This is classic Buffett year, being fearful when others are greedy & building a massive war chest for when a correction inevitably occurs.
When it comes to Buffett (and Berkshire), it's really only reasonable to look at 5-year returns. 1-year or YTD are too susceptible to market sentiment rather than true value. Eg the Buffett indicator (stock market value / GDP) is 2x std dev above the norm right now -- way overpriced by historical standards.
Buffett has repeatedly said that Berkshire's size means it will no longer be able to deliver outsized outperformance. He also says that most people should invest in index funds. It is perfectly reasonable to just buy the S&P if that aligns with your financial goals.
> BRK-B's 5 year return is 2% per year more than SP500.
That said, 2% per year is generally considered a lot in diversified mutual fund / ETF land. You might not be able to charge hedge-fund level 2-and-20 fees for delivering that, but you could certainly charge multiples of what the low-cost indexers do (instead, Berkshire charges you approximately nothing). Now, Berkshire is a conglomerate, not a fund, and you could argue 2% is an appropriate risk premium for a single stock, even one as diverse as Berkshire (which is still less diverse than the S&P). But it is pretty impressive for something that is not a tech company. Those are the only things in the S&P that seem to be generating any returns these days (besides Berkshire, JP Morgan is the only other non-tech company with a market cap over $1tn, and arguably banks really are tech companies now, too).
> Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings
The public company investments are a minority of Berkshire's current value. The majority comes from wholly-owned operating companies and insurance businesses.
Another user posted the difference between sp500 and Berkshire returns in the last 2 decades. Starting with 10k in one case you end up with 160, in the other at 240. And if the 2% delta stays there, it's going to compound even further.
Also, standard deviation on Berkshire is lower than the SP500, so the second is riskier.
BRK-B is also a top-10 (currently #10) component in the S&P 500 with a 1.74% weight. They also own ~40 stocks and I think around half of them are in the S&P 500 (including Apple, Amazon, and Google, which are also top 10 components but a combined ~15% weight), so, yeah.
Kind of a niche use case, but BRK.B is nice if you want a single stock that is relatively diversified, kinda mirrors the greater market, and doesn't pay dividends.
My employer uses a shitty HSA provider (Healthequity) who doesn't provide any sort of tax reporting, and I live in a state that taxes HSAs. Investing in BRK.B instead of a broad fund is a bit riskier, but it saves me from spending an hour tabulating individual transactions when I do my taxes
You can easily transfer (or rollover) HSA funds from HealthEquity ti Fidelity. Do it at as many times as you want, but at least once per year should suffice.
You don’t even have to send anything to HealthEquity, if I recall correctly. Just send Fidelity the Transfer of Assets form and they do it all:
HealthEquity charges a fee to do this which is very annoying. I think you can avoid it with an indirect rollover but you have to space those 365 days apart (not just in different years) and I prefer to not deal with the bookkeeping
>Historically, BRK-B has very often outperformed the SP500.
Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.
> It's a solid alternative if you distrust tech which is today very heavy in the SP500.
The only reason BRK kept up with SP500 over the last 10 years is because of its outsized investment in Apple in 2016 or so, after the disastrous results of sitting out of tech in the 2000s and early 2010s and pursuing other investments such as Kraft Heinz or whatever.
As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:
SPY has a cumulative return of ~370% from start of 2000. BRK.B is at ~1,200%. That's a pretty big difference.
You can discount Apple as being part of the portfolio, but that's a bit like saying, well they wouldn't have done so well if we remove the high performing stocks in the portfolio.
It's disingenuous to lump AAPL in with the tech stocks that compose the top part of the S&P 500 right now. Much of their valuations are highly-leveraged bets on a massive and nearish-term realization of a dream AI business scenario (NVDA, TSLA, AVGO, and to a lesser extent MSFT, GOOG and META).
What % of AAPL is a highly-leveraged bet on AI, in comparison to those listed above? If you could only own 1 of those over the previous and incoming 10 years, it'd be challenging to not choose Apple, with maybe Google as second (albeit with a sizable regulatory asterisk).
I know there's a tendency to reduce everything to numbers, but Berkshire is playing a qualitatively completely different risk management game from the rest of the companies in the top 10 in the S&P 500 right now.
Edit: selfishly, I think you have more to gain from understanding why BRK chose to invest in Apple, than you do from aiming to "explain away" BRK as unremarkable.
If you're trying to choose where to lazily (i.e. with as little mental effort as possible) stash away your investments, that's a separate discussion. Buffet himself recommends S&P 500. But BRK is playing a fundamentally different game from the S&P. An investment in VOO vs an investment in BRK support very different theses.
> Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.
Except this not factually true.
BRK-B has outperformed the SP500 on pretty much every time horizon outside of the 2009-2019 period and as you have pointed it significantly does so in the last 5 years.
> As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:
Tech is 34% of the SP500.
There is valid reasons to prefer SP500 ETF in a diversified portfolio. Hoping that it will perform better with less risk based on historical data is not one of them.
I would recommend the 2021 three-part Acquired podcast series on Berkshire. Episodes are long, though there are transcripts if you prefer reading over listening.
>“I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I've ever made,” Buffett told the audience, referencing the remarkable 680% surge in Apple's stock since Berkshire first began acquiring shares in early 2016.
