Greg Abel, Warren Buffett's successor as Berkshire Hathaway CEO, ended a 13-quarter streak of net stock selling last quarter, buying $23.5 billion of equities with Alphabet as the biggest purchase. He also lifted share buybacks to $4.5 billion and kept buying Berkshire stock into July.
Berkshire Hathaway's latest quarterly filing shows Greg Abel bought about $4.5 billion of a single stock last quarter, and he kept buying more this quarter.
Abel ends Berkshire's stock-selling streak
Warren Buffett was a net seller of stocks for 13 straight quarters before stepping down as CEO, and Abel continued that streak in his first quarter unless the $9.7 billion OxyChem acquisition counts as a stock purchase. Total net stock sales across those 14 quarters reached $194.8 billion.
Abel then reversed course. He bought $23.5 billion of equities while selling just $3.7 billion last quarter, and Alphabet was the biggest of those purchases, by far.
Buffett had initiated the Alphabet position in the third quarter of 2025 and said he approves of Abel making it one of Berkshire's largest holdings, a position that includes a $10 billion private placement Abel took in June in addition to open-market purchases. Alphabet is now Berkshire's third-largest position, and Abel may be adding more while the stock trades below the level of that private placement.
Buybacks resume too
Buffett had also stopped repurchasing Berkshire shares in the third quarter of 2024, a pause that ran six straight quarters. Abel ended that streak in his first quarter as CEO with a modest buyback.
He then stepped it up sharply: repurchases totaled $4.5 billion last quarter. Shares outstanding fell about 0.32% from the end of June to the end of July, meaning Abel spent more than $3.3 billion buying back Berkshire stock in July alone.
Should investors follow Abel?
Buffett has generally told shareholders to buy Berkshire stock whenever management buys back shares, since the board's 2018 policy only allows repurchases when the price sits below intrinsic value. That suggests management still saw the stock as undervalued in July, though shares have since traded higher into August and September.
Berkshire's price-to-book ratio now sits around 1.45, historically a good price to pay for the stock. The shares have mostly traded sideways in 2026 even as the market favored insurance and railroad stocks and Berkshire's own equity portfolio gained value, a pattern that may reflect investor sentiment about Abel's capabilities as an asset allocator.
Source: The Motley Fool
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
