Sightly off topic - How do you go about buying $1,000,000,000 of Apple?
If I want the best price I obviously want to buy in bulk.
Except somebody buying $1Bn of a stock (even if that is a % of market cap) is likely to draw some interest. Even more so if I mention that it is a certain Mr Buffet is making a 9 figure bet that the price will rise.
But I don't want to make 100,000 separate $10K trades because the front running and HFT systems will nail me.
Or do I quietly build up a position with options and then suddenly call them all and to hell with what that does to the market?
The 13F numbers are only reported once per quarter. Apple's daily average volume is around 43 million share trades per day, which at the price Berkshire paid was roughly $4.6 billion changing hands per day, every working day. To buy $1B of stock over the course of a quarter (60 working days) you need to buy about 153,000 shares per day (~$16 million), which would be trivial to hide in the gigantic volume.
There are specialists at large institutional firms that do this all day every day. It can be tricky to get a good price while buying large blocks in thinly-traded companies, but Apple is not one of those. Of course, since Berkshire did all of this
last quarter their holdings are already worth less. They're not in it for the short term, though, so I'm sure they don't care.