New Blood

Berkshire’s got a brand new bag.  You’ve almost never seen Warren’s company buy a stock and then blow it out a year later.  Berkshire’s corporate culture is and has always been buy and hold; Buffett tries to own things he would never want to sell.

But there’s some new blood at the company.  Todd Combs was brought in followed by Ted Weschler to take the reins on the investment portfolio, and I highly doubt Buffett and Munger hired them with an expectation that they’d do things a different way.

New blood is good sometimes.

As a shareholder myself and an adviser with virtually all of my clients in the stock, it’s really interesting to watch this whole thing evolve…

From Bloomberg:

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) locked in a gain on its Intel Corp. (INTC) bet by selling its stake less than a year after making the investment, shunning the buy-and-hold strategy favored by Chairman Warren Buffett.

Berkshire’s Geico unit accumulated 11.5 million shares of Santa Clara, California-based Intel in the second half of 2011 for an average price of about $22 each, according to National Association of Insurance Commissioners data compiled by Bloomberg. Buffett’s firm sold the stake in the world’s largest semiconductor maker for an average price of $27.25 this year through May 8, netting about $60 million in profit.

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