REUTERS/Rick Wilking
- Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has sold about 101 million Wells Fargo shares in recent weeks, a regulatory filing shows.
- The billionaire investor’s company cut its holdings by about 43% to 136 million shares, slashing its stake to 3.3%.
- The sales come after Berkshire sold 25% of its Wells Fargo position in the second quarter.
- Berkshire was previously Wells Fargo’s largest shareholder, and Wells Fargo was one of its five most valuable positions earlier this year.
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Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has dumped another 101 million of its Wells Fargo shares, according to a regulatory filing on Friday.
The famed investor’s conglomerate already slashed its stake in the banking giant by 25% to about 238 million shares in the second quarter. Berkshire has continued selling since then, cutting its stake by another 43% to 136 million shares, the filing shows. It now holds a 3.3% stake in the bank.
Berkshire was previously Wells Fargo’s biggest shareholder, owning 323 million shares or a 7.8% stake earlier this year. The bank also ranked among Berkshire’s five most valuable holdings earlier just a few months ago.
Buffett may have soured on the company because of the blow to its reputation from its fake-accounts scandal, and the cap on its assets imposed by federal regulators in 2018, David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland, told Business Insider last month.
Wells Fargo's stock price has slumped about 54% this year to below $25, meaning Berkshire's 136 million shares were worth around $3.4 billion as of Friday's close.
Berkshire sold a bunch of financial stocks last quarter. It slashed its JPMorgan stake by more than 60%, exited its Goldman Sachs position, and sold shares of BNY Mellon, PNC Financial, US Bancorp, Visa, and Mastercard, among others.