Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) sold more of its holdings in Bank of America (BAC), bringing its total proceeds to nearly $9 billion in recent months.
Late Tuesday, the conglomerate said it further reduced its stake in the country’s second-largest bank by 21.6 million shares, reaping about $862.7 million in profit from the sale.
Berkshire has sold BofA stock in 10 of the past 11 weeks starting in mid-July, selling a total of 218.5 million shares and earning $8.9 billion on those sales.
Berkshire still has a 10.5% stake in the nation’s largest bank, and the price of Bank of America stock has fallen about the same amount since Buffet began selling his company’s longest-held bank stock position.
BofA is still up 16% so far this year, behind rivals Goldman Sachs (GS), JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Citigroup (C). The stock fell slightly on Wednesday morning.
Buffett and Berkshire have not yet said anything about the motivation for the sale. And Berkshire remains the bank’s largest shareholder, with more than 800 million shares worth more than $32 billion.
“I don’t know what exactly he does because, honestly, we can’t ask and we wouldn’t,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said at a Barclays conference earlier this month.
The recent moves are notable given Buffett’s long history with the bank. He injected $5 billion into Bank of America in 2011, as the lender struggled to overcome the mess of the subprime housing crisis that caused the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
At the time, that investment was a gamble not only on Bank of America’s recovery, but also on the new leadership of CEO Brian Moynihan, who took over the top job in 2009.
“We buy the shares, some of the shares, and so life goes on. But he has been a great investor for our company and stabilized our company when we needed it at the time,” Moynihan added.
Bank of America’s financial performance is not expected to decline in the near term, according to the latest guidance from Chief Financial Officer Alastair Borthwick, presented at a conference on Wednesday.
Rate cuts by the Federal Reserve could help the bank as deposit costs fall and a large securities portfolio recovers.
Bank of America’s main lending revenue stream, net interest income, is expected to bottom out in the second quarter and continue to grow from there through the end of the year, the CFO said.
“We still feel that this is the case,” Borthwick said Wednesday at a conference in London hosted by Bank of America.
“We are now back to something closer to low growth, low inflation and a potentially reasonable interest rate structure, which should create a reasonably good environment for US banks,” Borthwick added.
David Hollerith is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance, covering banking, cryptocurrency and other areas of finance.
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