No. of Recommendations: 12
Year to date, BRK has purchased 17,355,469 OXY shares for $1,037,437,137. Average price paid: 59.78.
dataroma.com: DATAROMA Real Time Superinvestor ActivityInterestingly, all those purchases were made in March, and the month is not over yet.
Recall Buffett's comments on OXY at last year's AM:
buffett.cnbc.com - Morning session meeting"And the degree to which the market got dominated by that (gambling) is shown on a slide some ' I have it here somewhere. Yeah. Here's ' on [slide] Oxy-one ' if you'll put up the Oxy-one.
That shows how we bought what became ' well, we bought in two weeks (mostly in March), or thereabouts, 14% of Occidental Petroleum.And you'll say, 'Well, how can you buy 14% of a company in two weeks?'
And it's more extreme than that, because if you look at the Occidental proxy, you'll see that ' the standard names ' BlackRock index funds, State Street index funds, basically, Vanguard index funds, and then one other firm, Dodge & Cox.If you take those four entities ' and they're not going to buy and sell stock ' they may get their own little ' so they own 40% of the company, roughly, those four firms.
And they didn't do anything during this period. So now you're down to 60% of the Occidental Petroleum Company that's even available for sale.
Occidental's been around for years, and years, and years. Big company, all kinds of things. And with 60% of the stock outstanding, I go in and tell Mark Millard, this fellow that is 30 feet away from me or so, and I say in the morning to him, you know, 'Buy 20% and take blocks, or whatever it may be.'
And in two weeks, he buys 14% out of 60%. That's not investment. (Laughter)
I mean, you're not buying from ' I find it just incredible."It appears as if Buffett's appetite for OXY below $60 is still quite strong.
In the mean time, you have OXY continuing to repurchase shares, completing $3Bn in share repurchases last year, and this year re-authorizing an additional $3Bn.
oxy.com - Quarterly earningsWith CEO Vicki Hollub apparently speaking to Mr. Buffett recently, I hope she is taking a hint and repurchasing shares of stock aggressively at sub $60.
At a current market cap of $54 BN, these share repurchases are not insignificant.
