2024-08-05 10:12:14
Investor Warren Buffett is increasingly relying on cash: his investment company has sold a large portion of its Apple shares.
Star investor Warren Buffett is investing less and less in stocks. After years of stock market boom, the 93-year-old dumped shares in Apple and other companies on a large scale from the portfolios of his investment company Berkshire Hathaway in the second quarter.
As the company announced on Saturday, the holdings shrank by 390 million to about 400 million Apple shares by the end of June. Buffett’s company announced that the Apple stake was still valued at 84.2 billion US dollars at the end of the second quarter.
Buffett had already cashed in 115 million Apple shares in the first quarter. At the meeting, he indicated that there were tax reasons for this. However, the fact that Buffett has now sold Apple shares again on a large scale suggests that this is not just a model to save taxes. It could mean more that Buffett no longer expects much growth in the currently well-performing tech stocks.
Buffett stressed that he remains an Apple fan, saying that the iPhone manufacturer will remain Berkshire’s largest stock investment in the future.
The sales increased Berkshire Hathaway’s cash holdings by almost $88 billion to $277 billion in the second quarter. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which the company sold more shares than it bought. “We would love to spend it,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual general meeting in early May. “But we won’t spend it unless we believe it will give us very little risk and make a lot of money.”
“If you look at the overall picture of Berkshire and the macroeconomic data, you can safely conclude that Berkshire is taking a defensive stance,” said analyst Cathy Seifert of CFRA Research. She rates Berkshire shares as a buy. The stock markets sold off on Friday. Weak US labor market data had fueled concerns about the US economy. Investors were also concerned about whether the US Federal Reserve had waited too long to cut interest rates.