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3 Things About Warren Buffet’s Recent Gold Purchase Nobody Understands

How the facts lie far away from the headlines

Anthony Andranik Moumjian
3 min readAug 24, 2020

Warren Buffet recently purchased Barrick Gold Corp. According to the most recent 13F filing that ended on June 30, 2020, he purchased approximately 20,918,701 shares in them.

Every major publication has called this Buffet’s way of betting against the United States. However, here’s what we actually know.

The numbers.

Barrick Gold Corporation is a mining company. It’s not an actual bet on the commodity, it’s derivative of it. If we were to literally count the amount of this company he bought, it adds up to $563,549,805.

Let’s put this in perspective. $500 million is a lot of money — It’s a lot of money for everyone except Buffet. The market value of his holdings at Berkshire, according to the 13F filing, is $202 billion. This isn’t including his $150 billion cash pile he has growing. In this filing, he sold his entire stake of Goldman stock, all of his shares in Occidental Petroleum, most of his shares in Sirius XM, over half of his stake in JPMorgan Chase, and 26% of his stake in Wells Fargo. His selling spree amounted to over $10 billion. His purchase in Barrick amounted to $500 million.

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Anthony Andranik Moumjian
Anthony Andranik Moumjian

Written by Anthony Andranik Moumjian

Los Angeles. Long-time runner. Top writer on Quora, 100M+ total content views. New to Medium. Inquiries: Moumj@berkeley.edu

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