Let Your Portfolio Mirror Buffett's With These ETF Strategies

Who doesn’t want to follow investment strategies of billionaire investor Warren Buffett? Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRKa) BRK.B has added more than 78% over the last five years (as of May 15, 2018), better than the 64.4% gain of the broader market ETFSPDR S&P 500 ETF (AX:SPY) .

Notably, Berkshire Hathaway's 13F filing disclosing the first-quarter stock holdings has shown some major changes. Below we highlight those alterations in portfolios so that retail investors can bank on some winning ETF and stock investment strategies.

Buffett is All About Apple

Buffett is outright bullish on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) . Berkshire has the highest stake in the 13F portfolio at 21.27%. After raising his stake in Apple by 23.3% in the fourth quarter of 2017, he added 75 million more shares of Apple in the quarter. Berkshire Hathaway now owns about 4.9% of the outstanding shares of Apple.

Investors interested in following Buffett and being part of Apple’s growth story can play ETFs like iShares Dow Jones US Technology ETF IYW, Select Sector SPDR Technology ETF XLK and Vanguard Information Technology ETF (HN:VGT) (read: Why You Should Believe in Buffett & Bet on These Apple ETFs).

Treat Teva Nicely

Berkshire more than doubled its holdings in Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (NYSE:TEVA) Limited TEVA to 40 million shares during the first quarter of 2018. Teva has about 16% weight in iShares MSCI Israel ETF EIS and 5.4% in VanEck Vectors Generic Drugs ETF GNRX.

Make Money With Monsanto (NYSE:MON)

Berkshire reported the addition of 7.3 million shares of Monsanto in the first quarter, reaching the total to 19 million shares. ETFs like iShares MSCI Global Agriculture Producers ETF VEGI, First Trust Indxx Global Agriculture ETF FTAG, Materials Select Sector SPDR ETF ( XLB and VanEck Vectors Agribusiness ETF (V:MOO) have substantial weights in Monsanto. While VEGI has about 14.3% exposure to Monsanto, other ETFs have 8.1% to 10.1%.

Dump IBM (NYSE:IBM)

Berkshire left IBM after cutting its stake in the company. Per an article published on CNBC, Buffett last year said "IBM is a big strong company, but they've got big strong competitors too" (read: Invest Like Warren Buffett With These ETFs).

So, investors following Buffett may carefully handle the likes of First Trust NASDAQ Technology Dividend Index Fund TDIV as the fund has about 7.4% weight in IBM. But the fund has other strong candidates like Apple (which takes about 8.5% of the fund) (read: Should You Buy the Dip in IBM With ETFs?).

Steer Clear of General Motors

Berkshire offloaded stakes in General Motors (NYSE:GM) . For General Motors, the stake declined to around $1.8 billion from about $2 billion. Funds like First Trust Nasdaq Transportation ETF FTXR and First Trust NASDAQ Global Auto Index Fund CARZ have around 8% focus on General Motors.

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