Why Is Bill Gates The Largest Shareholder In John Deere???

Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975.  But I didn’t realize when Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates’ share was 49.2% vs. 28% for Allen.  By 1990, Gates’ fortune was valued at $2.8 billion and in 1999, his fortune swelled to $76 billion.

As many people were preparing for the Y2K bug…do you guys remember that?The Y2K bug was a computer flaw, or bug, that may have caused problems when dealing with dates beyond December 31, 1999.  While the people thought the world was going to stop to a halt due to the “millennial bug,” Gates was thinking on a totally different level.  That same year, Gates put $11.5 billion into Cascade Investments, his personal fund and another $6.5 billion into his various philanthropic organizations, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lets fast forward to 2011. Cascade Investment hold 24.5 million shares of Deere stock.  Then in 2013 Cascade Investment buys an additional three million shares increasing his stake in Deere to 7%.  By this time, Cascade also had investments in Canadian National Railway, Republic Services, a waste disposal firm and Ecolab, a global manufacturer of sanitary products.

OK, lets keep going.  Recently, Cascade Investment bought 87,000 more shares in Deere this past August making Gates the single largest stock owner at just above 10%.Gates bought 87,000 more shares in late August. The purchase brought his holdings to 31,510,573 shares, a stake of just above 10%.

During this same period between 1999 and 2018, Cascade Investments has been buying land all around the US, including14,500-acre deal one of the largest U.S. land sale not only in Washington State in 2018.

America’s richest man says that it is a terrible irony that most of the billion people, 15% of the world population, who live in extreme poverty and must worry about where they will get their next meal are suffering on farms. He says that the world needs to repeat the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, when new farming technologies, including new seed varieties of rice, wheat, and corn, increased the amount of food available and decreased its price.

“The world faces a clear choice,” he writes. “If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don’t, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation.”

Source

And that’s when it hit me…why Gates was the largest single stock owner in John Deere. Deere & Company manufactures and distributes various equipment worldwide agriculture equipment such as utility tractors; tractor loaders; combines, cotton pickers, cotton strippers, and sugarcane harvesters; harvesting front-end equipment; sugarcane loaders and pull-behind scrapers; and tillage, seeding, and application equipment.

Yesterday, Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Casey downgraded  Deere with a price target of $170. But the stock has bee in sideways range since Nov. 2017.

I hate to go against Bill, the chart suggest to short Deere now with a target at weekly demand.

This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.