3 Top Stocks Warren Buffett Can’t Stop Buying - 13F Forms Out Now

Billionaire Warren Buffett is many things- one of the world’s most successful fund managers, legendary philanthropist and owner of over 60 companies. Now the “Oracle of Omaha” as he is known has revealed the third quarter trades of his $169 billion Berkshire Hathaway fund. The result: a valuable glimpse into which stocks Buffett likes, and which he doesn’t.

Bear in mind that the 13F forms filed with the SEC reveal trades made in the last quarter rather than the current quarter- so it is possible that the fund’s positions have since changed. Nonetheless, his moves are still carefully tracked by investors round the world.

Here we also include TipRanks’ stock insights from Wall Street’s best-performing analysts. Does the Street sentiment match Buffett’s? We look at the outlook on these stocks from the best-performing analysts on Wall Street. These are the analysts that consistently outperform the market with the highest success rate and average return. Let’s delve in now:

Buys- AAPL, BAC, SYF

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Buffett has continued to load up on AAPL stock. In Q3 he snapped up another 3.9 million shares- taking the fund’s total AAPL holding 134 million AAPL shares valued at $20.6 billion. AAPL is now the fund’s third largest holding- coming up behind Wells Fargo and Kraft Heinz. After missing the boat on the recent tech sector rally (he recently admitted that he “blew it” by not investing in GOOGL earlier), Buffett has compensated by plowing money into AAPL since he initiated the position in Q1 2016.

Indeed, Buffett recently gave investors the lowdown on just why he likes AAPL stock so much. At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting (according to Silver Value Partners’ Gary Mishuris), he said he likes the stock because:

– AAPL is more of a consumer company than a tech company (Buffett famously avoids tech stocks).

– Apple’s brand and eco-system results in a loyal community of AAPL users with high switching costs. Consumers stick with AAPL products because the ecosystem (iTunes, apps, etc.) keeps them with AAPL.

– Its products are popular because of the aesthetics and ease of use rather than some technological superiority.

And AAPL also has the Street’s seal of approval. As we can see from the screenshot below, Apple scores a ‘Strong Buy’ top analyst consensus. Indeed, in the last three months analysts have published 23 buy ratings versus just 6 hold ratings on the stock. These analysts believe, on average, that AAPL can soar by a further 9.35% over the next 12 months. Drexel Hamilton’s Brian White is the most bullish on AAPL stock. He says “We were the first on Wall Street to project that Apple would reach a $1 trillion market cap as reflected by a price target; our current price target of $235.00 equates to approximately a $1.2 trillion market cap.”

You can click on the screenshot below for further Apple analysis.

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC)

Buffett is now Bank of America’s largest shareholder. Back in August, he made a snap $12 billion profit after exercising the fund’s right to acquire 700 million shares at a steep discount, following the initial purchase six years ago. And it would seem Buffett hasn’t looked back since.

In the third quarter he extended his position by 6.82% to 679 million shares valued at over $17.2 billion. BAC is now the fund’s fifth largest position and Buffett’s favorite bank stock.  “Bank of America has done a sensational job under [CEO] Brian Moynihan” he told CNBC recently, before adding that Berkshire “will be holders of Bank of America stock for a long, long, long time.”

We can see from TipRanks that Berkshire isn’t the only fan of this large-cap financial stock. The Street also has a ‘Strong Buy’ consensus on BAC. This breaks down into 8 buy ratings and 2 hold ratings from top analysts in the last three months. Meanwhile the $29.20 average price target means upside of over 11% from the current share price. Just yesterday, on November 14, four-star Renaissance analyst Howard Mason upped his price target on BAC. He says:

“We are raising our 12-month PT for BAC from $29 to $32 as the return-on-tangible-equity (ROTE), likely just over 11% for FY2017, increases to near 14% by 2019. Key drivers are: Operating leverage… capital return and…. a capital and credit tailwind from continued run-off of the legacy portfolio.”

Synchrony Financial (NYSE:SYF)

Berkshire recently initiated a large position in SYF- and in Q3 he ramped up this holding by another 19%. The fund’s total holding in this private-label credit card company now stands at 20.8 million shares with a value of over $645 million. Although Buffett has not commented publicly about his investment in SYF, we can see that he does have big positions in other credit card companies including Visa ($1.1bn) and Mastercard ($696m).

Plus, SYF has a relatively optimistic outlook from top analysts. In the last three months, the stock has received 5 buy ratings vs 2 hold ratings. These analysts have an average price target of $37.29, suggesting 14.5% upside potential from the current share price. BTIG’s Mark Palmer comments that SYF is poised to rally with better-than-expected net interest income. He says that a “healthy earnings beat” for the third quarter should “put shareholders’ minds at ease for now”- a statement clearly reflected by Buffett’s latest show of confidence in this lesser known stock.

Sells- IBM, WFC, CHTR

Buffett continued to slash the fund’s holding in tech giant IBM (NYSE:IBM)- this time by a whopping 31%. The fund now holds 37 million shares in IBM worth over $5 billion. Nonetheless this is still a significant drop from Berkshire’s original IBM investment of $10 billion. “I don’t value IBM the same way that I did six years ago when I started buying,” Buffett revealed to CNBC back in May. He continued: “IBM is a big strong company, but they’ve got big strong competitors, too.” The stock has a Hold analyst consensus rating on TipRanks, with 4 buy, 6 hold and 2 sell ratings over the last three months.

Notably, Buffett also trimmed shares in his massive Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) position as well as in Charter Communications (NASDAQ:CHTR), while exiting Belgium-based auto company WABCO Holdings (NYSE:WBC) completely.

Disclaimer: TipRanks is an independent cloud based service that measures and ranks digitally published financial advice. TipRanks' natural language processing (NLP) algorithms aggregate and ...

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