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Berkshire Hathaway is on track to lag behind the S&P 500 in Buffett’s last year as CEO

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Warren Buffett just before surprising shareholders in early May plans to step down as CEO Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year B shares They outperformed the benchmark S&P 500 It increased by 22.4 percentage points in 2025.

Over the next three months, BRKB fell 14.9% to $459.11, its closing low after the meeting on August 4.

It has since recovered 9.9%, closing at $504.34, up 11.3% year-on-year.

But that wasn’t enough to match the S&P’s 37.9% rise since closing at a yearly low of 4982.77 on April 8.

After a four-day winning streak, the index finished today at 6870.40; That’s just 20 points below its all-time high close in late October and up 16.8% year-to-date.

So, with 17 trading days until 2025 and 26 calendar days until Greg Abel takes over as Berkshire’s CEO, Berkshire’s B shares are outperforming the S&P by 5.5 percentage points.

They fell 12.2 percentage points on October 29, and were even tied by 0.6 percentage points on November 20.

But that’s not the whole story, because Buffett likes to compare Berkshire’s stock performance, including dividends, to the S&P.

This gives the index another 1.4 points for a total YTD gain of 18.2%, almost 7 percentage points ahead of Berkshire.

Melinda French Gates: Promising is a work in progress

Melinda French Gates sings The Giving Pledge. Released in 2010 Along with ex-husband Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Buffett still has a lot of work to do to achieve her goal of changing “the norms of what is expected of people with great wealth.”

Pledge’s website “More than 250 of the world’s wealthiest philanthropists,” it says, “have pledged to donate most of their wealth to charity during their lifetime or in their will.”

Melinda Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, participates in the panel titled “Digital Public Infrastructure: Reaping the Benefits” at the 2023 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund in Washington on April 14, 2023.

Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters

in one view wired “The Big Interview” podcast this week French Gates said: “I wish we were better at committing than we have been so far; it’s a problem that needs to continue to be worked on.”

Those who make promises “are they really giving money?”

“Some, yes, some on a massive scale, and we’re trying to show that through the commitment that you can make on a massive scale. But have they given enough? No. You know, some are doing it, and some are trying or not ready to do it.”

A major problem, he acknowledged, is that very wealthy people are starting to give away their money, in part because “it takes a while to know which organizations you can trust to use your money effectively.”

And if you create your own tool, “Who should I hire that I can trust to stay true to my values and mission?”

“There are a lot of obstacles that keep people from starting, but we know what they are. Once you start, you can build a flywheel, and that’s what we try to show them: Be big. You can be big, you can be bold.”

VIDEO: In 2018, Melinda Gates, co-chair and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, sat down with CNBC’s Becky Quick to discuss how the foundation aims to improve global health and eliminate poverty.

in augustA. report from Institute for Policy Studies Argued that the Giving Pledge was “unfulfilled, unfulfillable and not our ticket to a fairer, better future“many early donors ‘walk away’ richer Since they signed it.”

A spokesperson for the Giving Pledge described the report as “misleading”, which contained incomplete data that excluded “significant forms of charitable giving”, including contributions to foundations.

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Buffett on evaluating ‘moats’ (1999)

Warren Buffett explains Why is it important to look at what a company calls its “moat”—its ability to maintain an advantage over competitors?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would like you to investigate with us and tell us what you think are the signs of major government and economic ditches…

WARREN BUFFETMoat and management are part of the valuation process in that they are involved in our thinking about the degree and amount of certainty we attribute to the income stream (actually cash flow) we expect in the future.

So it is, you know, it’s an art in terms of valuing businesses. Formulas are finally getting simpler.

But if you and I were in the gum business, we’d have nothing. wrigleyso I use Wrigley in the classroom quite often – pick a number where you would expect the unit growth of gum to increase over the next 10 or 20 years.

Let me know your expectations for how much pricing flexibility you have and how much danger there is of Wrigley’s market share shrinking significantly. You can pass all of these. We are experiencing this too.

So – and in this case – we consider the moat. We consider price elasticity, which interacts with the moat in certain ways. We evaluate the possibility of unit demand changing in the future. We’re considering the possibility that management is either very bright about the cash they’ve developed, or very stupid about it.

And all of this is factored into our assessment of what the money flow looks like over the years.

However, how the investment will pay off depends on how this flow develops over the next 10 or 20 years…

If you have a big enough moat, you don’t need that much management.

You know it’s coming back Peter Lynch He says he likes to buy a business that’s so good that even a fool could run it, because sooner or later someone will. Okay — (Laughter)

So… he was saying the same thing. So he was saying that what he really loved was a business with a great moat, where nothing would happen to the moat. And there aren’t many businesses like this. But then you are involved in the evaluation of all these shadings.

This [a can of Coca-Cola]not the cherry version, but the regular version – there’s a hell of a moat around that. There’s even a moat inside the container, you know.

You know, there was some research done on what percentage of people were blindfolded and could identify which product they were holding just by holding the container. And in this respect, there are not many companies that can score like Coca-Cola.

So here we have a situation where the product has share of mind. If there are 6 billion people in the world, I don’t know what percentage of them think positively about Coca-Cola, but that would be a huge number.

The question is, 10 years from now, will that number be even higher, and will there be a slightly more positive impression on average for the billions of people who have that impression? That’s the gist of it.