New York – Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway dumped its entire $850 million stake in General Motors (GM) last quarter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Shares of the automaker, which recently forecast that a strike by autoworkers this autumn would cut pre-tax profits by about $800 million this year, were down about 0.3% on Wednesday.
GM’s holdings are a small percentage of Berkshire’s $313 billion portfolio, but the firm appears to be reducing its position in a number of large blue chip names.
The Oracle of Omaha also sold some of Berkshire’s other holdings in the third quarter, including Amazon, HP, Chevron, Procter & Gamble, UPS, Mondelez International and Johnson & Johnson.
Overall, Berkshire Hathaway was a net seller of shares in the third quarter, selling about $7 billion and buying $1.7 billion. Over the past year, the company has sold about $40 billion worth of shares.
However, Berkshire Hathaway did acquire some shares in satellite radio company Sirius XM, buying nearly 10 million shares in the third quarter for a total of $50 million – or just under 1% of Sirius’ total market value.
Sirius shares were up nearly 6% on Wednesday.
Berkshire ended the quarter with a record $157 billion in cash. The company had about $147 billion at the end of the second quarter, smashing the previous record of $149 billion set in 2021.
The cash, mostly held in short-term government bonds, has grown significantly as interest rates have risen and deal-making on Wall Street has dried up, giving Buffett fewer opportunities to acquire new companies.
Buffett brushed off Fitch Ratings’ downgrade of the US’s credit rating from the top AAA to AA+ earlier this year, telling CNBC on 3 August that Berkshire had bought $10 billion of US Treasuries that week after doing the same the week before.
“The only question for next Monday is whether we’re going to buy $10 billion in 3-month or 6-month [Treasuries],” Buffett said at the time.
Earlier this month, Berkshire Hathaway reported that its overseas bets had also paid off.
Berkshire revealed in 2020 that it had bought stakes of around 5% in each of Japan’s top five trading companies, with investments totalling $6.7 billion at the time.
It doubled down this year, taking its stakes in each company to more than 8.5% on average, as Japan’s stock market soared to a 33-year high.
“It was like God just opened a chest and just poured money in,” Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman, said of the investments in an interview with the Acquired podcast released in October.
Berkshire Hathaway’s shares are up about 15.8% so far this year. The S&P 500 is up 17.4% over the same period.
