Warren Buffett's Company Boosted Its Stake In Only Three Major Companies in Q4

Berkshire Hathaway, for the first time in years, neither added a brand new position nor fully liquidated an existing holding in the fourth quarter.

Warren Buffett, the fifth most wealthy billionaire in the world, had a pretty quiet fourth quarter.

The value of his hedge fund, Berkshire Hathaway , gained a relatively humble $3 billion, rising from $296 billion to $299 billion.

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Berkshire added to three held positions and subtracted from eight held positions.

The positions added to, according to ZeroHedge, were:

• Apple Inc.  (AAPL) - Get Free Report, by 333,856 shares to 895.136 million Apple shares.
• Paramount Global  (PARA) - Get Free Report, by 2.421 million shares to 93.637 million shares.
• Louisiana-Pacific  (LPX) - Get Free Report, by 1.249 million shares to 7.044 million shares.

Berkshire scaled back in eight positions, also according to ZeroHedge. Here are four of them. 

• Chevron  (CVX) - Get Free Report, from 164.4 million to 163.0 million shares.
• Activision Blizzard  (ATVI) - Get Free Report, from 60.141 million shares to 52.717 million shares.
• Bank of New York Mellon  (BK) - Get Free Report, from 62.2 million shares to 25.1 million shares.
• US Bancorp  (USB) - Get Free Report, from 71.1 million shares to 6.67 million shares.

"Remarkably, for the first time in years, Berkshire neither added a new position nor fully liquidated existing holdings in the fourth quarter," ZeroHedge wrote.

At the end of the fourth quarter, Berkshire's largest position was in Apple. Also in the top five are Bank of America  (BAC) - Get Free Report, Chevron, Coca-Cola  (KO) - Get Free Report and American Express  (AXP) - Get Free Report.

"We believe that Berkshire Hathaway, owing to its diversification and lower overall risk profile, offers one of the better risk-adjusted return profiles in the financial-services sector and remains a generally solid candidate for downside protection during market selloffs," wrote Morningstar in November 2022. 

"We continue to be impressed by Berkshire’s ability in most years to generate high-single- to double-digit growth in book value per share, comfortably above our estimate of its cost of capital."