Will Bank of America’s stock plunge stop Berkshire’s selling streak?

Will Bank of America’s stock plunge stop Berkshire’s selling streak?

So far, Berkshire Hathaway has been consistently reducing its Bank of America holding even as the bank’s stock price gradually slid lower.

In another filing late Thursday night, Berkshire disclosed the sale of 19.2 million shares for almost $779 million (average price: $40.52) on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

That extends its selling streak to 12 consecutive trading sessions.

Since that streak began on July 17, Berkshire has sold 90.4 million shares for $3.8 billion, an average of $42.30 per share, reducing its stake by 8.8%.

After three days of relatively larger share sales at the start, Berkshire has been fairly consistently disposing of an average of 6.3 million shares per day, even as the stock fell 10.5% from its two-year-plus closing high of $44.13 on July 16.

It even sold some shares yesterday at BAC’s intraday low of $38.98.

(Berkshire’s sales, and their implicit message that Warren Buffett has soured on the bank, certainly contributed to the stock’s weakness.)

Today, however, BAC’s slide accelerated with a 4.9% plunge to a close of $37.58, as bank stocks and the rest of the market were pulled lower by July’s weaker-than-expected jobs report.

Because Berkshire has two business days to report its BAC moves, we won’t know until next Tuesday if today’s price drop ended the selling streak.

And, either way, we probably won’t know Buffett’s endgame for a while.

If the sales continue, or resume after a pause, he may be looking to bring the BAC stake below 10%, to avoid regulatory burdens, including the requirement to promptly report stock moves.

Or he may be planning to liquidate the entire stake, as Berkshire did with Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and U.S. Bancorp.

As recently as April of last year, even as Buffett was telling CNBC’s Becky Quick he “didn’t like the banking business as well as I did before,” he seemed committed to Bank of America.

“I invited myself in many years earlier and they made a very decent deal for us [in 2011] and I like [CEO] Brian Moynihan enormously. And I just don’t want to sell it.”