Warren Buffett is SELLING!

So the 13Fs are out for Q1 of 2021. Of course, the 13F SEC filing shows us exactly what the big-name investors have in their portfolio, so we can see what they're buying and selling from quarter to quarter. The only annoying thing, though, is that this info gets held for 45 days after the quarter is done before it gets released to us. That's why for the January, February, March quarter, we're only just seeing the info now, even though we're halfway through May—more than halfway through May.

However, nonetheless, I'd much rather have this info than not, so you know, I guess beggars can't be choosers. So in this video, we're going to do a deep dive into Berkshire Hathaway's Q1 13F filings, analyzing the portfolio moves of, you guessed it, Mr. Warren Buffett himself. And I'll tell you right up the top of the video, there's some very interesting stuff going on. Warren Buffett, at the moment, is definitely selling much, much more than he's buying. So anyway, let's discuss right after this.

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So coming out of Q4 2020, Berkshire's stock holdings totaled $269.9 billion, up from $236 billion in Q3. However, here's the first big talking point: Berkshire's portfolio did not grow in Q1. After the most recent quarter, their portfolio was worth $270.4 billion, so up just 0.1 percent. So why did this happen? Well, a lot of that is down to their stake in Apple. Apple is 40 percent of Berkshire's portfolio, so movements in Apple's stock price will heavily influence Berkshire's portfolio value.

Now, in Q3 2020, Apple went up 28 percent; then in Q4, it went up 13 percent. But in Q1 of 2021, Apple was down 5 percent. So that's the first reason their portfolio size hasn't continued to shoot up. But the second reason is quite simply that Berkshire did a lot of selling in Q1, and it makes sense that if you reduce a lot of your positions, your portfolio is going to get smaller.

So how much selling did they actually do? Well, quite a bit. They had 46 stocks in their portfolio at the end of Q1, and during the quarter, they reduced their holdings in 11 of them, plus they sold out of two stocks completely. So let's have a look—what were the big moves? Well, firstly, they sold out of Suncor Energy and Synchrony Financial. But no big deal there; those stocks only occupied 0.09 percent and 0.26 percent of Berkshire's portfolio, respectively. So not huge sales, but look at this massive long list of the companies that they reduced in. There's a lot of them.

Heading up this list is Wells Fargo. They reduced 98 percent of Wells Fargo, which had a 0.77 impact on their portfolio. So it was actually a pretty sizable sell for Berkshire, and honestly, I don't blame Buffett for doing this, considering all the information that's come out about Wells Fargo in the past few years. It is also a convenient time to sell Wells Fargo because in 2021, Wells Fargo has been on an absolute tear as it recovers from its crash from last year.

But what this does show is a theme that has been very prevalent over the past year or so, and that is that Warren Buffett continues to want less exposure to U.S. financials. It seems the trend is now every time we get a 13F filing from Berkshire, we're just asking how much stock has Buffett sold in the banks this quarter. But interestingly, Buffett did actually address this in Berkshire's most recent shareholder meeting. So I'll just quickly play a clip from that, and you can hear his rationale for yourselves.

"Could you please explain why you decided to exit most of your bank stocks in 2020, except for Bank of America, and what's your view on the future of the banking industry?"

"I like banks generally. I just didn't like the proportion we had in comparison to the possible risks. If we got bad results—that did not. So far, we haven't gotten so. I just—and we were over 10 percent of Bank of America. It's a real pain in the neck, both to the bank and more of the banks than us, if we go over 10 percent. There’s just all our—and I like Bank of America. I mean, I like Brian Moynihan very much, and I like the banking business fine. So we took that up. But we took the overall bank position down. We didn't want to go above 10 in any others, and we did want to increase the B of A position. But overall, we didn't want as much in banks as we have. We like the banking business way better than it was in the United States 10 or 15 years ago. The banking business around the world, in various places, might worry me. But our banks are in far, far better shape than 10 or 15 years ago."

So there you go. It doesn't actually sound that bad. Berkshire just doesn't want as much exposure and would rather back one bank, as opposed to having large stakes in all of them, and then just coping with the paperwork of being considered something like a bank holding company.

All right, moving on. Another big sell—moving on into the second big reduction. Buffett reduced 88 percent in Liberty Global, which is a telecommunications company that had a 0.13 impact on the portfolio size. To be honest, I don't have much to add on that one, but if you look at this next one, they ditched half of their position in Chevron. This is a big move, as you can see—it had a one percent impact on their portfolio, which you've got to remember for Berkshire is literally billions and billions of dollars.

This one's really interesting to me anyway because it was only in Q3 of 2020 that he bought Chevron for the first time. Now, obviously, at the time, I thought this was a bad move, and I criticized Buffett at the time because he prides himself on being a very long-term investor, and then he just goes out and buys an oil giant. But to his credit, it seems as though he is backtracking a bit, at least enough to halve his investment size. Personally, I'd love to see him keep going and ditch it completely. I hope the reduction is kind of on the back of shareholder pressure.

I guess it was only a few weeks ago where Berkshire copped a fair few questions about, you know, climate change and specifically their plans to decarbonize their own business operations. So maybe this is a bit of a move on the back of shareholder pressure. I kind of hope it is, but really, I don't know. But in all honesty, if he wanted to ditch Chevron now, it wouldn't even be that hard to do it. I mean, even though he only started buying in Q3 of last year, he's still up 16 percent on his positions, so why not cut and run?

Anyway, that’s Chevron. The only other notable sell was a 40 percent reduction in Merck that had a 0.3 impact on his portfolio. But as you can see, the other positions were, you know, 0.08 impact or 0.11 or 0.03, so not much to write about there in terms of impact to the portfolio. Although he did reduce his GM holdings by eight percent, which, you know, is pretty interesting. But overall, the sales of the quarter totaled a three percent reduction in his portfolio—so around about eight billion dollars of stock sales.

But that seriously dwarfs the buyers for the quarter. All of the buying added together increased the portfolio by just 0.9 percent, or about two and a half billion dollars. So heaps of selling, not much buying. Plus Apple, which is forty percent of your portfolio, goes down five percent in the quarter, and that's why you don't see a gain in their portfolio in this quarter. And to be honest, if Apple went down like 15 in a quarter, that in itself would make it very, very hard for Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio to end up in the black.

But anyway, let's now turn our attention to the buyers. Interestingly, they added a new position in the quarter, and that was E.ON PLC—an insurance company. Nothing crazy here from Buffett; he knows what he likes. He bought about 4.1 million shares during the quarter, and currently, that position is worth $943 million. So it occupies 0.35 percent of his portfolio, and it's the 25th largest position. Interestingly, E.ON shares jumped 2 percent from the Buffett effect, and Buffett would be absolutely cheering on this buy because he is already up at least 10 percent on that position.

In other news, he also added 8 percent to his Verizon position, making that stake worth nearly $10 billion. It's now the sixth largest position in his portfolio, occupying 3.42 percent of the portfolio. And lastly, he added 52 percent to Kroger, so a big increase in that position. It's now worth 1.8 billion dollars and occupies 0.68 percent of his portfolio. So overall, those are Warren Buffett's moves for Q1 of 2021: lots of selling, not much buying, and interestingly, no real gains at all in Q1, despite the S&P rising seven percent in that same timeframe.

Anyway, let me know what you think of Buffett's moves down in the comments section below. Please leave a like on the video if you found it useful, found it helpful. It does a lot for the YouTube algorithm, so I really appreciate it because, you know, it does take a very long time to make these videos. To be honest, for a YouTuber, there's nothing worse than putting a heap of time into a video and then releasing it thinking it's going to do well, and then it just flops.

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