The VIP List…

Berkshire Hathaway’s stock portfolio is getting smaller.

Just not cheaper.

At the end of 2025, Berkshire owned shares in 42 publicly traded companies.

Six months later? →  29.

Thirteen names quietly disappeared from the guest list.

Meanwhile, the portfolio itself grew to roughly $299 billion.

Fewer stocks. More money.

And most of that money is sitting in a remarkably small number of places.

Berkshire’s five largest holdings now make up about 69% of the entire equity portfolio.

That’s roughly $206 billion concentrated in five companies.

Very Buffett-y.

And with Greg Abel now running the show, that concentration raises an interesting question:

Which five stocks get the lion’s share of Berkshire’s $206 billion?⇩

SPONSOR BREAK presented by MarketWise*

No. 1 Stock for 2027

There’s a good chance that Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang NEED this stock to fulfill their ambitions. Which is why Marc Chaikin –who recommended Nvidia before its 21,000% run-up – is predicting this could be the biggest winner of the new year. He’s sharing the name and ticker, free of charge, with no strings attached.

Click here to see why he’s calling this his No. 1 stock idea for 2027.

SPONSOR BREAK presented by Brownstone*

Don’t Make This 401(k) Mistake.

An email announcing a new 401(k) investment option is coming to 70 million inboxes. Most will delete it – and miss what Larry Benedict calls the decade’s biggest opportunity. He’s naming the one ticker to own before it arrives – free.
Watch here.

The Other 24 Can Wait…

Berkshire may own 29 stocks, but five are getting most of the money.

And the lineup is rather familiar.

Here’s how the $299 billion equity portfolio looked at the end of Q2 2026:

→ Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 1.48% )  : 22.0%

→ American Express $AXP ( ▲ 1.82% )  : 17.1%

→ Coca-Cola $KO ( ▲ 1.19% )  : 10.9%

→ Alphabet $GOOG ( ▼ 12.29% )  : 9.4%

→ Bank of America $BAC ( ▲ 0.57% )  : 9.2%

Together, those five account for approximately 68.6% of the portfolio.

The other 24 holdings?

They share the remaining 31.4%.

Quite the seating arrangement.

But Berkshire has never been particularly enthusiastic about spreading its money evenly.

Buffett built his reputation on concentrating capital in businesses he understood and was willing to own for years.

And the concentration itself isn’t new.

At the end of 2025, Berkshire’s five largest holdings already represented roughly 70% of the portfolio.

The difference is who’s sitting at the table.

Chevron has dropped out of the top five.

And Alphabet, which accounted for just 2% of the portfolio at the end of last year, now occupies fourth place.

That’s a rather substantial change in the guest list.

✱ And one worth taking a closer look at. ↓

SPONSOR BREAK presented by Brownstone*

For Every $1,000 Bitcoin Made, This Strategy Made Up to $22,000

It has beaten Bitcoin’s own returns 6-to-1… 9-to-1… and even 22-to-1.

And you never buy, sell, or own any cryptocurrency. Everything runs from a standard brokerage account.

A former top 1% hedge fund manager explains the entire method in a free video, full instructions included.

Watch it here.

SPONSOR BREAK presented by MarketWise*

Trump Is Taking America “Public.” Here’s How to Get in Early

Right now, a sitting president is attempting something no president has tried: putting America itself on the market. Louis Navellier, the man who was early to Nvidia, says it adds up to $31.5 trillion. So how does an ordinary person get in? Louis explains it, free, in his new video.
Watch it here.

A Is for Apple. And Alphabet…

Buffett first invested in the iPhone maker in 2016, when its valuation had fallen to roughly 10 times earnings.

By the end of 2017, Apple had become Berkshire’s largest stock holding.

Now another technology giant is climbing the rankings.

And its rise has been rather quick.

→ End of 2025: 2% of Berkshire’s portfolio, ranking tenth.
→ Q2 2026: 9.4%, making it the fourth-largest holding.

