And where you're going is you just don't understand the mentality of buy & hold ! You can bet your bottom dollar that Buffet did everything in his capacity to NOT move the markets whilst he was buying. He would have bought some here, some there, small chunks that nobody would notice until he had accumulated the total quantity he wanted. 0.76% of Apple is NOTHING ! Its a market for heavens-sake ... some people BUY, some people SELL !!! You're not considering the NET effect, you're only looking at gross. He doesn't want to move the market whilst he is accumulating because he wants to buy within his desired price range and not end up buying more and more expensiveley each time he buys a new chunk. The only time Buffet moves a stock is when his transaction ends up in the news and then all the "ooh Buffet" idiots come out to play with their stupid copy-cat trades that are already X months out of date.
Float means the shares that are in the hands of public with no restrictions for selling or buying. Daily volume averages about 30 million shares or about 0.57% of float. If he spread his purchase over 3 months (the reporting period of SEC disclosure) you are talking about 40/(30*90) or his transactions represented 1.4% of daily volume. Not enough to push things up or down IMHO.
Normally 1.4% is well within the noise (standard deviations) of volume traded every day. However, a smart day trader with a sophisticated algorithm and a lot of computer power and able to access trading info and timeline... might pick up the small signal out of the large random noise data set. Maybe the expert day traders among us can shed some lights on this. Mtrader, Phil Twist, Jammie J... any comments will be greatly appreciated.
Highly unlikely, and anyone who claims to would have a job of providing hard proof. As I said, people like Buffet will go to great lengths to hide in the noise. And that's before you consider they will no doubt also be making use of off-market venues and off-book trades too. Hell, some days or weeks they might not even trade at all, just to make it even harder to spot any patterns. As you said, its "noise". How are you going to differentiate between "a Buffet", brokers doing bulk trades and re-balances, people doing hedges etc. etc. etc. That's the beauty of spreading your order over 3 months .. nobody knows until its too late ! The whales know what they are doing. Don't underestimate the intelligence of your opposition.
specially in stocks. At least in forex, you are dealing with the central banks, and except if you are a George Sorros, you mean nothing to their bottom line.
From my understanding, at least in the later years, he also has very much control in running the companies, so he isn't exactly just a stock picker. From the articles I read, many of the companies that he buys he amalgamates, trims staff, etc, and this is part of the reason why whatever he touches seems to turn to gold. In fact, I remember even quotes going around that you don't want him buying the company that you work for because it will mean trouble ahead for the employees. Shareholders might love him, but no so much the workers.