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- Warren Buffett slashed his stakes in JPMorgan and Wells Fargo in the second quarter, a regulatory filing revealed on Thursday.
- The billionaire investor’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate also took a $560 million stake in miner Barrick Gold.
- Buffett trimmed several other holdings including BNY Mellon, PNC Financial, and SiriusXM.
- The portfolio update settled speculation about Berkshire’s disposals after it reported almost $13 billion in net stock sales last quarter.
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Warren Buffett cut his JPMorgan and Wells Fargo stakes and invested in Barrick Gold last quarter, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.
The famed investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO slashed his company’s JPMorgan stake by more than 60% to about 22 million shares, and its Wells Fargo position by more than 25% to about 238 million shares.
Those two holdings, which ranked among Berkshire’s 10 largest positions at the end of the first quarter, were worth about $2.1 billion and $6 billion respectively as of June 30.
Buffett and his team also bought about 21 million shares of Barrick Gold, a gold-and-copper miner. The position was valued at about $560 million at the end of the second quarter.
Berkshire dumped the rest of its Goldman Sachs stake in the period, which it cut by more than 80% in the first quarter. It also lowered its positions in BNY Mellon, PNC Financial, and SiriusXM. In contrast, it boosted its investments in Kroger, Suncor Energy, and Store Capital.
Overall, Berkshire’s stock portfolio grew in value by 15% to about $202 billion, as the value of its Apple stake soared by more than 40% to about $89 billion as of June 30.
The filing comes after Berkshire reported almost $13 billion in net stock sales in the second quarter. Its disposal of the “big four” airline stocks in April – which the latest filing confirmed — accounted for almost half of that amount, leaving another $6 billion to $7 billion in proceeds unexplained until now.
Berkshire’s earnings fueled speculation about what Buffett with sold, with investor Chris Bloomstran predicting he ditched JPMorgan, and finance professor David Kass anticipating a Wells Fargo exit.
The stock sales last quarter strike a contrast to Buffett’s aggressive spending in recent weeks. Berkshire struck a $10 billion deal to acquire most of Dominion Energy’s natural-gas assets in early July, plowed more than $12 billion into Bank of America stock in the three weeks to August 4, and appears to have repurchased more than $2 billion of its stock in July.
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