Bill Bails Big Time on Some Techvestments and Goes Full Green Acres

Video Transcript:

Thanks to the SEC, every three months we're lucky enough to get a peek into what investors like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio are buying and selling. Legally, they have to disclose this to the public or else they'd be more than happy to do it behind closed doors. Now I've been analysing the stock trades of one of the wealthiest men on the planet, Bill Gates, and if we look at his moves, they will intrigue you. So in quarter 1 2021, he sold out of 14 of his stock positions, some he sold by 100% and others he reduced by big percentages. Then if we click and take a look at how many stocks he bought in the first quarter of 2021, it was just one stock, a stock by the name of Copang, which we'll look at a bit later on in the video. But 14 stock sold and only one stock bought was very intriguing. So let's go over the stocks that he sold, and I've got to tell you I don't know how happy his billionaire friends are going to feel about it. So he sold 100% out of Liberty Group A and Liberty Group C. Liberty is a telecommunications company based on broadband services, mobile services and telephone services. Next, very interesting, he sold 100% out of his Twitter stock. Jack Dorsey, I'm sorry, but Gates is no longer an investor. Amazon, Jeff Bezos' e-commerce company, he also sold 100% out of. Very interesting, because if we take a look at Amazon's stock price, it's up over 80% since the pandemic in 2020. So maybe he's just sold out of this because he thinks it's overvalued. But Amazon wasn't the only big company on Gates' selling list. Apple was let go of as well. We can see that Gates sold 100% out of his Apple stock position over 1 million shares sold. So those are some big companies that Bill Gates doesn't want a piece of anymore. Apple, Amazon and Twitter. Next, let's look at the stocks that he's reduced. So Liberty Global C, he reduced massively by 86% as well as the general Liberty Global by 82%. FedEx and UPS, the delivery companies, both were reduced by a significant amount, 50% and 38% respectively. Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, 4 million of his shares were sold there with 35% off his portfolio. Cheese Gates has done a lot of selling. Next on the list is Canadian National Railway, something which he's been a long time holder in. Gates sold 18% of his position. Now 18% compared to how much he sold of the rest of his positions is relatively small. But normally, this would be considered a big sell. Now one of Gates' long time friend is someone called Warren Buffett, aka the greatest investor in the world. And Gates has been an owner in Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, for some time now. However, as we can see, he's just sold a decent chunk of it. He reduced his position by 11.9%, 5 million shares sold worth 6% of Gates' entire portfolio. Very interesting move because most of Buffett's investors hold their stock for life and never sell. However, Berkshire Hathaway is still Gates' number one stock position worth 9 billion dollars, 4 times bigger than his second largest position. So he still owns a lot of Berkshire Hathaway. And his last two positions that he sold was Caterpillar and Crown Castle International. He reduced them by 9.8% and 4.6% respectively. So there you have it. 14 stock sold already this year. Some of those positions he completely sold out of. Apple, Amazon and Twitter all gone. The one stock that he did decide to buy was a South Korean E-commerce company by the name of Koo Pang. Koo Pang is a company that only went public in March this year and some people are targeting it as South Korea's version of Amazon. Except it's still very much in its early growth phase as they've had a $295 million net loss. Most of their money has gone into expanding their business. 14 stock sold, one Korean E-commerce company bought, why is Gates done so much selling? Even if you take a look at the quarter before this one, it tells the same story. Gates sold 11 stocks in the fourth quarter of 2020 and he bought just one, a stock called Shrodinger. Again, it must be asked why is Gates doing so much selling in these particular times? First thing that we need to note is that we've had a pandemic and we're still in one, we're just starting to recover from it. A lot of companies have taken a hit when you look at their underlying business. The hotel industry, which employs 1.6 million Americans, had an 11.6% decline in revenue per room compared to 2019. Auto-Maker struggled as the demand for cars slipped with sales declining year over year by 20%. Oil and gas struggled as the need for it's lessened in the pandemic. Less factories running. Most industries suffered apart from the disruptive innovative companies, the likes of Amazon, which sells things purely