This past week, Warren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), gave an update on what its stock holdings look like, what stocks were added, which ones added to, and which ones it was selling. Though there aren't many major changes in the list, there are some telling points that most investors can study and learn how to invest like Mr. Buffett.

These are stocks he's added to or added in the last quarter:

• Becton Dickinson (BDX): Up 155,000 shares (total owned: 1.889 million shares).
• Fiserve Inc. (FISV): This is a new position of 4.4 million shares.
• Iron Mountain (IRM): Increased position by 206,000 shares. Has been buying this over the past several quarters with a starting position of 3.3722 million shares.

Government debt is expanding -- again! At the same time corporate coffers are overflowing some $1.6 trillion with reserve capital, not counting financial institutions. In some instances they have more money than any state in the Union and most small countries. Chasing Value: Apple's Holding $48 Billion -- For What?

Here's a shocker -- personal savings continues to increase. When the (false) economy was booming valuations for everything were spiraling out of control, leverage was extreme, and the savings rate was next to nothing. Everyone wanted to join the party and most people stayed at the party to long, which did not end well. The savings rate has not been so high in a decade as people reduce their debt and streamline their personal budgets.

Over the past four years I have made numerous bad calls. Thankfully, I have made far more good calls. But if only I would have been right all the time, then I would probably have a lot more of your money. To bet and never lose adds up pretty quickly to a substantial bit of change.

Yesterday when I posted Chasing Value: Citigroup Beats Apple one commenter took me to task "Didn't you post the same post about Berkshire B versus Apple at the beginning of the year?" The answer is yes, and I stand by that belief.

These two great companies, Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) led by extremely talented entrepreneurs, have very divergent businesses, by design, and neither would choose any other path. I could not help but go back to examine the stock records for the year to see by how far I might have blundered, assuming our reader already had. Here is what I found.

The Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPad are all the rage and the demand exceeds the supply. The supply produced in China is where we are sending a lot of our money -- stimulus money.

Ongoing discussions about whether the federal government should, or should not start priming the economic pump again with a another $750 billion got me thinking: what happened to the first stimulus money?

The money did not evaporate. It did not go up in smoke, and contrary to popular belief, Congress did not eat it, try as they might. If it still exists then why would the economy need more -- and the debt burden that goes with it?

I'm going to offer up brief opinions on some of the events from the past trading week. Maybe you had your eye on one or two of them as well.

Playboy (PLA) reported a net loss in its second quarter. The red ink came out to 16 cents per share this time around; last year, the loss was 26 cents per share. You know what? It doesn't really matter if management was able to narrow the bleeding. Playboy is purely an arbitrage play now, with Hugh Hefner making a bid to take control of the business (a competing bid has been made by FriendFinder, which owns Penthouse). I would avoid making a buy here, since the arbitrage game can be a difficult one to win.

Until recently, my largest positions were in financial stocks Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC) and Bank of America (BAC). As a contrarian investor, I do buy on fear and sell on greed as "my pal Warren" has advised for many years. This has worked out to be very profitable over the past 18 months. However, in the past 30 days the financial stocks have dropped to second place in favor of oil and gas stocks.

I think the economic recovery is moving at a snail's pace, lowering anticipated demand for oil while gas was already depressed based on the same factors and the addition of numerous new large supplies. Add to this the mess in the Gulf of Mexico and the public's already negative sentiment about oil companies and you have the makings of depressed pricing in the sector.

A reading of +2.4% GDP is still growth. It is just not very robust growth. It is also as the argument continues of whether the U.S. is headed for a double-dip recession or just a period of slower growth. PIMCO's Bill Gross calls it a long protracted period of slow growth. Today was lighter than normal on the earnings news, and the final verdict over a green or red ticker at the close was not clear until the final minutes today.

Here were the unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow Jones 10,465.94 -1.22 (-0.01%)
S&P 500 1,101.59 +0.06 (0.01%)
Nasdaq 2,254.70 +3.01 (0.13%)

Top Analyst Calls

Four weeks ago, I made the argument that National Grid (NGG) might be on Warren Buffet's radar screen as a foreign acquisition. The strategic benefits, depressed stock price and yield all made it look like a good fit.

Ten days ago, Barron's trumpeted National Grid, a British company traded on the NYSE, for all the same reasons, absent the merger and acquisition possibilities.

