Billionaire and investing legend Warren Buffett traded stocks in his personal account that his company Berkshire Hathaway was also buying and selling, according to a new report from ProPublica.
The report, published Thursday, citing data said to have been leaked from the Internal Revenue Service, alleges Buffett traded equities in his personal account during the same quarter, or the quarter prior, as Berkshire Hathaway
BRK.A,
+0.95%
BRKB,
-0.30%
traded those same stocks in 2009 and 2012. Stocks that Buffett and Berkshire both traded in during that period are said to have included Walmart
WMT,
+1.27%,
Wells Fargo
WFC,
+1.81%
and Johnson & Johnson
JNJ,
+0.77%.
Buffett has publicly disavowed any inclination to trade in stocks that may be deemed to pose conflicts of interest with Berkshire Hathaway. “I try to stay away from anything that could conflict with Berkshire,” Buffett said during the company’s annual meeting in 2016. “I can’t be buying what Berkshire is buying,” he’d said four years earlier.
Representatives for Berkshire Hathaway did not immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.
The 93-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” has publicly stated that he has a private investment account that is separate from Berkshire, which is required to disclose its holdings on a quarterly basis.
Buffett has a net worth of $116.4 billion, according to Forbes, the fifth largest personal fortune in the world.
Berkshire Hathaway ended the third quarter with a record cash pile of $157.2 billion, boosted by high interest rates. The company’s stock carries a market cap of $755 billion and is up 15.02% over the last 12 months. The broad-market benchmark S&P 500
SPX
is up 11%.
See also: Why Warren Buffett has done more to educate investors than any other corporate executive
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