Buffett Stock Buys Say Plenty About the Stock Market. Why His Inaction Says More.

(Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Fortune/Time Inc)

Sometimes what you don’t do speaks louder than what you do.

With a net worth of about $140 billion, there’s a reason Warren Buffett is considered the ultimate investment guru by so many. As he prepares to step away from his CEO role at Berkshire Hathaway by the end of the year, his followers are running out of time to imitate his moves.

The latest Berkshire trades reveal the house is still on the lookout for cheap shares. It bought a stake in UnitedHealth , the insurer that has dropped 50% over the past 12 months, probably because it sees the selloff as overdone.

And for what it’s worth, David Tepper’s Appaloosa also bought UNH stock in the second quarter. So did Michael Burry, the investor who famously made billions in the 2008-09 financial crisis as dramatized in the movie “The Big Short.” Given the stock’s continued declines before Friday, they may have all lost money so far.

Buffett also snapped up beaten-down house-building shares including Lennar and D.R. Horton. He leaned into a tariff trade with purchases of steel maker Nucor, which is a bet in part that taxes on imports will bolster U.S. producers.

But the biggest takeaway is how little Buffett’s firm bought. Its purchases totaled less than $2 billion, yet it sold more than $4 billion in Apple shares alone. Even the investments the company did make were so small they might have been directed by Buffett’s lieutenants, rather than the Oracle of Omaha himself.

We also know Berkshire was sitting on a cash pile of $344 billion at the end of last quarter. That’s extraordinary—more than a third of the company’s market value of $1 trillion.

Buffett’s caution doesn’t mean stocks won’t keep going up. It’s just that he doesn’t see many bargains right now. Unfortunately it’s not just a ticking clock that his copycats face—it’s a lack of opportunities to mimic.

— Brian Swint

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Trump’s Putin Meeting Could Be Crucial for Crude

President Donald Trump and Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Alaska later on Friday with the war in Ukraine expected to be top of the agenda. The summit could be crucial for oil prices, which have gradually declined in the past couple of weeks as supply has outpaced demand.

• West Texas Intermediate U.S. crude and the Brent international benchmark are both down about 4% over the past month. The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund , which holds major U.S. energy stocks, is down 1.2%.
• Any movement toward a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv could cause prices to fall below $60 per barrel, some analysts say. But if the summit ends badly, and the U.S. imposes stricter oil sanctions on Russia, prices could jump to more than $80 a barrel.
• Moscow already faces sanctions blocking oil sales to Europe and the United States. They complicate, but don’t prevent, sales to other countries. But the Trump administration has also warned India that it could impose secondary sanctions against it for buying Russian oil, and the Senate is considering a bill that would impose secondary sanctions.

What’s Next: Trump had set Aug. 8 as a deadline for Putin to agree to a Ukraine cease-fire or face sanctions—that deadline passed without any action. Traders will be watching to see if the U.S. president bares his teeth if negotiations don’t go his way.

—Avi Salzman and George Glover

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Berkshire Hathaway’s Mystery Solved. UnitedHealth Is New Stake.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has revealed its mystery stocks, and UnitedHealth Group is one. The conglomerate took on a new five million-share stake in the insurer during the second quarter while trimming its holdings of Apple and Bank of America, according to a quarterly regulatory filing.

• The UnitedHealth stake was about $1.6 billion at the end of June. Holdings could have shifted since then. Berkshire also took on new stakes in home builder Lennar and steel maker Nucor in the quarter, and jumped back into DR Horton with a new 1.5 million share-stake.
• Berkshire sold 20 million shares of Apple for around $4 billion during the second quarter and now owns 280 million shares valued at $65 billion. It also sold 26 million shares of Bank of America, reducing its holding to 605 million shares valued at $28 billion.
• David Tepper’s Appaloosa added to its UnitedHealth stake in the quarter, raising its holdings to 2.45 million shares, or about $764 million. Appaloosa took on a new eight million-share stake in Intel and fellow chip makers Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Micron.
• Among other big investment managers, Jeffrey Smith’s Starboard Value increased its stake in Tripadvisor to 8.5 million shares, while Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square reported a new 5.82 million-share stake in Amazon.

What’s Next: Berkshire added to its existing investments in Pool, Constellation Brands, and Chevron in the second quarter, while eliminating a position in T-Mobile US. It reduced its investment in Charter Communications by almost 50% and pared its holding in Liberty Formula One.

— Andrew Bary, Liz Moyer, and Janet H. Cho

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The Case For Rate Cuts Is Weak. They’ll Probably Happen, Anyway.

