Berkshire Hathaway profit advances 15% to $6.29 billion on investments

Berkshire’s Apple position is now at 133 million shares, more than twice the 61.24 million shares disclosed in Buffett’s annual shareholder letter released Saturday. Buffett said most savers would be better off putting their money in low-priced index funds over the long term, and he estimated that investors wasted roughly $100 billion over the past decade on unnecessary fees.

“That simply isn’t the case: both American corporations and private investors are today awash in funds looking to be sensibly deployed”.

In the fourth quarter, Dow Chemical Co. converted Berkshire’s $3 billion preferred stake to more than $4 billion of common stock.

Buffett said he accumulated about 123 million of the Apple shares, and that one of his deputies acquired the rest, without identifying the investment manager. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock over the previous year. Since then, Apple’s share price has rocketed 18 percent higher, bringing the worth of Buffett’s holding to around $7.8 billion. He does have an iPad – but someone else gave it to him.

When asked by CNBC why he bought so much Apple stock, Buffett bluntly replied, “Because I like it”.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) Chairman Warren Buffett on Saturday ramped up his criticism of Wall Street, saying investors should “stick with low-priced index funds”. Beyond costs, he says that identifying a manager who can beat the market over time is also a challenging feat.

He said USA shares could conceivably “go down 20 per cent tomorrow”. But he said he usually doesn’t like to take stakes beyond 10 percent.

“We also have a prize of $100,000 for whoever goes the furthest”, Buffett said.

But none of those iPhones were bought by Buffett.

Joking aside, Buffett has warmed up to investing in big technology companies lately, even though he is famous for having shunned them in the past.

And one thing he knows is that people continue to have an “incredible stickiness” with Apple’s iPhone. The Omaha, Nebraska-based parent has more than 90 operating units including insurers, energy providers, food and apparel producers, furniture and jewelry makers, and a railroad. Still, Buffett’s hefty purchases might indicate that the recent rise in Apple’s shares was caused not by the market’s optimism, but by Buffett’s. That works out to Berkshire buying an average of almost 3.8 million shares a day. Despite the fact that indexes are trading in record territories, Buffett said the US stock market was cheap with interest rates at current levels.