(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)
Berkshire Hathaway’s stock outperformed the benchmark S&P 500 stock index this week as investors sought safety from a sell-off for technology stocks sparked by concerns that AI spending is outpacing revenues.
Those declines are making Berkshire’s more than $350 billion in cash look more like a blessing than a curse.
The company’s A shares were up 5.6% and the B shares gained 5.7%.
Despite a rebound Friday that put the Dow above 50,000 for the first time, the S&P fell 0.1% on the week.
Berkshire shares are near even with the S&P year-to-date, recovering from a deficit of almost 8 percentage points last week.
DaVita shares rally on strong earnings after Berkshire trims stake
That’s good news for Berkshire, which has a 44% stake of more than 30 million shares that are currently valued at $4.2 billion.
The not so good news, though, is that it was obliged to sell almost 1.7 million DVA shares at a pre-surge price of $120.56 each last Thursday, for a total of just under $200 million.
In a 2024 agreement with DaVita, Berkshire promised to keep its stake at or below 45% of the company’s outstanding shares, which declined last quarter as DaVita bought back its own stock.
Borsheims’ golden renovation
Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary Borsheims is planning what it calls a “major architectural transformation” of its flagship Omaha jewelry store to signify its entry into a “new Golden Era.”
In a news release, President and CEO Karen Goracke is quoted as saying the goal is to “reimagine the customer’s experience” with an “elevated luxury environment” that “reinforces Borsheims as a destination.”
Discounts offered to shareholders help make the store a destination during Berkshire’s annual meeting weekend.
Renovations will begin after this May’s gathering. The store will remain open during the construction work.
The design is by HDR with construction by Kiewit. Both are based in Omaha.
BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
‘Figure out what makes sense and follow your own course’ (2016)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is for my children watching at home today and children in the audience.
How should they look at stocks when every day in the media they see companies that have never made a dime in their life go IPO?
WARREN BUFFETT: You don’t really have to worry about, you know, what’s going on in IPOs, or people making money.
People win lotteries every day, but there’s no reason to have that affect you at all. You shouldn’t be jealous about it.
I mean, you know, if they want to do mathematically unsound things, and one of them occasionally gets lucky, and they put the one person on television, and the million that contributed to the winnings with the big slice taken out for the state, you know, don’t get on there — it’s nothing to worry about.
Just — all you have to do is figure out what makes sense. And you don’t — and you look at buying — when you — when you buy a stock, you get yourself in the mental frame of mind that you’re buying a business, and if you don’t look at a quote on it for five years, that’s fine…
Let the rest of the world go its own way. You don’t — you don’t want to get into a stupid game just because it’s available…
A lot of problems are, as Charlie would say, are caused by envy. You don’t want to get envious of somebody that won the lottery or bought an IPO that went up.
You have to figure out what makes sense and follow your own course.
BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH
BRK.A stock price: $762,569.63
BRK.B stock price: $508.09
BRK.B P/E (TTM): 16.25
Berkshire market capitalization: $1,096,347,710,921
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (Up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $354.3 billion (Up 4.3% from June 30)
No Berkshire stock repurchases since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise indicated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS – Feb. 6, 2026
Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on November 14, 2025, except for:
The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
If you aren’t already subscribed to this newsletter, you can sign up here.
Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
