🧵 BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY IS BACK TO BUYING – WHAT'S HAPPENING AFTER BUFFETT
Greg Abel, Buffett's successor, has just done something Berkshire Hathaway hadn't done in 3 years – the company became a net buyer of stocks in Q2 2026. It bought $23.5 billion worth and sold only $3.7 billion.
Before that it was exactly the opposite – for 14 straight quarters Berkshire was a net seller of stocks, and its cash pile grew to a record nearly $400 billion by the end of Q1.
Abel already showed his style in his first quarter as CEO – he cut the equity portfolio from 45 to 29 positions. He's about a smaller number of companies he truly believes in, not scattered bets.
And the biggest chunk of Q2 buys? Roughly half was the well-known $10 billion investment in Alphabet (Google) in June. The rest the market will learn soon from the mandatory SEC filing (13F).
The company still sits on a huge cash pile – $365.5 billion, just a slight dip from the record.
Operating earnings (Buffett's favorite metric) rose 16.3%. Net income more than doubled to $25.7 billion – but here you need to be careful. This metric includes unrealized gains from the portfolio, which Buffett himself calls less meaningful.
Buffett recently compared the current market to a casino and said many things will look "very dumb" in time. Despite the stock market (S&P 500) jumping 73% in 3 years, Berkshire's own stock rose "only" 50%.
This is one of those signals the market loves to blow up into a sensation ("Buffett's successor is buying, so a crash/rally is coming and who knows what else"), but the reality is far more boring and therefore more credible. Abel didn't return to buying because he believes in a rocket market – on the contrary, both he and Buffett publicly talk about overvalued stocks. It's more that after 3 years of waiting with a massive cash pile, they finally found a few specific opportunities (Alphabet is a clear example) that made sense even in an expensive market.
An important detail lost in headlines: the company still has $365 billion in cash. That tells me it's more about cautiously adding to positions while keeping a huge reserve in case something breaks in the market. For the average investor, the most useful lesson is probably exactly this – not copying a specific buy, but the approach: be in the market but selective, and don't get carried away by bull-market euphoria. What do you think of Berkshire's latest buys?
