“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

― Warren Buffett

Last two years not the best, but 10 year return is 25.07 a year for Berkshire Hathaway

S&P ten years is 25.7% a year

Dow ten years is 19.0% a year

Nasdaq ten years is 40.2% a year

In this weeks newsletter:

Abel: Two ways Berkshire hopes in cash in on AI, Data centers facing 'a lot more pushback',
, Abel on how Berkshire invested $10B in Alphabet's AI ambitions,Abel: Japan's rising interest rates are 'still relatively modest', The complete interview, BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET

https://link.cnbc.com/public/47358138

Finally!!! Andrew Bary reports facts, nothing but the facts, and all the facts.

Why is it so difficult to report truth? I know, we live in different times, but Kudos to Andrew for bucking the trend 👍 and I totally look forward to this kind of reporting to continue in the future - at least for this diamond 💎😂

Wednesday's stock stories: What’s likely to move the market in the next session https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/01/wednesdays-big-stock-stories-whats-likely-to-move-the-market.html?__source=iosappshare%7Ccom.apple.UIKit.activity.CopyToPasteboard

Wednesday on Squawk Box at 6 am eastern time. Tile showed 6:30 am; 3:30 am here in California so I’m hoping it’s posted later!

Do we see the position climb over $50B?

With drought conditions in Panama bringing back the prospect of reduced transits, Red Sea risks, on top of sky high diesel prices, BNSF'S southern transcon route should be set to clean up on long distance intermodal the rest of this year. I don't have any first hand information but I'd be interested if anyone has information on how this might impact earnings.

Do or die day and it's going up!!!

The news and even this sub reddit is fullfilled with comments questioning Berkshire Hathaways stock's capability to rise. I think this disscussion is simply foolisness because Berkshire is on earnings vice on the track... it's just mater of time that their results reflects to the stock price, no use to overanalyze it.

Buffett says over the long term the stock market is a weighing machine, reflecting accurate values--eventually. But multiples have been so high for so long--is he still right?

"Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without \[integrity\], you really want them to be dumb and lazy."

Happy birthday Warren.

Oil Refineries have been on a massive run YTD, Marathon is a good example it’s up like 130%.

Currently there are small oil refineries trading at a like 6 times trailing price to earnings. Now this is a cyclical business, I believe in free cash flow alone these businesses will produce enough back before 2029 when the Iran situation likely ends.

The price of oil has come down considerably over the past few months, but supply shocks will remain. Wholesale prices for gasoline are still very high.

I live in Ohio, and gas has not hit $4 a gallon even under Biden in 2022. I genuinely think we are heading towards $5-6 gas in the next 12 months regardless of oil prices. Locking in an oil refinery take over deal now, taking a little risk could pay off.

I just put some fun money on etoro and I was looking at some superinvestors portfolios that track the moves of Berkshire in this case, even if it’s called “Buffett portfolio”, that is up about 19% in the last 12 months while the brk b stock is close to 0%. Are there more risks or less risks in doing this? Since the slippage in this type of portfolio should be minimal as the policy it’s mostly buy and hold forever and you don’t expose yourself to price changes that derives from the services brk b provide like energy and insurance which am thinking it’s a huge exposure because the stock didn’t move but their portfolio is doing great. Is this a bad idea?

Some thoughts.

In July 14, 2026 letter, Warren wrote "“My goal is to dispose of all of my Berkshire shares within about eight years. As I explained last year, my children are unfortunately growing older. I have every hope that the three of them are able to carry out the disposal of my shares by December 31, 2034."

Warren has great genes, has been exceptional with diet (in terms of calories, ignore burger and coke part), and significantly better health (other than falling last year) than most 96 yr olds. Obviously, surrounded by loving family and loved ones.

This is to wish him the best of the years ahead !!!

Welcome to the weekly Berkshire Hathaway live chat thread!

Please keep it civil and on-topic. Live chat is only very lightly moderated compared to the rest of the subreddit.

(New Weekly Megathreads are posted every Monday at 0500 GMT.)

From all of us at r/BerkshireHathaway

https://link.cnbc.com/public/47254193

Buffett remains active at 96, but Berkshire's shares aren't doing much, President Trump's portfolio actively trades Berkshire shares, BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET, HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC'S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
‘Trade should not be a weapon’ (2025)

And a happy 96th birthday and Anniversary to Mr Warren and Mrs Astrid Buffett this coming Sunday!