So last week I bought NGG on a dip as a value proposition and if by some miracle "my pal Warren" makes a play for it that would be a bonus. Not to mention my crystal ball would go up in value. If you might be interested in a 7.72% yield from a company with the cash flow to back it up, read on.

To continue the saga of what might be on Warren Buffett's foreign wish list, consider the current holdings of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/BRK.B), the largest of which is insurance. The insurance industry has been hard hit by the economy, but it also has the greatest potential to rebound of any industry. Insurance companies have huge cash flow and a large float (mandated by government regulation) that can be used for investments. This has been a major contributing factor in Buffett's success.

Unlike the construction, automobile or financial sectors that have been met with an economic tidal wave that destroyed demand, there is no lack of demand in the insurance industry. The insurance companies have been hurt by the shrinking of their investment portfolios more than loss of demand or even claims, accepting companies that wrote swaps, like American International Group (AIG).

When next "my pal Warren" invests abroad he may not have to go very far.

Today we expand on investment criteria and start to look at actual stocks of non US companies that might be in the running for inclusion as one of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/BRK.B) foreign holdings.

In searching for global investment prospects that might interest Warren Buffett we have established that newly allocated capital would most likely pursue companies that pay a dividend and make products or operate in sectors that are well established and have a high level of certainty to exist decades into the future. This is basic to "my pal Warren's" investment philosophy, and there is no reason to think this will change.

In Part 2 of this series we then examined the size of a potential investment settling on a general range from $4 billion to $24 billion.

Warren Buffett decided to stock up on Tesco (TSCO) shares earlier this week, MarketWatch reported this morning. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) purchased roughly 2 million additional shares, boosting to group's stake in the British supermarket past 3%.

Buffett's decision comes two weeks after the company announced a succession plan, naming Philip Clarke as chief executive effective in March. In addition, Tesco released first-quarter earnings a week ago, receiving a mixed reaction from analysts as same-store sales were mostly flat.

There are many places that Warren Buffett may choose to invest Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A / BRK.B) capital. At the same time you can be sure there are places he will not set foot. It is not likely he will invest anywhere that does not have a vibrant, well-established stock market with a stable government. So, Mr. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela will not likely see any capital deployed from the likes of "my pal Warren" any time soon.

As a matter of fact, I would put the chances at slim of any South American country, besides Brazil, getting a look at all. Brazil is just too big and too vibrant to ignore. I would rule out Africa entirely except for indirect investments in oil and minerals through large conglomerates. The closest thing in the region would be Israel, at the furthest western reaches of Asia. He has already invested there and there is a high probability he would again. Investors from most of Europe and Asia have done the same, although many would rather not discuss it.

He has also invested in China, Great Britain, South Korea, and Switzerland. I would expect more money to be plowed into all of them again without reservation if the right deal materialized.

Trying to figure out what Warren Buffett will invest in next is no small task. Although, you can bet it will not be small. In fact, he may try to acquire whole companies because anything else might not move the needle when it comes to increasing shareholder value at Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A / BRK.B).

This post is a follow up to Serious Money: Buffett Looking Beyond Our Borders, where I concluded that Buffett will seek an opportunity to invest in a company that is paying a dividend and has a very easy to understand product or service that will not become obsolete any time soon.

Stories are starting to appear that "my pal Warren" is gearing up for a major foreign acquisition. One of my dear friends Randy S. is taking a post graduate business class at UCLA where this issue is a part of the course. He is supposed to figure out what non US companies Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/BRK.B), led by Warren Buffett, might be considering for investment.

Ahh yes, the prediction business, quite tricky indeed. Starting with some basics, in most cases I would stick to the time tested philosophy that past performance is not an indicator of future success. That said, I think in the case of Buffett, it does. There are many clues along the trail based on his past performance.

Here are some basic consistencies from the existing portfolio that I would expect to hold true going forward.

Voltaire said, "Common sense is not so common" and George Bernard Shaw commented that having " ...enough of it was genius."

This reminds me of Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) or Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc. (AAPL) that have both displayed plenty of the former and arrived at the latter in their business pursuits.

Derivatives like Collateral Debt Obligations, or CDO's, and Credit Default Swaps, get their value from something else entirely: total hype in an environment of smoke and mirrors.

It turns out that if you build layer upon layer of derivatives until you have no idea what the original underlying value truly is, it becomes so convoluted that a genius can't comprehend it at all. It is self evident that nobody could even determine all the counter-party risk.