due to (of all things) the Apple stake. Oh the horrors...



apple.news: Buffett's Berkshire looks cheap with nearly $180B Apple stake: analyst


Warren Buffett's slice of Apple is looking juicier than ever, following a nearly 50% surge in the technology titan's stock price this year.
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owns about 916 million shares, giving it a 5.8% stake in Apple worth almost $180 billion today. The famed investor's conglomerate purchased the vast majority of those shares for $31 billion, meaning it's scored a nearly six-fold profit on paper (assuming it didn't pare the position last quarter.)

Apple stock has rallied to record highs this year alongside other Big Tech stocks


Apple is by far the most-valuable holding in Berkshire's stock portfolio, and Buffett's company is Apple's biggest single shareholder. Indeed, UBS analyst Brian Meredith estimated in a research note this week that Berkshire's portfolio appreciated by 10.1% between April 1 and July 16 this year ' and 75% of that gain was due to its Apple position.
Meredith suggested Berkshire's stock gains have raised its intrinsic value by 5%, meaning its shares now trade at a 15% discount to the company's underlying worth. 

Of course, Buffett aims to invest in high-quality businesses for the long term, and cares little about short-term swings in stock prices. Yet he's defended the massive size of his Apple bet ' it's worth nearly a quarter of Berkshire's $750 billion market capitalization ' earlier this year, saying it's a "better business than any we own."

The Berkshire chief has also championed Apple's focus on doing a few things well, praised CEO Tim Cook as an exceptional leader, and underlined how indispensable products like iPhones and MacBooks are to their users.