Buffett remains active at 96, but Berkshire's shares aren't doing much

Buffett remains active at 96, but Berkshire's shares aren't doing much. Even though he is no longer Berkshire Hathaway's CEO, he remains very involved as chairman, apparently continuing to make the big decisions on equities, including the addition in recent quarters of what is now a $36.6 billion stake in Google parent Alphabet. Berkshire investors, however, will not be celebrating the performance of the company's stock. After rallying in the wake of its Q2 earnings report to an intraday high of $537.74 on Aug. 10, its best level since its record high close just before Buffett's May 2025 announcement he would be stepping down as CEO, the Class B stock has fallen back to close Friday at $505.00, up just 0.5% year to date.

That puts it 12.2 percentage points behind the benchmark S&P 500, which is up 12.7% on the year.

While acknowledging it's "hard to say" why Berkshire's stock is lagging, Barron's lists of number of possible explanations, including uncertainty over Greg Abel as CEO, disappointment he hasn't been more aggressively reducing the company's still large cash position, Berkshire's continuing refusal to pay a dividend, and its failure to make a giant acquisition of $100 billion or more.

Berkshire Hathaway is one of the stocks being frequently bought and sold for President Donald Trump's investment portfolio. Of the 1,051 transactions listed in his disclosure form covering the month of June for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, five involve Berkshire's stock. Four of them specify Berkshire's Class B shares, while one just lists Berkshire Hathaway Inc. There were three purchases and two sales.

The disclosure form only lists a range for each transaction, not a specific amount, so we can only look at a range of totals. Thanks to the June 18 purchase between $1 million and $5 million, Trump was a net buyer for the month. In Trump's 2025 annual report, he reports holding between $1 million and $5 million worth of Berkshire shares.

A specialist trader works at his post on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange, Jan. 21, 2026. Brendan McDermid | Reuters

After reviewing thousands of trades in earlier disclosures, Bloomberg reported the "patterns bear the hallmarks of overlapping portfolio-management strategies, often index-based and much of it likely automated, and all of it difficult to disentangle." It says that's largely in line with the Trump Organization's public statements that third-party financial institutions independently manage the trading using "automated, model-based portfolios and direct indexing strategies" with no input from the president or his family.

Critics argue the president, along with top administration officials and members of Congress, should not be allowed to own individual stocks so they can avoid even the appearance of impropriety.