In a recent episode of "The Rank" on Fool Live, three of our experts ranked nine of their favorite infrastructure stock investments, and their No. 1 choice was clear. In this clip, recorded on Sept. 13, Fool.com contributors Matt Frankel, CFP, and Jason Hall, along with senior analyst Asit Sharma, discuss their consensus No. 1 infrastructure stock and why they ranked it so highly.
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Jason Hall: So, this is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A -0.28%) (BRK.B -0.68%). Here's what I'm going to do, I'm just going to read off some names. Acme Brick, International Metalworking, Marmon Holdings, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Extra Corporation. Let's see, Marmon, McLane, which is distribution, but they actually were tied into infrastructure because a lot of the stuff they do. That's just a couple.
Then you start looking at their stock holdings. There's a ton of banks. Why am I mentioning banks? Somebody has to finance the infrastructure. Banks are going to win. I can tell you guys, if there's a big push for infrastructure, this is going to be good for banks because there's a lot of lending that's still going to happen to private enterprise that's attached to it.
I think the biggest one that I didn't mention, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, the wholly owned energy subsidiary. It's the largest wind producer in the U.S. A lot of people don't know that. Massive, massive infrastructure investments and power transmission. You think about the push for renewables. There's so much going on with both the wholly owned subsidiaries and a lot of upside for that stock portfolio as well that might not be in traditional infrastructure companies, but infrastructure will drive a lot of positive results, and it's really, really reasonably valued right now.
Matt Frankel: Awesome. You mentioned the banks thing. If you ever noticed Bank of America, Wells Fargo, they all go down really badly when the oil market's doing bad. It's because that's a big portion of the loans on their book.
Hall: Yeah.
Frankel: Correct me if I'm wrong, Asit probably knows this better than I do. When Burlington Northern Santa Fe was an independent company before Berkshire acquired it, it was on par size-wise with UNP [Union Pacific], right?
Asit Sharma: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was. They have a different network. They don't have identical size network but it was sizable at that time. I'm sorry, I don't have the rough numbers with me.
Hall: Yeah. One of the three largest in North America and one of the things that made it so attractive to Berkshire was they already owned a pretty substantial stake, like 20% or so. What a wonderful conglomeration of assets.
