Sadly, I have to agree. These quick sales of major stock holdings have me worried that Mr. Buffett got some very bad news from his doctor or something along those lines. Mr. Abel is not a stock picker after all and leaving him a $400B equity portfolio might not be desirable.

I agree that Mr Buffett is well aware that his remaining days at the office are getting fewer and fewer, but I strongly disagree with the conclusion you're drawing.

First, I think it would be wildly out of character for him to try to arrange the portfolio in a way that does not suit what he truly thinks it should be right now.

Second, such a change would be purely so he can influence/bound the choices of a new manager to whom he is in effect delegating that specific capital allocation job function: I think he thinks that once he's gone, it truly is the job of the next team. I doubt if he will even offer any advice unless asked.

And in any case, if Mr Abel (and Todd and Ted) are not sufficiently experienced stock pickers, then surely it would be more of a kindness to leave Apple stock in the drawer than a pile of cash that will be extremely difficult to deploy safely at decent rates of return?

I think there is only one reason that the Apple stock was sold. As with any other investment he does not currently hold, he concluded that, taking into account any potentially foreseeable risks of permanent loss of capital, it did not offer the prospect of a sufficiently/commensurably high rate of return into the future, relative to other opportunities that might reasonably be expected to come up within an acceptable time frame. In short, he thinks Berkshire can probably do better with that money deployed elsewhere. What I don't know is the mix of "foreseeable risk" vis-a-vis "sufficiently high future return prospects". The only other reason that makes sense would be a loss of faith in the trustworthiness of management, which doesn't seem to be an issue at all here.

Jim