Bruce Berkowitz appears be losing faith in his teacher. Long considered a protegee of Warren Buffet's value-based investment strategy, Berkowitz has now sold a big stake in Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc, reports Jason Kephart of InvestmentNews.

In the second quarter, Berkowitz's Fairholme Capital Management has dumped nearly all of its A shares of Berkshire Hathaway and reduced its holdings of B shares by about 17 percent, writes Kephart. Fairholme sold a total of 1,567 of the A shares, currently trading at $128,529 a pop, and 163,314 of the B shares, currently $85 each.

That's a total sale of about $215 million worth of Berkshire stock.

On the year, Berkowitz's flagship Fairholme Fund "has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance," writes Kephart, gaining 30 percent year-to-date after losing over 32 percent in 2011. That's tops in the large-cap-value space this year. But the fund's three-year annualized return of 5.89 percent makes it nearly the worst-performing large-cap fund in that period.

InvestmentNews says that the fund's biggest buy in the quarter was 2.7 billion shares of the Jeffries Group.

Morningstar shows that the Fairholme Fund holds $7.1 billion. Its top four holdings are AIG (which accounts for 34 percent of the portfolio), Sears, AIA, and Bank of America.  

Edited by: Chris Cumming


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