OMAHA (AP) – Warren Buffett’s company unloaded a number of the smaller investments from its portfolio in the third quarter including General Motors, Mondelez and Johnson & Johnson.
Berkshire Hathaway filed a quarterly update on its USD313 billion portfolio with the Securities and Exchange Commission late on Tuesday.
But the story of this quarter might be what’s not in the report because Berkshire got permission from regulators to exclude one or more holdings while it is making changes to them. Those investments will be disclosed later after Berkshire does its buying.
Many investors like to follow the changes in Berkshire’s portfolio because they want to see Buffett’s latest investment decisions, although some of the smaller changes made each quarter are likely the work of one of Berkshire’s two other stock pickers. The filing doesn’t make clear which decisions Buffett made and Berkshire doesn’t comment on these, but Buffett generally handles all investments worth USD1 billion or more.
The only new investments revealed in the report was a nearly USD8 million stake in Atlanta Braves Holdings and a USD44 million Sirius XM investment.
Buffett has long been a baseball fan and once owned part of the local minor league franchise in his hometown of Omaha. But the Braves were spun off from one of Berkshire’s other holdings, Liberty Media, over the summer, so that’s likely where Berkshire picked up the shares.
Berkshire got rid of its investments in Procter & Gamble, UPS and Celanese Corp.
At the same time, Berkshire also trimmed its holdings in Chevron, HP, Globe Life and Markel though it had been previously disclosed in other filings that Buffett’s company was selling some of its Chevron and HP shares.
