The world’s most famous value investor is sitting on an enormous cash pile. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway currently holds more than $325 billion in cash and equivalents, according to the firm’s quarterly financial statements, most of it in U.S. Treasury bills.
Everyone wants to know why. Is he cashing out because he sees an unstable market priced too high? Are there no opportunities presenting themselves to him? Is he making way for a successor?
The stock market is hot, booming, on a winning steak. The S&P 500 surpassed the 6,000 mark. This year has been one of the best-performing years since 2000. Corporate valuations are soaring, and profits are too. This week, Nvidia crushed expectations, doubling its profits with its revenues surging on the back of artificial intelligence. But Buffett has always looked for undervalued companies with potential to invest in for the long term: a value investor. The Oracle of Omaha, as he is called, once said he doesn’t invest in things he doesn’t understand, such as technology companies—apart from Apple, of course. That said, part of that mounting cash reserve is from aggressively selling shares of Apple.
Cathy Seifert, a director at CFRA Research, explained that “Apple was becoming an outsize piece of the portfolio,” so the offloading “made sense.” Berkshire was late to the tech game but had a decent run with Apple, she said. On the other hand, Meyer Shields, a managing director at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, said the firm might have thought “it was fairly valued, or maybe more than fairly valued.”
“Berkshire has succeeded over the decades by being boring in that way,” he said.
Either way, it’s a lot more difficult to speculate about the cash. While it’s a crazy market, Seifert said, Buffett is a value investor who “tends to zig when everybody else zags… He’s not going to be swayed by momentum, certainly not.”
According to Shields, what some describe as a hot stock market, “Warren Buffett would describe as overpriced.” Berkshire investment managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler seem to have opened the company to technology exposure, he said, but it’s still possible they see a lot of it as “overpriced relative to whatever internal valuation metrics that they use, and because of that, they’re not averse to not investing in that market.”
However, Berkshire did recently buy some stocks: Domino’s Pizza, a favorite pizza franchise, and Pool Corporation, a swimming pool supplies company. After all, Buffett favors junk-food stocks (and really, just junk food, but who doesn’t). At the end of the third quarter, Berkshire’s stake in Domino’s was valued at around $549 million while the Pool stake was valued at about $152 million, according to Yahoo Finance.