over the internet. E-commerce sales actually grew during this time, up 44% in 2020. Companies like Twitter did well as more people had time to go on the internet and retweet. Even companies like FedEx and UPS benefited as people needed them to deliver things, because they couldn't travel as easy and go to shops. But what you might notice is Gates has now sold out of these types of positions. Amazon, with its 80% increase in price, he sold Twitter, with its 136% increase, sold FedEx and UPS with their 187% and 135% growth Gates has reduced. So maybe Gates thinks that these positions have had their time in the sun, their prices sky high and Gates clearly believes now is the time to get out. So what is Gates doing with his money now that he sold so many stocks? What's he doing with the cash? And I don't know if you guys know this, but Bill Gates is now the largest private farm owner in the world. He now owns 269,000 acres of farmland with assets totalling $619 million. That's nearly the size of Hong Kong in terms of farms. But Bill Gates isn't a farmer, he's a tech geek. He doesn't have green fingers, he's got keyboard fingers. Why has he bought up so much farmland and sold so many big technology companies like Twitter, Amazon and Apple? The thing you need to know about Bill Gates is he didn't become one of the wealthiest man in the world by mere luck. He became it by first through starting Microsoft, but next through very smart investing. You see in 1994 Bill Gates hired an investment manager by the name of Michael Larson and together they made some smart investing moves. 1999-2000 was the year of the great internet bubble pop. Microsoft, his company, got hurt badly and it fell 60%. But Bill Gates was smart and he had already sold out of his Microsoft position and diversified his wealth before the crash occurred. Now time has passed the long as 2021 and again he's done a lot of selling in those big technology stocks. The ones that we've seen go up by tens, sometimes hundreds of percentage points over the past year. Gates has sold them now. Maybe he's seen something similar as the what he saw back in 1999 and that's why he's moved out. I can't say for sure but it is a potential reason why he's done so much selling. And a lot of investments that he has made is buying up farmland. So much so that he's now the largest private farm owner in the world today. But why farms? I find this very interesting. He could buy basically any technology company out there but instead he sold them and bought farmland. One of the things that we have to realise about farmland is that it's a finite asset. A company can always sell more stock. The Fed can always print more money but farmland you can't just magically create another piece of land unless you're playing Minecraft or something. My point is that farms are a scarce resource and 50 years from now they'll still be in demand. They'll still be providing food for society. It seems that every investor and their dogs are moving into those big internet companies right now. Bill Gates is doing the opposite. He's moving into conservative investments. Now some people are saying that this investment from Gates is all about control. Bill is one of the richest people in the world. Net worth 126 billion dollars. He's looking to expand his power in the world. As the great quote from Henry Kissinger says, control oil and new control nations. Control food and you control people. Now I don't want to go deep into any theories on Gates but perhaps he's just making this as a smart investment. If we do see a recession over the next couple of years people still need to eat. People still need farms. I think Gates is wiser in the investing world than some people think and farms are a smart investment especially in this world where we've been printing trillions of dollars every year. 2020 we've printed roughly 20% of the total US dollars in circulation. Cash is a terrible investment. It's been devalued by the second but farms are a great place to store your wealth. In saying that the reasons why Gates has sold a lot of stocks and bought farms I cannot say for sure because he hasn't directly come out and said anything on why he's made the investments that he has and why he's decided to sell so many stocks. We haven't seen any words out of his mouth. You know he's recently had to go through a public divorce that could play a factor. I'm not sure he's big into helping with the pandemic and the medicine behind it. Maybe he's selling because he needs the cash for that or maybe he sees a nasty recession on the horizon with a market bubble pop coming soon. One thing that we can say for sure is that the market is changing. While many investors are pumping their money into internet companies Gates is doing the opposite. He's selling them, buying up farms and playing the game very conservatively.