Dear Commons Community,
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway increased its holdings in Japan’s five biggest trading houses, according to Japanese regulatory filings published yesterday. As reported by Fortune.
Berkshire grew its stake in Mitsui to 9.82% from 8.09%, in Mitsubishi to 9.67% from 8.31%, in Marubeni to 9.3% from 8.3%, in Sumitomu to 9.29% from 8.23%, and in Itochu to 8.53% from 7.47%.
While the additional Japanese investments were disclosed yesterday, the exact timing of the transactions is unclear, though the annual letter in late February telegraphed what was coming.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In contrast, Berkshire sold a net $134 billion in equities in 2024, ending the year with a cash pile of $334.2 billion—nearly double from a year ago and more than its shrinking stock portfolio of $272 billion.
Meanwhile, U.S. stocks began nose-diving in mid-February after President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs; he has since continued rolling out more. So far, he has hit China, Canada, Mexico, steel, and aluminum with higher duties, and reciprocal tariffs are due April 2.
The Nasdaq has tumbled into correction territory, and the S&P 500 also passed the correction threshold last week but soon pared its decline to less than 10% from its peak.
That’s left investors wondering if Buffett will finally make a major purchase of stock or clinch a mega-deal for a company after complaining for years that valuations have been too high.
But analysts told Fortune earlier that a big splash is still unlikely as valuations haven’t gone down far enough, noting that Buffett usually prefers to be patient.
“He has no interest in timing the market’s bottom, nor does he chase short-term rebounds,” Armando Gonzalez, founder of AI-powered research platform Bigdata.com, said. “Instead, he waits for moments when fear drives prices to levels where the risk-reward equation tilts decisively in his favor.”
Warren Buffett knows the economy and foresaw the instability that Trump brought to it!
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
