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Comment by lujim | Hacker News Reader

Took. This happened in March at an average price of $109. Today it is around $93. Berkshire just disclosed it today.

That's a really good point. Various articles are spinning it as if they bought AAPL because it's so cheap after the nosedive it's been in lately. That's not what the timeline was, and isn't really Berkshire's MO to time the market like that.

Well we don't know that he didn't buy more at the cheap price as well though. He could disclose today and have bought some on Friday at the lower price.

But like you said, we don't know that. At this point, that is just speculation about a fact we have no reason to believe happened at all.

You don't know what price they bought it at, it could have been purchased at any time between Jan and March (where it traded in the mid $90s frequently).

True, good point. AS of March at an AVERAGE price of $109

And in a quarter, they may disclose another contrarian buy to dollar cost average that down to $100.

Are billion dollar investments in public companies not public knowledge? (Serious question)

Institutional investment managers are required to disclose their investments. In this case it's called a 13F.

Corporate insiders (officers, directors, and employees) need to disclose trades involving their own company.

I don't believe an individual trading his or her own money need to disclose anything to the SEC. I could be wrong though.

Rank and file employees generally do not have to disclose their trades. I've worked at 3 public companies and never had to disclose to the government. At Merrill Lynch (and at other private investment houses), we did have to have ALL of our trades cc'd to the compliance desk, but that's a Wall St thing, not a government thing.

I'm pretty sure the rule is around owning a certain fraction of a stock (to make sure it's publicly known if you're trying to buy a controlling stake, because this would affect the price), not the dollar-value of it. And Berkshire owns ~0.18% of AAPL.

They are once the quarterly 13F reports come out.

https://www.sec.gov/answers/form13f.htm

For smaller companies it can also come out in a 13D which is faster (within 10 days), but only if the investment is more than 5% of the company. That's why there are a lot of ownership stakes of 4.9%.

>only if the investment is more than 5% of the company

Interesting, I think it's the same percentage in Indian stock exchanges.

> That's why there are a lot of ownership stakes of 4.9%.

Is reporting speed really important enough to change the size of your investment?

Apparently so. Hedge funds really don't like to disclose their positions.

Seems public to me. What am I missing?

It's amusing that BH paid the highest price you could pay for this stock in the last few months. :)

It's probably hard to buy a billion dollars of any stock without driving the price up, even if you spread purchases out.

For most stocks, but not Apple because it's both very high market cap and very highly traded. It has been averaging 43M shares traded a day which is over 4x the size of Buffet's trade. There are also plenty of days with it trading at much more than this size (it did 113M on April 27).

How many days do you think one would need to spread out a purchase of 1/4 of a stocks average daily volume in order not to noticeably move the price?

Presumably Buffet would respond to you by noting that the stock market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run. i.e. for the companies he owns, he isn't generally concerned with short term stock price fluctuations.

What an odd time to invest in Apple. Its in something of a slump with how it missed the mark on wearables and in something of a milquetoast design/innovation phase in general. When the watch came out Apple was selling for nearly $140. Now its $93. The market is not showing strong confidence in Apple, at least in the short term, and there's nothing on the Apple roadmap that says big growth in the future.

I wonder if this is a sign of the internal politics at BH as 85 year old Buffet gets closer to retirement/death. The younger guys want to make their mark and betting on a typically galloping horse like Apple is a nice way to start the pissing contents with others wanting to run BH after Buffet goes. If Apple does a massive rebound then the guy who made this call will be seen as the young whippersnapper who 'knows tech' and can take BH into the 21st century.

Buying low is not a bad place to start for an investing strategy.

I just looked at Apple's 3 year. It seems to dip and rise significantly. Maybe BH thinks that this is the bottom of a dip. I guess we'll see, but I can't remember the last time I was excited by an Apple product. They seem to be graying faster than expected as the mobile revolution evens out.

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