Berkshire Hathaway stock performance has been a quiet frustration for shareholders this year: the Class B shares closed Friday at $505.00, up just 0.5% year to date, while the S&P 500 has gained 12.7%, leaving Berkshire trailing the benchmark by 12.2 percentage points. Warren Buffett turned 96 on Sunday, and the gap is the awkward birthday backdrop nobody wanted to discuss.
The stock did flare briefly higher. After Berkshire’s second-quarter earnings report, Class B shares hit an intraday high of $537.74 on 10 August, their best level since just before Buffett’s May 2025 announcement that he would step down as chief executive. They have given it all back since.
Barron’s lists several possible explanations for the lag: uncertainty over new chief executive Greg Abel, investor disappointment that the company has not moved faster to shrink its still-considerable cash pile, Berkshire’s longstanding refusal to pay a dividend, and the absence of a transformational acquisition at the $100 billion-plus scale some had expected.
A Quarter of Aggressive Buying, Including a Landmark Alphabet Bet
The underperformance is not for lack of activity. Buffett, who retains the chairman’s role and appears to remain the driving force behind equity decisions, oversaw a sharp pivot in the first half of 2026. Berkshire purchased $39.4 billion of equity securities in the first six months of 2026, up from $7.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, and sold $27.8 billion, making it a net buyer of roughly $11.6 billion of stocks in the half.
The centrepiece of that buying was Alphabet. Berkshire’s stake in Google’s parent company now stands at roughly $36.6 billion, according to the latest disclosures, though Reuters, citing Berkshire’s regulatory filing, put the value at approximately $37.8 billion as of 30 June 2026, based on nearly 106 million shares held, up from 57.8 million three months earlier. The discrepancy reflects different closing-price snapshots. Either way, Alphabet has become Berkshire’s third-largest stock holding.
Part of that build came through a structured transaction. Alphabet’s June 2026 SEC filing shows that Berkshire participated in a $10 billion private placement, split equally between $5 billion of Class A Common Stock at $351.81 per share and $5 billion of Class C Capital Stock at $348.20 per share. That placement was part of Alphabet’s broader $80 billion equity raise aimed at expanding its artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Elsewhere in the portfolio, the Wall Street Journal reports that Berkshire opened a fresh position in D.R. Horton, the homebuilder it had previously owned and exited entirely, added to its stake in Lennar, and sold out of Constellation Brands. Kiplinger reports Berkshire also increased its Delta Air Lines holding by 44%, buying another 17.5 million shares to bring total holdings above 57 million shares, with a market value of $5.4 billion at the end of the quarter.
The housing theme extended beyond equities. Berkshire’s Q2 2026 quarterly report shows the company entered into an agreement on 31 May 2026 to acquire all outstanding shares of Taylor Morrison Home Corporation for $72.50 per share in cash, adding another major homebuilder to its sprawling collection of wholly owned businesses.
Berkshire Hathaway Stock Performance and the Buyback Shift
One development that may yet attract investors is the return of meaningful share repurchases. Berkshire bought back $4.5 billion of its own stock in the second quarter of 2026, a sharp acceleration from just $235 million in the first quarter. It was, according to reports citing the quarterly results, the first quarter in which Berkshire was a net buyer of equities after 14 consecutive quarters of net selling.
Operationally, the business is performing well. Berkshire’s Q2 2026 operating earnings came in at $12,983 million, up from $11,160 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Net earnings attributable to shareholders reached $25.67 billion for the quarter, boosted by $12.68 billion in investment gains. The cash pile, however, fell to $365.5 billion at 30 June 2026, down 8.0% from the March 31 level, as deployment accelerated.
Buffett’s own view on the macro environment is worth noting. Asked at Berkshire’s annual meeting about the apparent contradiction between his earlier advocacy for import certificates and his more recent criticism of tariffs, he distinguished the two on design grounds: import certificates, he said, were built to balance trade rather than to punish specific partners. His broader position was unambiguous: ‘We should be looking to trade with the rest of the world, and we should do what we do best, and they should do what they do best.’
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was a net buyer of Berkshire Class B shares in June 2026, making a purchase in the $1 million to $5 million range on 18 June, according to a disclosure filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Bloomberg has previously characterised the patterns in Trump’s trading disclosures as bearing ‘the hallmarks of overlapping portfolio-management strategies, often index-based and much of it likely automated,’ consistent with the Trump Organisation’s stated use of ‘automated, model-based portfolios and direct indexing strategies’ managed by third-party institutions.
Morningstar has indicated its fair value estimate for Berkshire’s Class B shares is likely to be revised slightly upward from $510, following the Q2 results. With the stock sitting at $505.00, the gap between the current price and that estimate is narrow. Whether Abel can close the gap with the S&P 500 is the question Berkshire investors will be watching into year-end.
