Warren Buffet has dumped half his stake in Apple
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has offloaded nearly half of its giant stake in Apple in a surprising move.
The Omaha-based conglomerate disclosed that its stake in the iPhone maker was valued at $84.2 billion at the end of the second quarter, meaning the Oracle of Omaha offloaded 49.4% of the bet technological.
Buffett reduced his stake in Apple by 13% in the first quarter and hinted at Berkshire's annual meeting in May that this was for tax reasons. Buffett noted that selling "a little bit of Apple" this year would be beneficial to Berkshire shareholders in the long run, should the capital gains tax be raised in the future by a U.S. government eager to fill a growing fiscal deficit.
But the size of this sale suggests it could be more than just a tax savings. Here we are faced with a repositioning of the historic investor in the High Tech sector.
After declining in the first quarter on fears of a delay in AI innovation, Apple shares took off in the second quarter, gaining 23% and reaching a new record, thanks to more details provided to investors on the future of the artificial intelligence.
It won't be clear why the famed long-term-focused investor is selling the stake that Berkshire first bought more than eight years ago, whether for business reasons, market valuation or portfolio management concerns (Buffett's usually doesn't want a single holding to become too large). Berkshire's stake in Apple was once so large that it took up half of its stock portfolio.
It must be said that, evaluating Apple's current price and the performance of the indices, we could be faced with a timely abandonment of exposure to a technology stock market that appears overvalued and is heading for a sharp decline. Here is the value of the shares in the last six months.
Apple Berkshire began buying Apple shares in 2016 under the influence of Buffett lieutenants Ted Weschler and Todd Combs. Over the years, Buffett has grown so fond of Apple that he dramatically increased his stake to become Berkshire's largest and called the tech giant his second-largest business after his insurer group.
Buffett has recently started selling his most important holdings. Buffett recently began downsizing his second-largest holding, Bank of America, dumping $3.8 billion worth of the bank's shares after 12 days of selling. All this cannot be accidental.
Overall, the quarterly report showed that Buffett dumped stocks last quarter, which saw the S&P 500 rise to a record high in anticipation of a "soft landing" for the US economy. That soft landing was called into question this week with Friday's weaker-than-expected July jobs report.
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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/warren-buffet-ha-scaricato-meta-della-sua-partecipazione-in-apple/ on Sat, 03 Aug 2024 14:22:10 +0000.