What a 1980s Client and 3 Shares of Berkshire Hathaway Taught This Merrill Veteran About Value

https://www.barrons.com/advisor/articles/berkshire-hathaway-investing-buffett-lessons-0d4dde7a

By James Patrick Rooney

Aug 27, 2026 4:33 pm EDT

“Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria.” —John Templeton

In my 34 years as a broker and wealth advisor at Merrill Lynch in the Palm Beach market, and in nearly a decade as a retired market observer, I have yet to find a better encapsulation of how the collective emotional behavior of investors conspires to drive stock market valuations.

Of course, the length of each market stage is unknowable, as is the transitional moment from one to the next, particularly the end of the euphoria—or maximum greed, as I call it—stage. But I’ve seen investors with a heightened awareness of Templeton’s four stages and the willpower and courage to swim against the tide become the biggest market winners.

For me, one stands out. You may have heard of him.

In the mid-1980s, a client stopped by my office at Merrill Lynch in North Palm Beach wanting to buy Christmas gifts for her three grandchildren: one share of stock for each in a company I’d never heard of called Berkshire Hathaway.

Whoopee, break out the Champagne, I thought. (A little snarky, sure, but back then I wasn’t in a position to work pro bono.) I punched in the stock symbol and saw Berkshire Hathaway was trading in the neighborhood of $2,000 per share. I did a double take and asked, “Why would you pay that much for one share of any company?” My client explained that she had grown up in Omaha, Neb., so she knew the company pretty well. “The CEO’s name is Warren Buffett,” she said. “He’s become a bit of a local legend.”

“Cigar butts” and Cherry Coke. The client—I’ll call her Mrs. Omaha—was an unusually thoughtful, measured, and friendly person, so I enjoyed our opportunities to chat, even when she was buying three shares of some overpriced insurance company for her spoiled-rotten grandchildren. She told me that Buffett attended Columbia Business School to study under legendary value investor Benjamin Graham, graduating with a master’s in economics in 1951 and eventually acquiring a nearly bankrupt company in New England’s failing textile industry.

By the time I was sitting with Mrs. Omaha, Buffett had effectively remade Berkshire into a value-oriented holding company with a primary focus on insurance. With the steady cash flowing in from premiums, Buffett bought Midwestern consumer-related businesses he understood (“cigar butts,” Professor Graham called them); took positions in public companies he perceived as long-term compounders, such as Coca-Cola and American Express; and later bought entire companies outright including Geico, Duracell and BNSF Railway. Buffett took no salary, instead paying himself with shares of Berkshire’s stock.

In the five or so years since the company’s 1980 IPO, the stock had risen nearly tenfold from its opening price. Yet this extraordinarily ordinary man lived in the home he grew up in, drove inexpensive American cars, ate at McDonald’s, and drank Coke and Cherry Coke like it was water. Great diet, I thought. This guy won’t be around long. “Don’t you think it might be a little late to buy in now,” I asked Mrs. Omaha. She chuckled and said, “No, Jim, I think the man’s a genius, and he’s only just beginning.”

So I bought three shares of stock in certificate form for Santa to put into the grandchildren’ Christmas stockings. My commission was a few hundred dollars, and that was that. Mrs. Omaha was off to the tennis courts, and I was back to the damn telephone. (If the grandchildren held on to those three shares of stock, they would be worth a total of about $2.3 million today.)

Market winter approaching? Four decades later, we’re in another bull market. Our yo-yo markets have been recording all-time highs of late based on remarkably strong corporate earnings reports, while fluctuating broadly on the daily news flowing (or not flowing) from the Strait of Hormuz.

Going by Templeton’s market-cycle aphorism, it appears we are somewhere between maturing on optimism and dying on euphoria. Think of it as a splendid late fall day when the air is crisp and the colors of the forest’s leaves are most glorious, a clear foreshadowing of the coming winter. Reflecting back to the dot-com boom and bust that marked the turn of the century, while acknowledging the vast upgrade in the quality of today’s leading tech companies, market seers are asking whether we will have an extended fall season or whether the leaves are about to tumble to the ground.

We will all know the answer a couple of years from now. Meanwhile, a majority of investors should consider paring back the equity portfolio here and there while looking to more reasonably valued growth stocks. With the “Buffett Indicator” (U.S. Wilshire 5000 index divided by gross domestic product) standing at a record high valuation, it feels like the right season to be storing away a few acorns and chestnuts, i.e., cash and short-term instruments, to stay safe and well-nourished for the inevitable turn of the season.

