Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway may have left $23 billion on the table by trimming Apple stock earlier this year

Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire Hathaway slashed its Apple position by 55% in the first half of 2024, even as the iPhone maker’s stock traded at or near record highs.

Calculations by B-17 suggest Berkshire Hathaway’s sales of Apple stock in the first and second quarters of this year resulted in about $23 billion in missed profits for Warren Buffett’s conglomerate.

Berkshire Hathaway entered 2024 with a massive stake in Apple, holding 905.6 million shares worth about $174 billion at the time.

At current prices, that stake would have been worth about $210 billion. Instead, Berkshire Hathaway’s current stake in Apple was worth $84 billion at the end of the second quarter.

Berkshire Hathaway trimmed its Apple stake by 13% in the first quarter, selling about 116.2 million shares. In the second quarter, it sold 389.7 million shares.

Since the second quarter, shares of the iPhone maker have soared about 10% to record highs around $232 per share as investor excitement grows around the company’s Apple Intelligence technology fueling growth in its hardware sales.

Because it’s impossible to know exactly what price Berkshire Hathaway sold the Apple shares at, B-17 relied on the average share price of Apple stock in the first and second quarters as the sales price.

The calculations suggest Berkshire sold its 505.9 million shares of Apple at a weighted average price of about $186.15 per share in the first half of 2024.

The difference between the weighted average price and the price of Apple stock on Thursday nets out the $23.1 billion in missed profits for Berkshire Hathaway.

That’s not to say it was a bad trade on Berkshire’s part.

It’s nearly impossible to perfectly time an exit out of such a massive stake, and Berkshire’s Apple trade will go down as one of its best in history.

Berkshire started building a stake in Apple in the first quarter of 2016, and according to data from HedgeFollow, its estimated average buy price is $39.59 per share.

Since then, Apple shares have soared 485%.

What’s even more impressive is that Berkshire Hathaway started building its massive stake in the tech giant when it was already the largest company in the world as measured by market capitalization.

Few investors knew how much bigger Apple could get from there, except for Buffett.