Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway upped its stake in Japan’s five biggest trading houses, according to the News on Monday from Bloomberg. And lately the Far East seems to have caught his and Berkshire’s eye with the firm pouring even more money into Japan’s mega trading firms, or “sogo shosha”, shortly after claiming a $5-billion chunk of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC. And it looks like there’s more to come: when Berkshire picked up its original 5% stake in each firm back in August 2020, it hinted that there was room to buy up to 9.99%. That might be why the sogo shoshas’ stock prices inched higher when the latest news broke.

Berkshire’s bulked-up stakes in the Japanese trading firms could tell us something about Buffett’s views on inflation. After all, these businesses make money by importing, trading, and investing in all sorts of commodities, from oil to metals and textiles – and the more those materials cost, the bigger the firm’s profit. Reading between the lines, then, this move suggests Buffett could be betting on raw materials getting more expensive down the line.

Buffett’s been the poster boy for “quality investing” for decades: that’s a safe, stable investment strategy that focuses on buying great businesses at fair prices. But recent moves – like his big buys in Occidental Petroleum and TSMC – have seen Buffett wade into riskier, more volatile industries