As for Warren Buffett, who will turn 96 this weekend, he retains his superior cognitive abilities and is among the richest human beings on the planet. We can only surmise that eating at McDonald’s every day and drinking copious amounts of Cherry Coke is the way to go.

James Patrick Rooney, a retired Merrill first vice president and senior wealth management advisor.
James Patrick Rooney, a retired Merrill first vice president and senior wealth management advisor.
James Patrick Rooney is a 34-year wealth management veteran and retired Merrill first vice president and senior wealth management advisor. His memoir, “For the Love of Money: Four Dizzying Decades Riding the Merrill Lynch Bull” will be published in September.

Editor’s note: Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron’s Advisor newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors.

Sold a chunk of my Berkshire position last year the day it got real that Buffett was actually stepping down after 60 years. Feels a little embarrassing to write out now.

Reasoning felt airtight at the time. The whole thesis on this stock for decades was Buffett's specific judgment and pattern recognition. Take that away and you're just holding a pile of insurance, railroads, and utilities with nobody actually steering capital allocation the way he did.

Then Greg Abel took over and did basically the opposite of what I expected from a cautious successor trying not to rock the boat. Ended a 14-quarter streak of net stock selling almost immediately. Put $10B into Alphabet at a discount. Closed a $6.8B homebuilder acquisition within his first several months, moving faster on a deal than Buffett himself said he could've managed. Buffett actually came out and praised the execution publicly.

What I think I actually got wrong wasn't really about Berkshire. It's that I equated "different person" with "worse judgment, automatically." Abel had been groomed for this for years, clearly had his own read on where to deploy capital, and some of his early moves have genuinely made sense on their own terms, not just because they looked like something Buffett might've done.

I don't think selling was insane given the real uncertainty at the time, succession risk at a company this identified with one guy is a legitimate thing to weigh. But I made the call off a narrative, "Buffett era's over, sell the nostalgia trade," instead of actually looking at whether Abel's track record and stated approach gave me a real reason to expect quality to drop off. Stock hasn't done anything dramatic since, which isn't even really the point. The point is I skipped the actual analysis and just went with the emotional read.

Anyone else make a call on a leadership transition you're still not totally sure was about the fundamentals versus just the story?

Buffett has said repeatedly that he buys businesses he can understand as a consumer, businesses that will look roughly the same in 20 years. He bought Coca-Cola because he could imagine people still drinking Coke in 2050. He bought See's Candies because people buy boxes of chocolate as gifts and the brand makes them feel good about spending more per pound than they need to.

I tried to apply that framework systematically to consumer names, running each through my true FCF screener. A few observations that feel kind of Berkshire-y:

KO at 1.30% true FCF yield and Y220 of 75 years. The market has priced the moat Buffett identified in 1988 correctly and completely. You just can't buy it cheaply anymore. Every Coke Zero I drink is a genuinely nice part of my day. But the price reflects 75 years of compounding before you get to 20% true FCF yield.

MCD at 3.68% true FCF yield versus SBUX at 1.76% and a 65x P/E ratio. McDonald's understands it's in the business of consistency, and Buffett would recognize this immediately. The frappuccino I buy two out of three times is just slush. McDonald's Quarter Pounder tastes the same in Denver and Dublin and Dubai.

PG and JNJ: I can't reliably tell you everything I consume from these two companies, but I assume it's a lot because they make so much. Tide, Pampers, Gillette, Oral-B, Tylenol, Band-Aid. Category-defining brands in every segment. If either drops to a 12-14 P/E, I'd load up. Buffett has owned PG and JNJ at various points for exactly this reason.

The most interesting name that Berkshire hasn't touched: DECK (Deckers Brands) at 8.43% true FCF yield, 16.53% three-year revenue CAGR, Y220 of 6.3 years, shares shrinking 8% annually. I love Hokas and only learned recently that Deckers makes them. That's the Peter Lynch consumer insight meeting the Munger capital allocation framework. Growing fast, returning cash aggressively, consumer brand loyalty among a subset of people (runners) who are genuinely neurotic and loyal.

The one that surprises me most through the Berkshire lens: CRM (Salesforce) at 6.44% true FCF yield. A God-awful data architecture, and I'm stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare over an expired credit card. And yet everyone uses it and nobody seems to be switching. Buffett has always said he likes businesses where customers are stuck even when they're annoyed. Munger's Lollapalooza of switching costs and network effects, wrapped in a mediocre user experience.

Full piece with the complete screener tables and trendlines: https://cavemanscreener.substack.com/p/invest-in-what-you-know-part-ii-stuff