Apple was up more than 4% by Thursday 3 p.m. on a $1 billion bet by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Buy low, sell high.
There is some poetry perhaps in Carl Icahn selling his Apple shares to Warren Buffett.
— Horace Dediu (@asymco) May 16, 2016
See Reuters, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.
UPDATE: Berkshire Hathaway bought the shares, not Buffett. See here.
Yup, here we go again.
The difference between Carl Icahn and Warren Buffet: Buffett only invests for the long-term, Icahn only trades for the short-term. Arguably, their definition of long-term and short-term may be different from the rest of us, but one thing is clear, they both know how to make money. Warren’s bet on Apple is an anomaly for him, in that he very rarely invests in Tech companies. His investing in Apple clearly signals that he believes it is a blue chip company worth owning.
“We don’t get into things we don’t understand. We buy very few things, but we buy very big positions. Know what you own, own a few and buy a lot.” – Warren Buffett
Great comment. One of the better ones I’ve ever read here (or there).
The fear around AAPL has been palpable, and it has been very much a self-fulfilling prophecy. How smart was Warren Buffett to read that fear and start his acquizition!
Sorry – acquisition not “aquizition”. Got interrupted.
The interesting aspect is how small Mr. Buffett’s aquisition is relative to the outstanding AAPL stock count. Apple itself will dwarf this number in it’s AAPL purchases this quarter.
Logically, if it’s a smart buy for Mr. Buffett, it’s just as smart a buy for Apple. In fact, looked at as an independent acquisition by a long term holder of AAPL, Apple’s purchase of at least (6.62-5.48=) 1.14 billion shares or at least (1.14/6.62=) 17.2% of the shares outstanding in 2012, at an average price about equal to Mr. Buffett’s price, makes Apple about a hundred times smarter than Mr. Buffett!
So how dumb does that make the stock market?
“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” ~ Warren Buffett