Investing
5 Stocks That Warren Buffett Should Sell -- or Add to the Stake
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Being Warren Buffett may come with one of the best job titles in the business world. It also comes with the most responsibility, and the investment community and public gets to play armchair quarterback by analyzing or criticizing Buffett’s every move. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) is one of the largest and most recognized companies in America, but it would also be considered as having one America’s largest in-house investment portfolios.
24/7 Wall St. reports in detail each and every quarter about Buffett’s top stock holdings. Just four positions make up about 58% of the total fair value of a public stock portfolio that was shown to be over $107 billion in the last filing, while the equity position was listed as over $113 billion at the last report. Then there is the other side of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio: the stakes that are so small one wonders why the conglomerate even bothers owning them.
While investors genuinely care about when Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-B) buys or sells a stock, Team Buffett often tends to keep a tail position around in former large stock holdings. The reason may be that he still gets to keep tabs on the companies or still gets to call in as a shareholder. There is also another notion, that the portfolio managers just never really get around to cleaning up the tail of a position.
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It turns out that Buffett has five public stocks that used to be far larger stakes or which seem like token positions. The take of 24/7 Wall St. is that these positions either need to cleared out entirely or they should be grown into something worth the time of Buffett and his team.
The stakes that Buffett needs to delete or add to include Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Lee Enterprises Inc. (NYSE: LEE), United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS), Kraft Foods Group Inc. (NASDAQ: KRFT) and Mondelez International Inc. (NASDAQ: MDLZ). There are of course other stakes that make less sense, but these are the first places where Buffett could clean up the portfolio.
Now that portfolio managers Todd Combs and Ted Weschler are handling one Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary each, it just makes sense for Buffett and his team to manage fewer positions of stock. That is particularly true for those positions that are a few million dollars.
Keep in mind that an equity stake of $100 million or less represents less than 0.1% of the total equity portfolio at Berkshire Hathaway. Also, a $100 million stake now represents just 0.3% of the market cap of Berkshire Hathaway. How can such small positions benefit anyone?
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Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson was again the same tiny stake of only 327,100 shares, but it was much lower than in years past. Back in 2011, we noted that J&J was down to about 42.6 million shares, after having peaked at 62 million shares in prior years. Johnson & Johnson has been a solid dividend grower and has managed to overcome most of its supply chain issues to the point that shares have risen over 50% since early in 2012. J&J shares have not done much of anything in 2015 yet, but analysts keep ticking their targets higher and higher.
Johnson & Johnson has a market cap that is $275 billion, which would allow Buffett to own as much as he would want to own without disrupting the share price here. It is time for Buffett to either re-engage J&J for a much larger stake or to jettison this tiny tail of what used to me a very large stake.
United Parcel Service
The position in UPS was the same tiny 59,400 shares, but this is way down from 2012. In 2011, Buffett’s stake in UPS was 1.429 million shares. While this larger stake would represent over $140 million today, had it not been sold, the reality is that the new stake represents only about $6 million.
UPS is one of those companies that enjoys close to a duopoly with FedEx in competing with the U.S. Postal Service. This stake would fit in with being a Buffett stock now, and the company’s $89 billion in market cap would allow Buffett to park enough capital here without greatly disrupting the share price.
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Lee Enterprises
This stake was the same size at only 88,863 shares, but it may just be a token strategic stake after Buffett bought much of Lee’s debt. Buffett originally tried to keep the stake confidential, but that effort was denied by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lee fits in with Buffett’s ownership of local media for news and advertising. At the time, Lee had over 50 daily papers and more than 300 weekly newspapers and niche publications, with a $59.5 million valuation. This feels too small for the likes of Buffett and his team, and it was a 1.655 million share stake in Lee worth a paltry $2 million at the time. Even if Buffett wanted to own Lee entirely, its market cap is a mere $180 million in mid-2015.
If Buffett wants to own more local media, why not just acquire the rest of Lee? Maybe he just doesn’t need to. Buffett is no stranger to owning media at the local and national level.
Kraft Foods
Kraft Foods Group has been the same small stake of only 192,666 shares, but this used to be much higher. The selling history was that Buffett already was lowering the Kraft Foods stake in 2010, after having been as high as over 138 million shares.
Buffett had been critical of the Kraft-Cadbury deal, and he sold off his shares through time while still ending up with a small Mondelez stake as well. This now ties in with the Kraft-Heinz deal, so it will be interesting to see how this stake will pan out ahead. Buffett was always interested if food mergers.
Mondelez
Mondelez has remained the same small position again at 578,000 shares, but it remains far lower than in the past. As a reminder, this was the “other Kraft” after Kraft decided to break into two companies, which got it booted off of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
If one of the two Kraft stakes does get sold here, it would seem almost certain that it would be the Mondelez stake, now that Buffett is involved in the Kraft-Heinz deal.
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