(That is the Warren Buffett Watch publication, information and evaluation on all issues Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You possibly can enroll right here to obtain it each Friday night in your inbox.)
Berkshire was a web vendor of shares in Buffett’s last quarter as CEO
Berkshire has offered Apple shares in every of the final three quarters and in seven of the previous 9 three-month intervals, lowering its shares by a bit greater than 75% because the summer season of 2023.
Even so, Apple stays Berkshire’s greatest fairness stake with a worth of $60.3 billion primarily based on Friday’s shut.
The Apple gross sales, nevertheless, have helped #2 American Specific shut the hole from virtually $150 billion to only beneath $8 billion.
It is six straight quarters of gross sales for Financial institution of America, lowering that stake’s shares by 75% because the center of 2024.
Berkshire’s Amazon.com stake was valued at $2.2 billion on the finish of the third quarter. It is now all the way down to $478 million after the sale of seven.7 million shares in the course of the fourth quarter, a minimize of 77%.
In 2019, when Amazon first appeared in Berkshire’s portfolio with an $860 million place, Buffett went out of his solution to inform CNBC’s Becky Fast it wasn’t his choice, he did not suppose it was a big holding, and no huge “character change” had reversed his conventional aversion to tech shares.
Barron’s suggests it was portfolio supervisor Todd Combs who purchased the shares and the massive discount could also be associated to his December departure to hitch JPMorgan Chase.
Buyers weren’t deterred by Berkshire’s gross sales of the three shares. All of them ended increased on the week.
Shopping for oil and insurance coverage
Berkshire elevated its share stake in Chevron by 6.6% in the course of the fourth quarter, including one other $1.2 billion to the place primarily based on the oil big’s year-end inventory worth.
That is the largest increase for any Berkshire inventory in This fall, however there have not been any particularly important modifications within the Chevron place over the previous three years.
Greater crude oil costs have helped raise Chevron’s share worth by 20.7% because the starting of the yr, placing the present worth of the stake at virtually $24 billion, up from $19.8 billion on December 31.
It’s #5 by worth amongst Berkshire’s inventory holdings.
Chubb was the second greatest purchase of the quarter with a 9.3% share improve including about $910 million to the worth of the place primarily based on the insurer’s December 31 inventory worth.
Berkshire’s 34.2 million shares are at the moment valued at virtually $11.4 billion, making it the eighth largest holding in Berkshire’s fairness portfolio.
Berkshire takes small step again into the newspaper enterprise
The one inventory added to Berkshire’s portfolio in the course of the fourth quarter was a comparatively small stake in The New York Occasions Firm.
It’s at the moment valued at $395 million, up from $352 million as of the tip of the yr because of a 12.4% bounce for the newspaper’s share worth.
The New York Occasions constructing is seen in Manhattan, New York, August 3, 2020.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Buffett’s love of newspapers goes manner again. He delivered The Washington Submit and different DC newspapers as a toddler, purchased a really worthwhile Submit stake for Berkshire within the Nineteen Seventies, had a detailed friendship with Submit writer Katherine Graham, and labored carefully with the editor of a small Berkshire-owned Omaha weekly that gained a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
However in 2020, Berkshire offered its newspaper holdings, together with Buffett’s hometown day by day, The Omaha World-Herald, and The Buffalo Information, a Berkshire property since 1977, to Lee Enterprises for $140 million.
Primarily based on the comparatively small measurement of the Occasions stake – it accounts for 0.1% of the worth of Berkshire’s fairness portfolio – it virtually definitely was not a Buffett buy, with both portfolio supervisor Ted Weschler, or Todd Combs (earlier than he departed) making the choice to purchase.
Whereas the Occasions buy is sort of spare change by Berkshire requirements, it’s greater than the $250 million Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Submit in 2013, a worth that was thought on the time to be 4 instances what the newspaper was price.
The present market worth of the Occasions Firm is $12.6 billion, giving Berkshire a 3.1% stake.
Berkshire’s vote of confidence appeared so as to add to the Occasions’ momentum, with shares ending the week with a 6.9% acquire at an all-time closing excessive close to $78.
An entire record of Berkshire’s U.S. holdings as of December 31 seems under.
Berkshire utility settles federal wildfire claims
Berkshire Hathaway’s PacifiCorp took two important steps this week to take care of the big legal responsibility claims it faces over wildfires within the West.
