Buffett offloads more Bank of America shares; sales top $3.8 billion

Berkshire Hathaway run by billionaire Warren Buffett, extended its selling of Bank of America and has shed more than $3.8 billion of the second-largest U.S. bank's stock since mid-July, reports Reuters.
Berkshire sold approximately 19.2 million Bank of America shares for $779 million between July 30 and Aug. 1, according to a Thursday night regulatory filing.
Buffett's conglomerate has sold 90.4 million Bank of America shares since July 17, in 12 straight trading days of selling.
It remains the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank's largest shareholder, owning 942.4 million shares, or 12.1 per cent of reported shares outstanding worth about $37.2 billion as of Thursday.
Bank of America shares fell as much as 4.3 per cent in Friday morning trading. Through Thursday, they had fallen more than 10 per cent since Berkshire began selling, while the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index fell just 2.5 per cent.
The sales began after Bank of America's stock price had risen by about two-thirds since late October, and traded at more than 1.2 times book value.
That boosted the value of Berkshire's shares to over $45 billion, more than triple the $14.6 billion, it paid for them.
Berkshire must keep reporting sales until its stake falls below 10 per cent. It will report second-quarter earnings on Saturday morning.
Buffett, 93, one of the world's most revered investors, has invested continuously in Bank of America since 2011, when Berkshire bought $5 billion of preferred stock.
Well, markets are discounting mechanisms, as we all know, and one might hypothesize that markets had been pricing a scenario more akin to a soft landing, or a Goldilocks scenario, some would call it.