Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway boosting its stake in Occidental Petroleum.

Video Transcript

- Warren Buffett turning up the heat as Berkshire Hathaway hikes its stake in Occidental Petroleum now to 26.8%. Of course, he has been inching up that stake in the company really all year long now. And the company also has regulatory approval to buy up to 50%. The "Wall Street Journal" did report earlier that , I believe a couple of weeks ago, that Berkshire was not planning to buy all of the company. But you have to wonder then what is going on here with this stake--

- Yeah. 99%.

- --continuing to creep up. Interesting here this morning there was one Citi analyst that did cut his recommendation on OXY to a neutral from a buy, perhaps after the run that we've seen in the shares based on all this buying that Berkshire has been doing.

- A question about how they would like it to be reported on their own earnings and within their own financial statements as well because this actually gives them even, though they have the permission to buy up to 50% of Occidental Petroleum, this also is critical in the threshold as well that they've crossed in the 26.8% of OXY that they own because that actually gives them the permission to claim the financials as well of Occidental on the Berkshire Hathaway financial statements too.

- Yeah. This is a company that Warren Buffett-- I don't know about himself, but his company Berkshire Hathaway has been sampling all the way back to the merger time when I believe they bought Anadarko. That was a big shale play back in the day. And I believe-- don't quote me on this-- but I believe Warren Buffett is still getting an 8% premium or interest payment on preferred shares to the tune of $10 billion. That's the principal amount.

So he's been milking this. Is he going to buy the entire company? It's been a while since Berkshire Hathaway has done one of these deals. I think Precision Castparts was the last one here. We can take a look at the YFi Interactive. I do have a chart to show. This is a year to date on OXY. And we can see kind of a broadening megaphone pattern here. Difficult to say if this is--

- Broadeing megaphone.

- Yes. There we go. It's very difficult to draw when I have this laptop here. Anyway, here's what's happening today as well as Friday. But I wanted to show the year to date because the energy sector is where we have seen the most gains. ExxonMobil back up to 57.7%. Chevron up. Now, some of these stocks have come off their highs. But Berkshire was one of those stocks at the beginning of the year that was making new highs even as the rest of the market was just falling off a cliff. So pretty interesting to see that develop there.