伯克希尔三季度回购96亿美元，现金储备3570亿

Just moments ago, Berkshire Hathaway reported its third quarter earnings as you heard Lisa talking about. Yes. Wanna bring in Matthew Palazola, as we promised, senior insurance equity analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. Now you've been looking at all of these numbers coming in. Let me highlight a few of them Sure. Demarcated in red here as I look at the the headlines on the terminal. Chiefly here, the buyback of $9,600,000,000 in shares.

Why why don't we start there? Yeah. You... You'd expected more buybacks going into this. Uh-huh. What does that number tell you about the health of this company and what's prioritized? So I like that number. The... We knew because of the disclosed share counts that they had probably bought back at least 4,000,000,000 and change in the quarter. So we knew that was gonna happen. We looked at the valuation of the stock through the quarter.

We said, well, it was actually got cheaper through the quarter, so it would make sense that they would have bought back even more. So last quarter, I was a little disappointed. This quarter, I think this is a nice vote of confidence. Though, you've seen the stock rally hard post quarter, so I would expect maybe this tails off a little bit in the fourth quarter. Last time you were here, we were talking about their cash pile.

How was that doing, and did that help them avoid some of this bond market volatility? It's doing well. Oh, that's nice. My cash pile is doing less well, but I'm very happy for that. Lot better than all of our cash piles put together probably. The number I have here is $357,000,000,000 of cash. They don't own a lot of fixed income. So they have this big insurance business. Typically, you'll see an insurance business backed by fixed income.

They're a little unique. Theirs is backed mostly by equities. So they avoid a lot deliberate choice? That is a deliberate choice because for years, they had the greatest investor of all time running the portfolio. Wanted to ask you about GEICO, about the insurance business. Of course, it's a huge and long standing part of this conglomerate. What did we learn about GEICO, the reinsurance business, all of that from So the numbers that we get to it looks like the insurance as a whole business came in kind of where I thought.

The earnings were down like 50%. Now that sounds a lot worse than it is. They were highly inflated going into it. If anyone's driven a car, you've probably seen that your auto insurance rates went up a lot. Indeed, they have. And that was across the board. And what GEICO did is they shed a lot of customers. They raised prices significantly. So their earnings were record numbers, unsustainably high. So they came down from that.

So the insurance business, still good, but down from these insanely high numbers. How are Bercetche Hathaway fans feeling about the Greg Abel choice? We've seen him. He's been in there for a while now. He's pretty consistent with the, you know, the ideals and the tenants of the legacy, but he's made his own choices as well. Yeah. I think... Look. No one... There's there's no replacing Warren Buffett. Right? But I think he's done a good job.

People I talk to, I think they wanna see... People wanna see some some dramatic thing. Right? But they can't do that. They're going to be measured. I would say in our preview note, we put out a table that showed capital deployment for Able in 2026 versus capital deployment over the past five years. And he's done almost as much in nine months than they did in the previous five years. So he is deploying capital. To the extent that it can move the needle for the entire conglomerate is...

You know, remains to be seen, but he's putting money out there. Always a fun exercise to have things you've read back to you, but let me do that here just to emphasize what you just said. Greg Abel has already put about half as much capital work in 2026 as former CEO Warren Buffett did the prior four years. In your note, previewing the earnings that we just got here, you also noted that he's getting into new kinds of businesses.

Talk a bit about that. In the past, we've seen these adventures take them into territory they're familiar with. Mhmm. How much is he charting new terrain here? So interesting thing, they now own a significant share in Alphabet, which we we know. That was actually started under Warren Buffett. So that was around third quarter of 'twenty five where they started it. This year, they accelerated those purchases. I went back and looked because in the fourth quarter, these stocks are not doing well.

And I said, oh man, they're probably taking a bath on this. Not as bad as I thought. They're probably down like a billion and 0.5 or something. So the sell off in Google shares hasn't hurt them as much. They have not really given a ton of information on why they did it. But I do think that at least they view the Google business as not only a play on AI, but having moats aside from AI. They also participated in an IPO for a company, Bending Spoons, that Italian AI company.

Italian AI company. Don't we all love Italian AI companies? You know, between random flute knowledge and Italian AI company knowledge, I really can't compete. Sorry. Continue. So... And what that company does is they buy other tech companies, and I think they they kind of rehabilitate them. So it's not necessarily a a tech IPO play or something, but kind of a unique thing for them. They participated in the Snowflake IPO Yeah.

Years ago, and they had consequently sold off that position. But, you know, newer things. They they made some acquisitions in the homebuilders, which is a business that they're in as well, and the chemical business. So a little bit of new and a little bit of businesses they're familiar with. Only got about thirty seconds left. What are you expecting next? What are you looking for? I think probably more equity purchases, I I would hope.

You know, maybe they take advantage of weakness. In this quarter, it looks like they did not buy. It looks like a net selling off by maybe $500,000,000 of equities, which is not dramatic. They bought a lot so far, but maybe they they lean more into the equity market.