Saudi Arabia’s $ 300 billion sovereign wealth fund sold 50% of its stake in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway

Reuters / Rick Wilking

• Saudi Arabia’s $ 300 billion sovereign wealth fund halved its position in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway in the second quarter of this year, an SEC filing showed last Friday.
• The kingdom’s public investment fund ditched 210,222 shares in Berkshire, meaning it gave up around $ 40 million of its previous investment in the investor’s famous firm.
• He now owns around $ 39 million in Berkshire shares.
• In the same file, the fund revealed that it had abandoned its stakes in companies like Facebook, Boeing and Disney.
• The PIF also said it made about $ 4.7 billion in new investments in funds focused on real estate and the utilities sector.
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Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is one of the largest in the world, has sold 50% of its shares in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission file.

The kingdom’s public investment fund saw an almost 50% drop in ownership of Berkshire shares, with current holdings of 218,778 shares, a 13F filing showed on Friday last week.

PIF’s disclosure showed that the value of Berkshire shares held fell to around $ 39 million in June 2020, down from a previous investment of $ 79 million in May.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has also ditched his Berkshire shares, completely exiting his $ 5.5 million stake in the company he joined about a year ago.

The Saudi fund, which was created by royal order to finance projects and secure government stakes in Saudi companies, has previously invested in Tesla, Uber and Softbank’s Vision Fund to expand its global portfolio.

This time around, the estate fund has chosen to focus on exchange-traded funds rather than individual stocks and has invested nearly $ 4.7 billion in US-domiciled ETFs.

Read more: Warren Buffett bet on a gold miner and lower his banking stakes because he picks winners, said a veteran Berkshire Hathaway shareholder.

New investments of $ 1.86 billion in the SPDR Select Utilities Fund and $ 2.79 billion in the SPDR Select Real Estate Fund have been made, both issued by State Street Global Advisors.

At the same time, the fund also sold all of its shares in large US companies such as Boeing, Facebook, Marriott International and Walt Disney.

The positions in individual participations were also reduced to zero in the US banks Citigroup and Bank of America and in the European energy companies Shell, BP and Total.

PIF had initially poured billions into these companies in the first quarter, but the impact of the pandemic and the resulting negative oil prices meant that many of these stocks were trading at historically low levels. From the SEC filing, it was not clear what kind of gains or losses PIF made on its trades.

PIF’s stake in Facebook was worth more than $ 520 million, while its stake in Disney was valued at around $ 495 million, according to the SEC filing.

Conversely, the fund increased its stakes by around 46% in cruise line Carnival and 37% in event promoter Live Nation Entertainment.

Read more: Bruce Fraser outperformed the S&P 500 by almost 286% as a hedge fund manager before switching to real estate investing. He details the strategy he used to amass more than 1,600 multi-family units.