President Donald Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates, but the case for cuts is growing harder to make, even as market expectations for it have hardened like cement. The end result might not deliver what the president truly wants.

• Stocks have hit one record after record, with the S&P 500 reaching its 18th of the year on Thursday. Bitcoin and Ether are trading near all-time peaks, retail investors are bullish, new tech stock listings are soaring, and small-cap stock gains are outpacing the S&P 500.
• The job market is cooling but the unemployment rate is hovering at 4.2%, still an historically low level. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said this week that full employment gives the central bank the “luxury” of waiting for more inflation data to determine their next move on rates.
• Core consumer prices rose 3.1% last month, an uptick from June. Economists expect the pass-through of tariffs, which were reset at higher rates in August, to accelerate through the autumn and beyond, and hit consumers. Already producer prices rose at an annual rate of 3.3% in July, showing the fastest monthly gain since May 2022.
• Based on all this, the case for cutting rates—usually associated with economic stresses—is tissue-paper thin. And yet it’s likely to happen at least three times this year, according to forecasts published Thursday by Goldman Sachs, with more cuts expected in 2026.

What’s Next: The hard conclusion from this paradox is that Trump’s pressure campaign has been a success. If Powell doesn’t lead the case for rate cuts, it will be seen as an overtly political act. If he does lower rates, he’ll be seen as having bent to the will of the president.

— Martin Baccardax

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Trump Says Social Security Has Improved Under His Watch

President Donald Trump touted customer service improvements under Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano on the 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act, even though the agency has cut thousands of jobs and consolidated some offices under cost-cutting moves by the Department of Government Efficiency.

• Although Trump said he fulfilled his campaign promise of no tax on Social Security for seniors, the Republicans’ megabill stops short of that. Instead, it provides for a $6,000 deduction for middle- and lower-income taxpayers aged 65 and over from 2025 to 2028.
• The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the temporary tax break will accelerate the insolvency of the retirement trust fund. The fund is now projected to run dry in 2033, about nine months earlier than 2024 projections, the Social Security Trustees reported in June.
• Trump said his administration kicked nearly 275,000 unauthorized people off of Social Security. Jon Whiten, deputy director of the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said undocumented immigrants “help keep Social Security running” by paying tens of billions in taxes each year, despite being ineligible for benefits.
• Proposals to shore up Social Security include increasing taxes on higher earners and raising the age when people can claim full benefits. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) has proposed borrowing $1.5 trillion to create a separate investment fund for Social Security to bolster the trust fund.

What’s Next: If Congress doesn’t act by 2033 to fix the program’s finances, recipients will see their benefits automatically cut by 23%, with incoming payroll tax revenue paying the remaining 77%. Social Security won’t run out of money as long as workers pay payroll taxes, but it will run short unless lawmakers act.

—Elizabeth O’Brien and Janet H. Cho

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Big Pharma Is Embracing Direct-to-Consumer Drug Sales

Big Pharma is taking a page out of the mattress industry’s playbook: Sell directly to consumers. Amid pressure from the White House to cut drug prices, some drugmakers are experimenting with direct-to-consumer sales that bypass middlemen, offering lower upfront prices to those who pay for it themselves.

• Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are selling their blockbuster weight loss drugs this way at prices well below list price, but still above what people using insurance pay. For the White House, direct to consumer sales aren’t the main event. The administration wants U.S. drug prices to converge with prices in overseas markets.
• The idea of going direct to U.S. consumers has long faced an almost insurmountable challenge: Most patients pay relatively little at the pharmacy counter. A report this year by the IQVIA Institute found that 93% of all prescriptions have an out-of-pocket cost of less than $20.
• Weight-loss drugs changed that equation. Medicare won’t pay for Lilly’s Zepbound or Novo’s Wegovy as a weight-loss treatment, and most commercial insurance plans put limits on the medicines. Cash-pay options from the companies seem to be working. More than a third of new Zepbound prescriptions are through Lilly’s direct-to-consumer channel.
• Pharmaceutical company executives appear willing to apply this model elsewhere. Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer plan to sell their blood thinner Eliquis directly to consumers, and virtually every drug CEO said something on their latest earnings calls about selling drugs straight to patients.

What’s Next: The White House’s efforts to lower U.S. drug prices has some other spill over effects. Lilly said it is raising the list prices of its drugs overseas. Governments and health systems in developed markets like Europe will have to pay more to lower prices in the U.S.

— Josh Nathan-Kazis

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—Newsletter edited by Liz Moyer, Patrick O’Donnell, Rupert Steiner