Property and casualty insurer Chubb Ltd. was the unknown stock that Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has been buying lately, according to a regulatory filing released on Wednesday.
After the market closed, Chubb shares went up more than 8%.
A +0.58% rise in Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) BRK.B, +0.61% File 13-F with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that as of March 31, they owned more than 25.9 million shares of Chubb CB, -0.08%, which is worth $6.7 billion. As of the end of each calendar quarter, big investors have to report the stocks and options they own that they are long. After the end of the quarter, you have 45 days to file.
Chubb stock has gone up 12% so far this year, and it closed on Wednesday at $252.97.
Some investors are thinking about whether Berkshire will keep a stake in CB or try to buy the company outright, which means Chubb shares are likely to go up Thursday morning, according to Cathy Seifert, an analyst at CFRA.
She said that Berkshire’s equity stake gives it access to one of the best-performing subgroups of the financial sector at a price below its peers. “We can’t guess if Berkshire would try to buy CB outright, but we do know that their business models are very well suited to each other,” Seifert wrote.
In the third and fourth quarters of last year, Berkshire was given permission to keep secret information about one or more of its holdings. Berkshire changed those earlier documents to show that it did own shares in Chubb. As of the end of the first quarter, the stake was worth 2% of Berkshire’s money.
During the question-and-answer period at Berkshire’s annual meeting on May 4, Buffett wasn’t asked about the unknown holding. Berkshire did say at the time that it had sold all of its shares in Paramount Global PARAA, -1.14% and cut its holdings in Apple Inc. AAPL, +1.22%.
The 13-F form showed that Berkshire sold more than 116 million shares of Apple, which is about 13% less than it had before. The company still owns the most Apple stock, which dropped from just over 50% of Berkshire’s portfolio to about 40%. On May 4, Buffett said that Apple would probably still be Berkshire’s biggest holding by the end of the year.
