Executive Producer
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Warren Buffett
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Both classes of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway marked the first day of trading today for the just-split Class B stocks with their biggest one-day percentage gain since last August.
Both the Class A and Class B stock ended the day at their highest levels since early November, 2008.
The A shares closed today with a gain of 4.5% at $108,850. After three straight days of strong gains, they’re up 11.6 for the holiday-shortened week.
Current price: [BRK.A 108850.00 
4650.00 (+4.46%) 
]
The Baby Bs finished 4.6% higher today at a post-split price of $72.72. They’ve gained 13.6 percent this week.
Current price: [BRK.B 72.72 3.20 (+4.6%) ]
Volume for the Class B shares hit 14.5 million shares in today’s session. That compares to a 10-day average of 65,100 shares when the stock traded at its pre-split price of over $3000.
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Even volume on the unsplit A shares more than doubled to 4.4 thousand from their 10-day average of 2.1 thousand.
Buffett told Fox Business today he would prefer less action:
“We don’t want any day traders. And we get very, very few of them in the end. We want to get the same kind of shareholders that we’ve attracted in the past, we want to get people who look at buying a share of Berkshire … that they intend to hold forever… There’s been a little more action than is ideal today.”
Putting Berkshire stock into double digits for the first time in years makes them more affordable for small investors who weren’t able to handle a four-figure price tag.
In addition, there’s been speculation the Class B split will pave the way for Standard & Poor’s to add Berkshire to its benchmark S&P 500 stock index. If that happens, big index funds that mimic the S&P’s performance would need to purchase the stock. Some buyers now may be trying to anticipate a gain for Berkshire if it does indeed become one of the 500.
S&P passed up a chance to do so tonight, selecting NRG Energy to replace Sun Microsystems in the index.
That’s a bit of good news for Buffett anyway. NRG is up 5 percent to $25.20 in after-hours trading. Berkshire owns 6 million shares of NRG, a 2.3 percent stake. Current price: [NRG 24.00 
-0.67 (-2.72%) ]
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