Everything Warren Buffett: CNBC: Warren Buffett Continues to Cut Constellation Energy Stake

Friday, May 15, 2009

CNBC: Warren Buffett Continues to Cut Constellation Energy Stake

Published: Thursday, 14 May 2009 | 10:50 AM ET

By: Alex Crippen
Executive Producer

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is still chipping away at the almost 20 million shares of Constellation Energy [CEG 25.57

-0.07 (-0.27%)

] it received last December as part of its break-up fee.

Berkshire's MidAmerican Energy Holdings had made a deal a few months before, at the height of the credit crisis, to buy Constellation. Constellation decided to go with France's ECF instead. It handed over the 20 million shares for changing its mind.

As of mid-February, Berkshire had sold over five million CEG shares for a total of $137 million. That brought its Constellation stake down to 14.8 million shares.

Today, an SEC filing lists another series of sales that brings Berkshire's stake down by 2.3 million shares to 12,476,154. That's 6.26 percent of Constellation shares outstanding, down from 7.45 percent in mid-February and 10 percent at the end of last year.

Here's a listing of the sales detailed in the latest filing:

Berkshire's Constellation Sales: April-May

Date	Shares Sold	Price/Share	Total Price
April 9	41,736	$23.07	$962,850
April 13	3,330	$23.02	$76,657
April 15	40,000	$23.06	$922,400
April 17	3,100	$23.05	$71,455
April 23	2,513	$23.01	$57,824
April 24	60,600	$23.04	$1,396,224
April 27	30,800	$23.03	$709,324
April 28	26,400	$23.10	$609,840
April 29	100,000	$23.12	$2,312,000
April 30	100,000	$23.69	$2,369,000
May 1	100,000	$24.57	$2,457,000
May 5	100,000	$24.47	$2,447,000
May 6	133,527	$24.75	$3,304,793
May 7	300,000	$25.49	$7,647,000
May 8	500,000	$26.04	$13,020,000
May 11	304,045	$26.08	$7,929,494
May 12	500,000	$26.25	$13,125,000
May 13	6,002	$26.05	$156,352
TOTAL	2,352,053	$25.33	$59,574,212

As you can see in this graph, the size of the daily sales (purple bars) increased as Constellation's stock price (blue line) moved higher.

In its first quarter earnings release last week, Berkshire revealed it had cut its stake in ConocoPhillips [COP 45.03 0.43 (+0.96%) ], selling millions of shares at a loss.