Investors really hate 80% of Berkshire Hathaway right now
Berkshire Hathaway is a lot of things. The seat of world’s most famous investor: Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha. An insurance company. A value investing haven. An industrial conglomerate. The host of annual bashes to celebrate capitalism.
It is also, literally, one-fifth Apple.
Berkshire’s latest 13F filing shows ownership of 789,368,450 shares of Apple. That position is equal to a little less than 20% of Berkshire’s current market capitalization.
Apple has been on an absolute tear lately — up more than 12% in five sessions after investors decided they liked the company’s AI strategy. That’s its best one-week performance since August 2020.
Berkshire, being one-fifth Apple, would surely benefit from this, right? Right?
Nope. It’s down about 1% over this period.
The value of Berkshire’s Apple position has gone up by roughly $18.5 billion, while Berkshire’s market cap is down almost $7 billion in the same period.
The unavoidable implication is that investors are taking a very negative view of everything else in Buffett & Co.’s portfolio, from the other publicly traded companies to the ones they fully own — where many of the big-ticket items are in the industrials or utilities space.
Of course, market breadth has been abysmal lately, with the kind of value companies Buffett tends to prize doing poorly.
But what’s striking is just how negative the view is on Berkshire ex-Apple: the $25+ billion decline is roughly equal to the losses across one of the worst-performing US sectors (utilities) during the same time!