On Friday, the Justice Division introduced the utility has agreed to pay $575 million to resolve harm claims lodged by the U.S. authorities over six fires in California and Oregon in 2020 and 2022.
The federal government says PacifiCorp’s electrical traces “negligently” began all six fires. Its information launch notes the “claims resolved by this settlement are allegations solely and there was no willpower of legal responsibility. PacifiCorp continues to disclaim legal responsibility for these fires.”
A DOJ official is quoted as saying the settlement “strikes a stability by addressing the federal government’s important fire-suppression prices and lack of pure assets with out stopping PacifiCorp from providing electrical energy at honest costs.”
A PacifiCorp assertion says the corporate has now settled “almost 90% of identified claims” for greater than $2.2 billion, “offering certainty for purchasers and progress towards a financially wholesome utility.”
A NASA MODIS satellite tv for pc picture reveals wildfires in Oregon, U.S. September 8, 2020. Image taken September 8, 2020.
Maxar Applied sciences | by way of Reuters
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET
Some hyperlinks could require a subscription:
HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
How Berkshire’s utilities now reply to the specter of wildfires (2025)
Greg Abel describes how Berkshire utilities are working to cut back the chance their tools might contribute to wildfires.
BECKY QUICK (relaying a shareholders’ query): “Please, talk about your technique on shield our firm from future liabilities resulting from wildfires blamed on our electrical utility corporations out West.”
WARREN BUFFETT: Properly, that is an excellent query. And — and we have — we have made some errors prior to now after we purchased PacifiCorp in 2000, what, 5?
GREG ABEL: Sure.
WARREN BUFFETT: Walter Scott, and David Sokol, and myself, three guys who — capitalists at coronary heart — and we’re coping with our personal cash.
However we made a mistake by not carving it up into seven states that we had been shopping for. And it got here — it got here with an aggregation, the place it wasn’t state by state. And we — we saved the identical — the identical construction. And that was a — that was an enormous mistake.
There are — nicely, each a part of the nation goes to wish electrical energy. And there are going to be locations the place — the place public electrical — privately-held electrical utilities can be very silly to function.
And the way that will get resolved in a democracy, we are going to discover out.
However these are the details, as they stand now, I might say.
Greg?
GREG ABEL: Yeah. The fact, the chance across the wildfires, i.e., that the wildfires happen, they are not going away. And we all know that. And the chance most likely goes up every year, so —
However what we are able to do to cut back the chance of it impacting our system, and our underlying asserts, and the, sadly, the liabilities that include such occasions, we are able to change that and handle that…
We then take it even additional. And that is one thing Warren and I’ve mentioned many instances, is that the utilities have began to acknowledge when we now have these uncommon climate occasions. And Warren touched on what’s been taking place in Nebraska with storms.
However they’re equally occurring — or important occasions occurring — out West.
However when we now have these, we have gotten very, superb at saying, OK, we now have to handle the system in a different way. We’ll probably de-energize as a result of there’s prone to be an occasion.
However the one factor we hadn’t tackled — and that is very related to the one important occasion we had again in 2020 in PacifiCorp — is we did not de-energize the system as the hearth was approaching, as a result of our workers and the entire administration staff had been, all their lives, skilled to maintain the lights on.
And the very last thing they need to do is flip these lights off and have a system de-energized.
And after these occasions, and as we actually checked out how we’ll transfer ahead in managing the property and lowering that threat, we now have clearly acknowledged, as a staff, that we now have to de-energize these property.
BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH
BRK.A inventory worth: $746,500.00
BRK.B inventory worth: $498.20
BRK.B P/E (TTM): 15.93
Berkshire market capitalization: $1,074,365,958,250
Berkshire Money as of September 30: $381.7 billion (Up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding Rail Money and Subtracting T-Payments Payable: $354.3 billion (Up 4.3% from June 30)
No Berkshire inventory repurchases since Might 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, except in any other case indicated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS – Feb. 20, 2026
Berkshire’s prime holdings of disclosed publicly traded shares within the U.S. and Japan, by market worth, primarily based on the most recent closing costs.
Holdings are as of December 31, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F submitting on February 17, 2026, aside from:
The total record of holdings and present market values is accessible from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please ship any questions or feedback concerning the publication to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, however we do not ahead questions or feedback to Buffett himself.)
In case you aren’t already subscribed to this text, you may enroll right here.
Additionally, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are extremely beneficial studying. There are collected right here on Berkshire’s web site.
— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
