We recently got a look at Berkshire Hathaway's (BRK.A 0.39%)(BRK.B 0.28%) updated stock portfolio when the company filed its latest quarterly disclosure. A few of the moves were already well-known, such as the sale of about half of its Apple investment and the addition of even more shares of Occidental Petroleum.
However, one move in particular that surprised me was the sale of a portion of Berkshire's investment in Capital One Financial (COF 3.44%). Berkshire sold about 2.65 million shares of Capital One, which equals a 21% reduction in the investment. Even after the sale, Berkshire still owns about $1.4 billion of the bank stock, so it isn't like Warren Buffett and his team have completely lost faith in the business. But it still surprised me, and not only because Berkshire only added Capital One to its portfolio for the first time about a year ago.
I'm often aligned with Buffett's moves. For example, I think the recent Apple sale was a smart idea, for a number of reasons. But I have to say that I disagree with him here. In fact, Capital One is at the top of my list of attractive bank stocks to buy right now.
Why I'm a fan of Capital One
There are a few reasons I'm a fan of Capital One. For starters, it's a highly profitable bank. Not only is Capital One a credit-card-focused bank, but it also focuses on products like online checking and savings accounts more than other large U.S. banks. This gives it an excellent cost structure. In fact, Capital One has a net interest margin of 6.70% as of the second quarter – for context, Bank of America's NIM in the same period was 2.41%.
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I'm also a big believer in Capital One's pending acquisition of Discover Financial Services. This deal adds hundreds of millions of credit card accounts to Capital One's portfolio, and most of the banks' credit card products are complementary to each other, meaning there's little overlap.
Not only that, but after the deal is finalized, Capital One will have its own payment network. It can use Discover's network to process much of its debit and credit card volume and avoid paying interchange fees to Visa and Mastercard. Plus, owning its payment network creates a ton of future possibilities, such as becoming the processor for other banks' credit card products.
In addition, Capital One is a cheap bank stock right now. It trades for about 10% below its book value (most likely due to recession fears and the credit card business), but this is remarkably inexpensive compared to most peers.
Why did Buffett sell?
One important thing to keep in mind is that we have absolutely no idea why Berkshire decided to sell some of its Capital One stock. We don't even know if the move was initiated by Warren Buffett himself, or by one of his investment managers.
That said, there are a few potential reasons I can think of. For one thing, most of Buffett's stock moves recently seem to be in the direction of taking risk off the table, and that could certainly be the case here. After all, credit card loans are inherently riskier than, say, mortgages or auto loans if we run into tough times. In addition, Berkshire was sitting on a gain of approximately 37% on its Capital One investment in a little over a year, so this could be taking some of its profits off the table.
Whatever Buffett's reason (and I'm sure he has one), it's important to remember that every investor has different goals and risk tolerance. And to me, the risk-reward dynamics of Capital One look great right now.
