Berkshire adds Kroger and Biogen, cuts back on Goldman and Wells 

Berkshire Hathaway revealed late this afternoon what was in its portfolio of U.S. publicly-traded stocks on December 31, the end of 2019's fourth quarter.

The highlights:

• Goldman Sachs (GS): Slashed stake by 35% to 12 million shares, worth $2.8 billion at today's close. In 2013, Berkshire received around 13 million Goldman shares by exercising warrants that were part of its 2008 loan deal with Goldman at the height of the financial crisis.  The Q4 sales largely reversed purchases of Goldman shares in 2018.
  
  
• Wells Fargo (WFC): Reduced holding by 14.6 percent to 323 million shares, worth $15.6 billion. It's an acceleration of selling that's been underway since 2017 when Wells' "fake account" scandal was gaining steam. Early that year, Berkshire owned 9.6% of the bank's outstanding shares. Now the stake is down to around 7.6%.

The Goldman and Wells sales were probably triggered by Buffett himself.

His portfolio managers, Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, were also active in Q4. Based on the size of these moves, we think they can be attributed to them.

• Kroger (KR): New stake of 18.9 million shares, worth $535 million. That's about 2% in the supermarket company. Kroger shares gained 6.3% after-hours on the news.
  
  
• Biogen (BIIB): New stake of 648 thousand shares, worth $216 million. It's just 0.4% of the biopharmaceutical's shares outstanding. The stock was up 2.0%.
  
  
• Occidental Petroleum (OXY): The percentage increase in Berkshire's stake, 154%, is enormous. But the value of the additional 11.5 million shares is a modest $478 million. The value of the entire stake is just $788 million. That's a strong indication the buying is not directly related to Buffett's deal last April to loan OXY $10 billion for its acquisition of Anadarko.
  
  
• RH (RH): Berkshire increased its stake by 41% in the home furnishings retailer previously known as Restoration Hardware. Its 9% of RH's shares outstanding is currently valued at $407 million. The company's shares were up 3.3% after-hours. 

One interesting item: Berkshire reported owning around $25 million worth of two securities that mimic the S&P 500 stock index. Extremely small change by Berkshire standards, (the company has $128 billion in cash), but something I haven't seen before.

Munger: "Wretched excess," Tesla, (expletive deleted) earnings & more

When Charlie Munger answers questions at the annual meeting of the Daily Journal, (he's the chairman of the Los Angeles-based publisher serving the legal profession), he doesn't have to share the head table with Warren Buffett.

So, for a little more than 2 hours on Wednesday, it was pure Munger. As usual, he didn't disappoint, with pithy opinions on Tesla's high-flying stock and CEO Elon Musk, Chinese businesses and investors, inflation and economists, and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).  There was also a lot of "wretched excess" mentioned. (Bill Smead talked about that on "The Exchange" yesterday.)

Of course, our CNBC camera was there.

You can watch three minutes and 54 seconds of highlights here:

Or you can watch all two hours, six minutes and 46 seconds here:

BUFFETT AROUND THE INTERNET

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BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH

BERKSHIRE'S TOP STOCK HOLDINGS 

Berkshire's top stock holdings by market value, based on today's closing prices. The number of shares held is as of December 31, 2019, as disclosed in the company's February 14 13F SEC filing.

The full list of holdings and current market values is (usually) available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker. (We're having a technical problem right now, but we're working on it.)

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-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch