stock (I certainly didn’t), Apple would have been flying high and not even close to being closely tailed by Microsoft, which by the way, is targeted to be valued higher than Apple. Microsoft shareholders have no worries because the Azure cloud business is said to be unlimited in growth unlike Apple’s failing iPhone business.
I’m trying to guess what next is going to befall Apple in terms of overall market value. It will likely be more rumors about a dearth of iPhone sales despite Apple not giving any sales numbers. Who needs actual numbers when speculation carries just as much weight for deciding Apple’s worth. Apple is just a stone’s throw from reaching a $1T value yet again but $50B is still not chump change. Let’s see how long it takes with Apple’s share price going up about $.50 a day.
Nice post