| Berkshire's secret stocks aren't secret anymore The Securities and Exchange Commission requires institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in assets under management to file a Form 13F every three months, listing the publicly-traded U.S. stocks in their portfolio.
That's the primary way we get a rough idea of what Berkshire Hathaway is buying and selling.
Sometimes, however, the SEC will allow some holdings to be kept confidential for a time, to prevent copycat buyers from driving up a stock's price as it's being accumulated.
That's what we saw in Berkshire's Q3 filing: "Confidential information has been omitted from the public Form 13F report and filed separately with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."
This week, when Berkshire released its Q4 filing, the secret was revealed. And it's wasn't just one stock, it was three.  Two of them are sizable stakes, even by Berkshire standards, going right into our list of the company's ten largest holdings of U.S. stocks.
As of December 31, Berkshire held 146.7 million shares of Verizon Communications, about 3.5% of that company's outstanding shares.
Sixty percent of the shares were purchased during the fourth quarter.
At today's closing price, the stake is worth $8.3 billion. (It was $8.6 billion at the end of the quarter.)
Combined with Berkshire's much smaller $630 million worth of T-Mobile (it did more than double its stake during the fourth quarter), the Verizon position may be a bet on the emerging 5G wireless technology, a strategy endorsed by former Cisco CEO John Chambers in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Secret two The other big confidential purchase was Chevron. Berkshire bought 48.5 million shares (91% of them during the third quarter) that are currently worth $4.6 billion. (As of December 31, it was $4.1 billion.) That's 2.5% of the oil giant's outstanding shares.
As CNN Business puts it, buying Chevron stock "is a bet that oil demand will fully recover from Covid-19 and remain elevated for decades to come, despite growing public pressure" on oil companies due to climate change concerns.
The Motley Fool's Eric Volkman notes that's "entirely in character for Buffett, who throughout his career has pounced on individual stocks and sectors that have fallen out of favor with investors."
And it's another "sign of confidence" in an energy sector revival, following Berkshire's $4 billion July purchase of Dominion Energy's natural gas assets.
On the other hand, Berkshire cut its Suncor Energy stake by almost 28%. But at less than $250 million, it was already relatively small.
Secret three is also small Berkshire revealed it bought 4.3 million shares of professional services company Marsh & McLennan, that are currently worth almost $500 million. Eighty percent of them were purchased during the third quarter.
And then there's ...
But does it mean anything? Bloomberg Opinion's Tara Lachapelle writes Berkshire's investing activity was "all over the place" during the fourth quarter, making it hard to know what Buffett and his portfolio managers might be thinking.
And on CNBC's "Fast Money Halftime Report" today, Berkshire shareholder Josh Brown made the case that Berkshire's stock moves now are "less worth paying attention to than maybe ever before in my lifetime" for most investors, with no "fundamental takeaways on individual companies" or "sector bets."
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BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH
  BERKSHIRE'S TOP U.S. STOCK HOLDINGS - Feb 19, 2021
 Berkshire's top holdings of disclosed publicly-traded U.S. stocks by market value, based on today's closing prices.
Holdings are as of December 31, 2020 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway and New England Asset Management's 13F filings on February 16, 2020.
The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
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-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
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