That’s a 4.7-fold increase in portfolio weight in just six months.

Of course, a rising portfolio weight doesn’t necessarily mean Berkshire bought that much more stock. Share-price appreciation can also increase a holding’s share of the portfolio.

But the shift is substantial.

And it comes as Alphabet’s cloud business is expanding, while the company commits enormous sums to AI infrastructure.

→ There’s another interesting parallel.

When Buffett first bought Apple, its valuation had become unusually attractive relative to its earnings.

Alphabet’s valuation has also been attracting attention, although its reported earnings come with an accounting complication we’ll get to shortly.

So Berkshire’s fourth-largest holding deserves a closer look.

Especially when Google’s cloud business is sitting on a rather extraordinary backlog of future business. ↓

Google’s Booked. Very Booked.

The numbers coming out of Google Cloud are rather substantial.

→ $514 billion: Cloud revenue backlog, up 50% from the previous quarter.

→ $240 billion: The backlog at the end of 2025.

That’s more than double in just six months.

✱ A backlog represents contracted business that hasn’t yet been recognized as revenue.

And according to Alphabet’s CFO, the company expects to recognize just over half of that backlog as revenue over the next 24 months.

But there’s another number worth examining.

✱ Alphabet trades at roughly 22 times forward earnings — meaning investors are paying about $22 for every dollar of profit analysts expect over the next year.

→ Its trailing price-to-earnings ratio looks even lower, at approximately 16 times.

Although that figure comes with some rather unusual accounting assistance.

Alphabet reported a massive earnings increase in Q2, helped by gains on investments in SpaceX and Anthropic.

Those gains boosted reported profits, making the trailing valuation appear cheaper than the underlying operating business alone would suggest.

✱ So the 16× multiple deserves an asterisk.

And the cloud growth isn’t coming without a substantial bill.

Alphabet has raised its 2026 capital spending outlook to $195–205 billion, largely to expand AI infrastructure.

Management expects spending to increase significantly again in 2027.

More demand. More infrastructure. More money required to keep up.

Even Google’s waiting list comes with a construction budget.

And while Berkshire has been increasing its exposure to Alphabet, it’s also been putting money into another familiar name.

Berkshire itself.↓

Berkshire Goes Shopping… at Berkshire.

After zero buybacks in 2025, Berkshire resumed repurchases earlier this year.

→ March: $234 million at roughly $487 per Class B share.

→ May: $740 million at approximately $476.

→ June: $3.8 billion at approximately $488.

That’s roughly $4.8 billion in first-half buybacks.

Quite the shopping spree after a year of doing absolutely nothing.

But Berkshire has a particular rule about buying its own stock.

As Abel explained in his first annual letter:
“We will buy back Berkshire shares when they trade below our estimate of intrinsic value, conservatively determined.”

✱ Intrinsic value is management’s estimate of what a business is actually worth.

And the shopping may have continued.

By July 29, Berkshire had approximately 4,550 fewer Class A-equivalent shares outstanding than at the end of June — a reduction worth roughly $3.4 billion at July’s share prices, though not a confirmed repurchase total.

By late October, the stock was trading near $548.

That’s roughly 12% above what Berkshire paid in June.

And the valuation has moved with it.

→ June buyback price: Approximately 1.4× book value.

→ October price: Nearly 1.6× book value.

✱ Book value is what remains after subtracting a company’s liabilities from its assets. The multiples use Berkshire’s June balance sheet.

Which raises a question.

Is Abel still willing to pay the new price?

Was this email forwarded to you? Don’t miss out on future stories — subscribe using the button below.

Also, help your friends blossom this spring! Share us with them.

💬 We Want To Hear Your Story:

Got a market or stock you want us to analyze next?

Just drop your request in the comments here.

P.S. – If you no longer want to receive occasional emails from us and you want to unsubscribe, click here 👉 “Unsubscribe” . Thank you!