Investors will be focused on much more than Berkshire Hathaway’s earnings when the company reports first-quarter results on Saturday, including stock buybacks, cash levels and equity sales.
The key figure could be the level of share repurchases, as investors try to gauge how CEO Greg Abel and chairman Warren Buffett view the stock, which has lagged the S&P 500 so far this year by more than 10 percentage points and about 40 points since May 2, 2025, when Berkshire stock hit a record on the eve of the annual meeting last year. This year’s meeting will take place Saturday in Omaha.
The class A shares ended Thursday at $711,900, down about 6% so far in 2026 and off 12% from the peak a year ago. The S&P 500 is up 29% over the past 12 months.
Berkshire began stock buybacks on March 4 after a nearly two-year hiatus and purchased about $225 million that day. The question is how much it bought back in the rest of March and into the first part of April. If the company bought back $2 billion to $3 billion in March, it could be viewed favorably as a sign that the company is stepping up its buybacks under CEO Greg Abel, who succeeded Buffett as CEO at year-end.
Investors also will be focused on Berkshire’s cash levels, which stood at $373 billion at year-end. The figure could be higher on March 31, even after Berkshire paid almost $10 billion for OxyChem, the chemicals division of Occidental Petroleum that it purchased right after the new year.
One reason for the rising cash could be sales of stock that were managed by Todd Combs, a former Berkshire investment manager who oversaw about $15 billion of stocks in the $300 billion portfolio. Combs left Berkshire in December for an investment job at JP Morgan and the Wall Street Journal reported recently that Abel, who oversees the portfolio, sold the stocks run by Combs. Combs managed about 5% of the portfolio while manager Ted Weschler, who remains at Berkshire, also ran about 5%, with Buffett handling the rest. Weschler now handles about 6%.
Thanks to the likely Combs sales, Berkshire likely was a net seller of stocks—data that will be released in the company’s 10-Q report, also due Saturday.
In a CNBC interview on March 31, Buffett said that he wasn’t seeing much to buy in the stock market despite a decline then of close to 5% year to date. He mentioned a “tiny” equity purchase but didn’t reveal the stock.
Berkshire’s operating profits in the first quarter are expected to be up about 13% year over year to $11 billion, or $7,600 per class A share, according to FactSet. This figure excludes investment gains—realized and unrealized. Book value could rise to around $505,000 per class A share. That would mean Berkshire now trades for about 1.4 times book value, near the lower end of its range in recent years.
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