Berkshire's Brazilian fintech investment is a quick moneymaker

Berkshire Hathaway has generated substantial paper gains with its investment in a Brazilian online bank that starting trading this week.

Nubank was founded in 2013. Its goal was to use technology to improve banking in Brazil, where, it says, "people pay the highest fees and interest rates in the world for the worst banking services."

It's been successful. Nubank says it had 48 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Columbia as of the end of September, making it "one of the world's largest digital banking platforms."

Earlier this year, it entered the CNBC Disruptor 50 list at #40.

That success has contributed to strong demand as its parent company, Nu Holdings, goes public.

It priced 289 million newly issued shares at $9 each on Wednesday. That was at the top of a recently-lowered expected range of $8 to $9.

Around 1PM ET Thursday, it opened trading at $11.25. At today's close of $11.85, it's up 24% from the $9 IPO price. That puts its market value at around $55 billion, making it the highest-valued Latin American financial institution.

Here's Berkshire Hathaway's part of the story.

In June, it invested $500 million in the company during a funding round that valued it at $30 billion.  That implies a stake of just under 1.7% of the pre-IPO shares.

And this week, Bloomberg quoted "a person familiar with the matter" as saying Berkshire bought 10% of this week's offering. That would be 28.9 million shares. At $9 each, Berkshire paid $260 million.

At today's close, those shares alone are worth more than $342 million, for a gain of almost 32%. They represent 0.6% of Nu Holding's 4.6 billion shares outstanding.

And based on some back-of-the-envelope math, Berkshire's pre-IPO $500 million investment would give it around 72 million shares, for a total of roughly 101 million shares, worth $1.2 billion.

That would be a gain of 57% from the total of $760 million it spent. Pretty good for six months' work.

(No guarantees here. The pre-IPO stake is a rough estimate, and there may be factors I don't know about. Financial whizzes, please feel free to correct me. Presumably we'll get an exact number when Berkshire files its Q4 13F in mid-February. )

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BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH

BERKSHIRE'S TOP U.S. STOCK HOLDINGS - Dec 10, 2021

Berkshire's top holdings of disclosed publicly-traded U.S. stocks by market value, based on today's closing prices.

Holdings are as of September 30, 2021 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on November 15, 2021, except for Apple, Bank of America, and U.S. Bancorp, which also include shares held as of September 30, 2021 as disclosed in New England Asset Management’s 13F filing on August 16, 2021.

In addition to U.S. stocks, shares held as of December 31, 2020 of China's BYD, as listed in Buffett's 2020 letter to shareholders, are included. The price of those shares in U.S. trading is used to approximate the current market value of the position. The value of the stake as a percentage of the company's market value is fixed at what was listed as of December 31, 2020 in the letter.

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

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-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch