Let’s Rate Buffett’s Latest Moves VIEW IN BROWSER By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - Berkshire Hathaway made some big moves
- Here’s what our top quant system says about them
- The latest Seasonal Edge trade printed 68% in a month
- Ask our top analysts anything
Buffett, even on his way out the door, is making headlines… Warren Buffett announced his retirement as CEO in May, ending a 55-year tenure. He’ll hand over the reins to one of the market’s most famous success stories, Berkshire Hathaway, to Greg Abel, head of the firm’s non-insurance division, and stay on the board of directors. But the Oracle isn’t done making moves… He has until the end of the year to do what he will with the Berkshire portfolio. And late last week, news broke that he’s staying busy. Buffett made several key position changes, as well as several completely new holdings and one dropped entirely. In particular, one of the new buys is embattled health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group (UNH). That stock has dropped more than 50% from its late 2024 peak after a slew of bad news – starting with CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination and continuing with a Department of Justice investigation, plus two consecutive quarters of bad earnings reports. For context, UNH hadn’t reported anything less than a beat on revenue and earnings since the first quarter of 2008. It’s a very Buffett kind of trade. Insurance stocks are what made him rich – now he’s doing what he does best: buying what’s been a rock-solid business during what he clearly sees is a temporary selloff. And make no mistake: Buffett has influence. Investors bid up UNH shares more than 12% on Friday because they think Buffett has the connections and chutzpah to potentially help the company fix these big problems. | Recommended Link | | | | If you missed Bitcoin in 2011, Tesla in 2012, or NVIDIA in 2016, you know the sting of regret… Now the master trader Jeff Clark has uncovered a new opportunity. He calls it “Crossfire” – and it could hand you gains of as much as 1,285% in as little as two days. Don’t let this become another “what-if” moment. Watch his free briefing now. |  | | But should you follow him? Far be it from us to tell Warren Buffett what to do with his cash, especially in the last few months he’ll be in charge. But there’s an important difference between investors like you and me and Warren Buffett. We don’t and can’t see what Buffett sees. We can’t do what he does. More specifically, we can’t call up the new CEO of UnitedHealth, talk through the company’s problems, and help him figure them out. What we can do is, in our view, a whole lot better. Here at TradeSmith, we employ a team of dozens of analysts, machine learning specialists, and systems designers to help our subscribers beat the market. The way we do that is with data. We spend millions experimenting with new strategies that are all grounded in the countless data points that construct the picture of every investment. Lately, we’ve been focusing on grading individual stocks. We’ve combined several key factors that correlate with share price growth on both the fundamental and technical sides. For fundamentals, we seek out stocks with growing revenues, earnings, and profit margins. The stocks growing these at the fastest rates get the highest scores. And for technicals, we look for stocks in strong uptrends alongside the presence of strong buying volumes – the kind that most likely come from large Wall Street institutions. We quantify these factors into a score, then create a composite weighted score that grades the whole picture. It’s fine for billionaire portfolios like Berkshire’s to play the long game. But what our Quantum Score basically tells you is whether this stock is likely to do anything for you, anytime soon. Just like we did for stocks in three major tech trends on Saturday. And given everything we know about UNH here in 2025, what kind of score do you imagine it gets? Not a great one: 
UNH has respectable Fundamentals at 67. But its Technical score, at 29.4 (the blue line on the chart at right), has rapidly deteriorated this year. It should also be noted that UNH’s technical score collapsed back in April, before shares continued to slide another 25%. And to be perfectly clear, the Quantum Score is not biased against value stocks in any way. You might have gotten that impression after Saturday’s look at the techiest of tech names. Another Buffett stock, grocery chain Kroger (KR), is just as much of a value-tilted company, trades at less than 19 times earnings… yet earns a much better score: 
It doesn’t matter if you’re a grocery store, a homebuilder, a quantum computing company, or a chipmaker. The Quantum Score ignores everything but the factors we’ve determined to matter more than any other. There was a lot more to Buffett’s recent 13F filing than the UNH purchase, though. Let’s take a deeper look at some of Berkshire’s biggest moves… Sticking with the new additions, Buffett also made a few other big moves. Buffett spread $5 billion evenly across D.R. Horton (DHI), Lennar (LEN), and Nucor (NUE). Two homebuilders and one steelmaker. DHI gets almost as excellent of a Quantum Score – 85.8, with stellar fundamentals: 
Its rival LEN isn’t the highest rating I’ve seen, but it has been improving over the last several months: 
Similar story with NUE: 
In addition, Buffett picked up a couple lesser-known names in Lamar Advertising (LAMR), and Irish home and business security company Allegion Plc (ALLE): 
Of these two, ALLE is clearly the one worth looking at. It rates a perfect 100 on its technical score and has a strong Fundamental score at 75, equaling out to a Quantum Score of 89.7. Just as – if not more – interesting, however, were Buffett’s other new holdings. We also saw a big boost in the stake of Pool Corp. (POOL), by 136.3%. That’s another middling Quantum Score stock, and one that used to be rated much more highly back in March: 
Then there are the stocks Buffett sold. He sold his T-Mobile (TMUS) position outright, and I was surprised to find that’s one of the higher rated stocks in our system: 
Equally notable, though, is the further trimming of Apple (AAPL) stock – as that’s one of Berkshire’s biggest long-term winners and has arguably had the greatest impact on Berkshire’s success in the last 25 years: 
It’s worth noting, too, that Apple is the lowest-rated stock of the Magnificent 7, trailing even Tesla (TSLA). Overall, according to the Quantum Score, Buffett had two solid buys in ALLE and DHI, a big miss in selling TMUS, a likely good call in selling more AAPL, and otherwise middling additions in other areas. There was a lot more in the filing, but these include the biggest moves from a capital perspective. Outside of Berkshire, there’s another stock that’s lighting up in the Quantum Edge system, too – so our CEO Keith Kaplan made sure to include it in his new webinar about the key breakthrough behind these scores. Watch now while the replay is still available. Seasonal Edge subscribers just put another win their pocket… Back on July 6, a new major seasonality window opened up on electronic components maker Monolithic Power (MPWR) through August: 
The data showed that MPWR had gone up 13 of the last 15 years from July 6 to August 30. On average, the stock returned more than 9.5% in this short span. That made it a prime candidate for our Seasonal Edge strategy – which trades the top seasonal patterns throughout the year. Fast forward to now, and the recommended call option on MPWR gained 67.9%… the shares popped 12.3% as the stock reached the profit target based on our data. Yet another example of how powerful seasonal patterns can be… especially when paired with confirming factors. For our Seasonal Synergy strategy, trades are selected based on a combination of an Optimal seasonality pattern (a high win rate and high average return), along with an Optimal RSI value unique to each stock. Here’s another seasonal trade coming up with a strong history, in Accenture (ACN): 
For 14 of the last 15 years, ACN has been up from August 20 to November 18 for an average return of nearly 8%. As of today, ACN’s RSI is just under 32. If it stays below 51 by August 20, that would help confirm the trade. That’s one to keep an eye on. To building wealth beyond measure, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily P.S. Sometime soon, I’ll be gathering with TradeSmith’s best and brightest for a brand-new episode of TradeSmith Roundtable. Our analysts always manage to surprise me – but because their takes are data-driven, they also come with plenty of receipts to back them up. As part of this new episode, we’d like to introduce a segment that’s all about what’s on your mind. What insights would help you best determine what’s “hot or not” in the markets today? Send your questions for any of our analysts to feedback@TradeSmithDaily.com, and we’ll use the coming episode to give you guys answers to a few of them. Keep in mind, we aren’t able to give individual investment advice, but we can give general analysis on any individual stock or strategy you want us to address. (Disclosure: Michael Salvatore held positions in TSLA and BRK.B at time of writing.) | 
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