For tenth consecutive quarter, between January and March 2025, Berkshire Hathaway, the investment holding of investments Warren Buffetta living legend of investors of all time, increased its cash holdings selling on Wall Street more actions than you bought. In this way, his “cash” arrived at the end of two and a half years at USD 348,000 million.
The so -called “Oracle of Omaha”, for its wisdom and successes when investing, has been two and a half years to bet against the general market trend, selling more actions than you buy. In the first quarter of this year it was clearly a successful strategy, which allowed Berkshire not only to increase its market capitalization, but also to get among the 10 companies with the largest market capitalization in the world. last Friday its market value is 1.2 billion (millions of millions) of dollars, which implies an increase of 18.4% so far this year and USD 180,000 million in net capitalization.
In this way, it became the eighth company of the world for capitalization, surpassing giants such as the Saudi-Aramco oil company (which in the same period lost 10% capitalization) already Tesla, which so far this year lost 33.2% of its value, about USD 460,000 million.
According to the balance of the first 2025 quarter that Berkshire presented, during that period he sold shares for USD 4.7 billion, USD 1.5 billion more than those dedicated to new stock market purchases, increasing his cash in that way and also to the revenues generated by his business empire, which covers insurance, industry, public services and even railway investments, Amen of bonds of the US Treasury.
The report precedes in a week the annual shareholders meeting of Berkshire, which will take place in Omaha, Nebraska, next Saturday. According to the British newspaper Financial Timesin the Tenida, known as a “Woodstock for capitalists,” Donald Trump He assumed, on January 20, the US presidency.
In the US, Buffett’s opinion about Trump’s measures and economic policy, in particular the “tariff war” that began last April 2, arouses a lot of interest from the public and the White House itself. On April 4 Trump published on social networks a message suggesting that Buffett supported his measures. But Berkshire Hathaway issued a statement by saying that the versions in that sense “are false.”
Then, in a dialogue with the CBS chain, Buffett himself said that tariff increases were “to some extent, an act of war” and that people “not fairy of the teeth.”
In the first 2025 Berkshire quarter, it had Net Profit of USD 4.6 billion, well below the USD 12.7 billion the same period of 2024, basically due to the fall of the value of its shares portfolio. Likewise, they are notable results for a period in which, by case, the values of the most valuable companies in the world fell strongly, such as Apple (-20.2%), Nvidia (-16.7%), Amazon (-14.3%), Alphabet/Google (-15.4%), and Tesla (-33.2%).
In the last decades Buffett made notable plays in times of crisis or sudden movements of the market. In 2008, during the collapse of Lehman Brothers and “The Great Financial Crisis” took advantage of the lack of liquidity to negotiate better terms and, acting as a kind of lender of last instance, invest in Goldman Sachs, General Electric and Bank of America. “In a chaotic market, when someone needs large quantities, you have to be ready to disburse billions quickly if you are going to play seriously,” he explained the following year.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many expected that this strategy repeated, but did not. Injecting liquidity to companies in problems, the Fed was entrusted, while, by the hand of Buffett, Berkshire made a massive repurchase of his own actions: USD 24.7 billion in 2020 and USD 27,000 million in 2021.
Thanks to his cold head, as a buffet investor he is a skilled storm pilot and never stopped applying his method of five basic questions to evaluate an investment:
From the point of view of “business.”
- Is it the sector in which it acts or the business of the company-objective something clear and understandable from the perspective of the investor?
- Does the company have historically consistent management?
- Does the business have a long -term favorable perspective?
From the point of view of management
- Does the company have a rational management?
- Is it the management of the open and honest company with its shareholders?
With those questions and some more basic principles, Buffett went very far. Next Saturday, at the Woodstock for capitalists, we will have to see what says of Donald Trump’s measures and policies.
