Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Holdings Outperforming S&P 500 Handily

We recently pulled the most recent 13-F of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to track its holdings and recent performance.  Due to Warren Buffett's generous donation, the Foundation is loaded with Berkshire shares.  At the end of 2007, BRK/B made up 46% of the Foundation's equity holdings.  Because of Berkshire, the Foundation is heavily overweight the Financials sector at 46.93% (vs 17.58% for the S&P 500).  It is also overweight Healthcare, Consumer Staples and Industrials.  The Foundation is underweight Telecom, Consumer Discretionary and Energy, and it has a 0% weight in Technology, Utilities and Materials. 

We're guessing that the majority shareholder in MSFT doesn't need anymore Tech stocks in the Foundation, but it's still surprising to see that the fund has no other Technology holdings.  What does that say about the struggling sector?

click to enlarge

Below we highlight the holdings of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from its Q4 '07 13-F.  We provide the current portfolio weighting of each stock and its estimated P/E ratio for next year, but the list is sorted by year to date percent change.  Based on its holdings at the end of the year, the equity portion of the portfolio is down just 3% year to date (pretty good compared to the S&P 500's return of -6.79%). 

As shown, CNI is up the most at 15%, followed by CMCSK, CLHB, TSCO, KOF and HD.  RDNT, MRK and SGP are down the most this year, and the Foundation's biggest holding (BRK/B) is down 2.24%.

Comments

[vodka_tonic:]

awesome let me pattern my portfolio after them...wait i don't have billions of dollars :)
jk guys, ty for the analsis.

2008 Feb 26 05:57 PM

[granger:]

Very cool thanks. Nice to see some overlap. I currently hold TSCO, CNI, EXP, BRK-B. I am sure in much smaller portions then Gates.

2008 Feb 26 06:08 PM