In some glimmer of good news in the bleak broader market landscape, Berkshire Hathaway
Why does this matter? Because Berkshire does not do buybacks casually. Buffett has always maintained that the company would only repurchase its own shares when they traded at a meaningful discount to what they believed the value was. When buybacks dried up in mid-2024 it was a clear signal that they did not think their own company was cheap. The fact that they have resumed tells you something has changed in that calculus. Shares are down about 8% from their all-time high in April of 2025, and it appears that’s enough for them to re-start the buyback machine.
For anyone who follows value investing as a thesis (which I like to imagine I do), Berkshire has always been the gold standard. If the team at Berkshire thinks their own stock is trending cheap in this environment, that is a meaningful data point. That said, I am not ready to say this a clarion call that the bottom is in. $225 million is a rounding error for a company sitting on $373 billion in cash. This is Berkshire cracking the door open and peeking outside but if we see them making more buybacks in the billions, then things become more interesting.
What I do find symbolically compelling is that this is the first major capital allocation move of the Abel era. He did not go hunting for an acquisition or deploy capital into the broader market. He bought his own company’s stock which is exactly the kind of alignment between leadership and shareholders that value investors dream about. It is also, frankly, the smartest political move he could make. Greg Abel has to step in and replace a mythological figure. The entire investing world is watching to see if he is worthy of the chair. So of course buying that mythological figure’s life’s work is the right opening play. Nobody is going to roast you for betting on Berkshire.
But beyond the symbolism, there is a real investment case here. Berkshire is set up remarkably well for the kind of macro environment we’re trending towards. If we are genuinely staring down stagflation, you want to own businesses with pricing power and essential demand. People will continue to pay their car insurance through Geico. People will continue to buy Coca-Cola products regardless of what oil does. Berkshire Hathaway Energy is positioned to benefit directly from the AI datacenter arms race. These are exactly the boring, durable, cash-generating businesses that tend to hold up when everything else is getting hammered. I happily own BRK.B in my portfolio and have no qualms about continuing to hold it.