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berkshire's management, which has always been known for its low-key approach, announced a move this week that caused a lot of discussion in the market: ajit jain, the company's vice chairman in charge of insurance business, sold more than half of berkshire's holdings.

regulatory documents show thaton september 9, jain sold 200 berkshire class a shares at $695,417.65, which is equivalent to cashing out $139 million (about 990 million yuan).。

(source: sec)

after completing the transaction, jain still holds 61 berkshire class a shares, his family trust also holds 55 shares, and the non-profit jain foundation has 50 shares. in other words, jain sold nearly 55% of his holdings on monday.

there is a lot of discussion: what happened in berkshire?

after a tumultuous early career, jain left india for further studies in the united states and joined berkshire from mckinsey in 1986, a position he holds to this day. under his leadership, berkshire has successfully entered the reinsurance industry and completed the transformation of its auto insurance business, geico.

in 2014, buffett publicly announced that both jain and abel would be his qualified successors (he finally chose abel), and in january 2018, he promoted jain to vice chairman of insurance business and joined the board of directors.after that, the two of them began to step forward and sit on the stage of berkshire's annual shareholders meeting.

(source: 2024 berkshire shareholders meeting)

regarding the reduction of holdings, some media called jain, but he refused to respond. berkshire remained silent as always, leaving it to the outside world to comment.

among the many speculations, there are two more mainstream conjectures: valuation theory and retirement theory.

the share price of berkshire class a shares has risen by nearly 24% this year, outperforming the s&p 500 index and many technology growth stocks, and broke the $1 trillion market value milestone for the first time in august this year.

(berkshire-a daily chart, source: tradingview)

matching the stock selling action is,berkshire's buybacks have also begun to slow down significantlypublic companies repurchased only $345 million of their own stock in the second quarter of this year, far below the average of $2 billion in the previous two quarters. buffett has repeatedly said that the repurchases were because the stock price was below its intrinsic value, but the latest move may indicate that the "stock god" has changed his mind.

bill stone, chief investment officer of glenview trust, which holds berkshire shares, explained:at best, jain's sale is a sign that the stock is no longer cheap.the current price-to-book ratio of nearly 1.6 times is probably close to buffett's conservative estimate of intrinsic value. stone does not expect berkshire to make a large number of repurchases at current prices, or any repurchases at all.

of course, what is hidden by the appearance that buffett is still dominating wall street at the age of 94 is thatjain is also 73 years old this year.

when buffett announced that abel would be his successor, the outside world generally believed that the core reason was that abel was 11 years younger than jain. however, at last year's shareholders' meeting, buffett publicly stated that there was no competition between abel and jain, and jain "never thought about managing berkshire."

as for the uncertainty of the "post-buffett era", investors have also been worried.will jain stay at berkshire after abel takes over as ceo?。