Warren Buffett Portfolio: Which stocks does Warren Buffett own?

It is no doubt that the last couple of years have witnessed a surge in the volume of retail investors pumping their money into the stock market. People now are more conscious about financial planning than ever before. Our previous generation was primarily alien to the stock market and preferred only low risk low return investment etc. Our generation, however, has taken a leap forward to explore arenas of the stock market.

Investing in the stock market does not mean that you are parking your money to get higher returns. “Stock market investments are subject to market risks” the sentence keeps on humming in the back of our minds whenever we talk about the stock market. What's more, in the bigger part, it is actually the case that you need to bear a risk to gain from your interests in the equity market. A question then normally jumps into our minds that "Is there any better approach? Like what about duplicating what enormous investors do?

Well, it is easier said than done! Copying big bulls cannot be an ideal investment approach but learning from them is what every investor should do! It is much needed to know what the top money managers are wagering on nowadays. The basic rule of their investing is to invest for the long-term, frequently understanding the potential in companies that others neglect to see. 

Who Is Warren Buffett?

Warren Buffett , an American business magnate and one of the most popular investors, chairs (is a Chairman, CEO ) Berkshire Hathaway, an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. 

In the early piece of his career at Berkshire, Buffett focused in on long haul (long-term) investments in publicly traded companies, yet more as of late he has purchased whole company. Berkshire now owns a diverse range of businesses including confectionery, retail, railroads, home furnishings, encyclopedias, manufacturers of vacuum cleaners, jewelry sales, manufacture and distribution of uniforms, and several regional electric and gas utilities.

Here, we will have a sneak peek into the one and only Warren Buffet’s portfolio 

Recent Changes in Warren Buffet’s Portfolio

Offloading Pharma

Pharma company AbbVie Inc. was one of the major investments that Buffett made in the healthcare industry. The Oracle of Omaha started buying AbbVie shares near the third quarter of 2020, quite clearly to gain from the rising stock prices of pharmaceutical companies in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we can see that this is pretty good speculation, considering how early he forecasted the growth that pharmas are going to register in the short term. However, the investment did not go for long enough.

From the first quarter of 2021 itself, Buffett started offloading his investments from AbbVie. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, sold 11.4 million shares of AbbVie. The latest figures show that Berkshire still had over 3 million shares of AbbVie, amounting to $410.7 million. Considering that the drugmakers may not be able to deliver the same sterling performance in the post COVID era and the fact that Buffett has been withdrawing his investments from the company, it is likely that he may exit completely from the same.

Bullish on Oil Major

Here you learn the very first principle of investment- don’t put all eggs in one basket! We can see the diversification here that Warren Buffett maintains- pharma and an oil major! Coming back to the context, Buffett invested in Chevron, a US oil major, in the last quarter of 2020, back then there was high volatility in the oil industry. This forced the big bull to reduce his stake within 6 months of his initial investment. Things turned around, and oil prices spiked owing to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. This made Buffett buy 9.5 million shares of Chevron by the end of 2021, taking his total stake to $4.5 billion.

Perfect Speculation on Video Game Publisher

What can be more perfect than speculating and buying stocks of a company that is going to get acquired by a major tech giant? Nothing! Weeks before Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a game publisher, Warren Buffett invested about $1 billion in Activision Blizzard. The acquisition is planned as a $68.7 billion buyout deal with shares at $95 apiece. However, Buffett purchased the shares at just $77 apiece, which gives him a gain of $18 per share in just a few weeks. 

Cutting Down in Insurance Broker

It’s not that Warren Buffett keeps his competitors at bay. Even though Buffett’s own firm Berkshire Hathaway has its own insurance business, the company invested a sizable amount in insurance broker Marsh & McLennan by the last quarter of 2020. However, things didn’t go as expected and Buffett started cutting down his holdings in the insurance company. Starting from the second quarter of 2021, Berkshire Hathaway has brought down its holdings in Marsh & McLennan from over 5 million shares to just around 400k. 

So this has been a glance over how Warren Buffett manages his investments. Here is the list of all major investments and disinvestment that Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway has been in quite recently:

So what we deciphered from this? Holdings of investment firms like Berkshire Hathaway are made public from filings made to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This, however, does not mean that you should copy the same. Why?

Because you cannot copy at all!

It is true that firms like Berkshire Hathaway have to make their holding public with the SEC but they do not do this immediately. Moreover, they can ask the SEC to hold their filings for some time before making them public. So there is always a time gap between their investments and the time the information reaches you. Copying the same thing after enough time has passed may not reap any desirable result.

No information on the investment goal and approach

There are two things that you cannot decipher just by looking at the investments- what’s the purpose of the investment? And how will the investment/disinvestment proceed? Investment firms not only invest in a company to make capital gains, there can be other reasons as well. Furthermore, they do not prefer to invest in all the sum at once, instead follow a staggered approach. The same applies when they start disinvesting. You cannot mimic this, and even if you try to do so, you will lag behind by a big gap to reap any fruit out of it.

Bad investment strategy

Copying a portfolio is not a healthy investment strategy. You can have different financial goals, different abilities to invest, you have a family, you can also have some plans for the future, or say, you are a human being and not an investment company. Investment firms pool resources from a number of investors and then frame investment strategies accordingly. You do not have that much resource at your disposal so copying the portfolio may prove too expensive. 

Not all investments make profits

Even big investors make losses and sometimes the losses overshadow the gains. In our above examples only we have seen how some ventures proved to be loss-making investments for Warren Buffett. However, since he has a colossal amount of capital with him and his firm, He can bear a major loss but you may not. Hence, it is better to avoid betting on others’ portfolios and build your own investment plan.

Having said all these, you should note that learning from Warren Buffett’s investment is different from copying, i.e.; there is much to learn. You can also pick the stocks from his portfolio which you believe will perform better in the coming future. For this, we give you the list of top holdings of Warren Buffett from Berkshire Hathaway so that you can enhance your portfolio even better.

As we can see, Warren Buffett has invested huge sums in big market cap companies like Apple, Bank of America, American Express, Coca Cola, etc. You can follow the same investment approach. Investing in top US companies is now easy with INDmoney. Create your free US stocks now and own stocks of top US companies.