While political analysts and journalists obsess about President Donald Trump’s executive orders and their constitutional significance, the investor Warren Buffett has made his judgement clear on how the economy could look during the Trump years. In a massive stockmarket move, he has dumped nearly a billion dollars of long-held shares in retailer Walmart in favour of tech and airline stocks.
This demonstrates an astonishing change of heart for Buffett, who as recently as 2013 referred to the US airline industry as a “deathtrap for investors”. He was equally renowned for dubbing Apple’s shares “grossly overvalued”. His perennial faith in retail stocks seems to have evaporated, too, with the world’s most influential investor selling off his entire $900m stake in Walmart.