September 14, 2020
Warren Buffett made no splashy deals in 2020, and he didn’t weigh in on some of the year’s most contentious topics in his much-anticipated annual letter. Behind the scenes, the 90-year-old billionaire was hardly inactive.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. was firing up another engine: stocks — both buying its own and trading others. The conglomerate snapped up $24.7 billion of Berkshire shares last year, a stark record for the business sitting atop a $138 billion cash pile. It also almost doubled the volume of buying and selling of other stocks compared with 2019.
The moves signal a carefully forged path in markets sent convulsing by the pandemic and then lifted by stimulus that’s paved the way for heavy retail trading and an unprecedented SPAC boom. And Buffett is sticking close to home — ultimately becoming a net seller of shares in other companies for the first time since 2016, while his prolific repurchases of Berkshire stock continued into this year with at least $4.2 billion of buybacks through mid-February, according to a regulatory filing Saturday.