Buffett’s company sells IBM shares again, buys more Apple

OMAHA, Neb. — Warren Buffett’s company sold almost a third of its remaining IBM shares in the third quarter and changed some of its other investments.

Berkshire Hathaway filed a quarterly snapshot of its portfolio with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. Investors watch Berkshire’s filings closely because of Buffett’s successful record.

The company sold nearly 32 percent of its remaining IBM shares to leave it with 37 million shares at the end of the quarter. Before this spring, Berkshire had held more than 80 million IBM shares.

Berkshire also picked up nearly 4 million more Apple shares to give it 134 million shares of the Cupertino company.

Berkshire officials don’t generally comment on the reasons for their portfolio moves.

But Buffett has said that IBM hasn’t performed the way he expected since he first bought shares in 2011. IBM’s stock rose to $215 in March 2013 but closed Tuesday at just under $149, a decline of more than 30 percent, as the company has faced stiff competition in the cloud computing business from Microsoft and Amazon.

The quarterly filings with the SEC don’t make clear who made all the investments at Berkshire. But Buffett handles the biggest investments, such as Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo, while investments of less than $1 billion are often the work of Berkshire’s two other investment managers.

The latest quarter is the first since Berkshire exercised the Bank of America warrants it received in 2011 when Buffett invested $5 billion in the bank. It reported holding 679 million Bank of America shares at the end of September.

It boosted its investments in Synchrony Financial and Monsanto.

And it trimmed its stakes in Wells Fargo and Charter Communications.