Filings this week show that Berkshire Hathaway continued to build its Occidental Petroleum position with nine straight days of buying through Monday. It is still selling BYD shares, but at a slower pace, and it made a very small reduction in a Liberty Media stock.
OXY’s stock price gain probably ended nine session buying streak
It appears Berkshire Hathaway ended its Occidental Petroleum buying streak on Monday, the ninth straight day it added to its stake in the oil giant.
A filing that evening shows Berkshire bought a total of 2.9 million shares on Thursday, June 13, Friday, June 14, and Monday, June 17.
It paid almost $176 million, putting the average purchase price at $59.70 per share.
The nine days of purchases began on June 5 as OXY’s share price came back down to around $60, the level that has prompted buying in the past.
Over those nine days, Berkshire bought 7.3 million shares for nearly $435 million, an average price of $59.86 per share.
As of Monday, it reported owning 255.3 million shares, a 28.8% stake valued at more than $15.5 billion based on today’s closing price of $60.92.
OXY is the sixth largest equity holding in Berkshire’s portfolio, accounting for about 4% of its total market value.
Occidental shares rallied on Tuesday after the filing, trading between $60.83 and $61.60, which is more than Berkshire apparently likes to pay.
Under SEC rules, it has three business days to disclose new purchases. With the market closed Wednesday for Juneteenth, the deadline for any buys on Tuesday is tonight.
As of 10:45 pm ET, there has not been a filing.
And with the stock trading as high as $62.96 on Thursday and not going below $60.72 today, it seems unlikely purchases would have resumed during the rest of the week.
We won’t know for sure about Thursday and today, however, until next week.
Berkshire BYD reduction tops 66%, but pace of selling slows
Berkshire’s stake in the Chinese electric carmaker BYD continues to shrink, with almost two-thirds of its original 225 million share position eliminated as of June 11.
The rules in Hong Kong only require a filing when a transaction moves the owner’s percentage stake through a whole number.
That’s a drop of 11.9 million shares, or almost 14%, since a filing last October revealed Berkshire’s stake had fallen below 8% to 87.6 million shares.
Since Berkshire started cutting back on BYD in 2022, the pace of the sales has been slowing, as indicated by the flattening curve in the chart above.
The move from 8% to 7% took 230 calendar days, averaging nearly 52 thousand shares a day.
The drop from 9% to 8% over 128 days averaged almost 86 thousand shares per day.
