In November 2024, Manage Forward looked at Berkshire Hathaway's decision not to repurchase a single share in the third quarter of that year and called it a warning. In Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Halts Stock Buybacks: A Cautionary Signal, we read the pause, the cash pile above $325 billion and the net stock sales as Warren Buffett telling investors that prices were rich. We closed by suggesting that "holding cash can sometimes be the best strategy when faced with inflated asset prices."
A full year of filings later, the verdict is partly right and mostly wrong. We called the behaviour correctly, since the buybacks did not return at any point in 2025, but we misread what it meant. The pause was valuation discipline about Berkshire's own shares, not a forecast about the market. The cash it left behind now looks like a deployment problem, and one that has outlasted Buffett's tenure as chief executive.
Berkshire's 10-K for fiscal 2025 states that "there were no share repurchases in 2025." According to CNBC's coverage of the fourth quarter, the cash hoard slipped to $373.3 billion at year-end from a record $381.6 billion in the third quarter, and Class A shares rose 10% in 2025 against a 16.4% gain for the S&P 500.
The rule was about Berkshire's price, never the market's
Our original piece leaned on analysts who saw a risk-off mentality and an investor waiting for a better entry point into the market. That framing borrowed a story Berkshire never told. Every 2025 filing restated the same test, and none of it refers to the index, the economy or valuations elsewhere. Read plainly, the policy in the 10-K has four parts:
- Berkshire may repurchase shares only at prices below its intrinsic value.
- That intrinsic value is to be determined conservatively, which builds in a margin.
- Repurchases are subject to a $30 billion cash floor.
- The judgment now sits with the chief executive, after consultation with the chairman.
There is no book-value multiple in that list. Our 2024 piece compared a 1.6 times price-to-book ratio with a 1.2 times "upper limit" while noting, in the same paragraph, that Berkshire had abandoned that guideline in 2018. That was sloppy: we cited a retired rule as though it still bound the company, and the comparison made the pause look more mechanical and more bearish than it was.
The best evidence against the market-timing reading came in 2025. CNBC reported after the third quarter that Buffett held off on buybacks "despite a significant pullback in the stock," with shares down by double digits from their highs, partly as a so-called Buffett premium faded after the succession announcement. A manager making a call on the broader market would have found that gap between a falling Berkshire and a rising index hard to ignore. Buffett ignored it because his test asks whether the stock trades conservatively below what the business is worth, and the answer was evidently still no. A buyback rule tells you what a company thinks of its own price and nothing about the S&P 500.
Patience has a carrying cost, and the bill is growing
This is the strongest defence of the original piece, and part of it holds. Treasury income is not nothing, and declining to overpay has a value that never shows up in a quarterly comparison. The fourth quarter supplied a reminder of what overpaying costs: CNBC reports results included a $4.5 billion impairment on Kraft Heinz and Occidental. A company that would rather sit on bills than repeat that kind of mistake is making a defensible choice.
Defensible, though, is not the same as vindicated. If the cash was a bet that equities were too expensive, 2025 lost the bet, with the S&P 500 up 16.4%. CNBC also reports that Berkshire was a net seller of equities in the third quarter, booking a taxable gain of $10.4 billion, which only added to the pile. Saxo itself names the condition that would change the picture: "The signal turns when Berkshire restarts buybacks or announces a big acquisition." Buybacks did not restart in 2025, and Berkshire's net-of-payables measure for its insurance and other businesses rose from $328.0 billion in the first-quarter 10-Q to $369.0 billion in the 10-K, even though CNBC's broader measure dipped in the fourth quarter. A hoard that grows because nothing clears the bar is honest, but it is still capital waiting for a use.
A buyback rule tells you what a company thinks of its own price and nothing about the S&P 500.
Leaders who drew the lesson we offered in 2024 should revise it. Holding cash because prices look inflated is a macro call dressed as prudence, and most boards are no better at macro calls than Berkshire's critics. The filings support a narrower and more useful lesson: write the test for spending in terms of your own value, set a floor, and accept that a strict test will say no for long stretches. Then treat the accumulated cash as a question the board owes an answer to.
The judgment now belongs to someone else
The most consequential change in Berkshire's buyback policy since our piece is a single phrase. The 2025 quarterly filings said intrinsic value would be "conservatively determined by Warren Buffett, Berkshire's Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer." The 10-K now says it will be "conservatively determined by Berkshire's Chief Executive Officer after consultation with the Chairman of the Board." The fourth quarter of 2025 was, as CNBC put it, Buffett's final quarter as CEO.
Our 2024 piece treated the pause as one famous investor's personal read on the world. The filings now treat it as an institutional rule with a new judge. We have found no company statement on how Buffett's successor as chief executive, Abel, intends to apply it, and it would be a mistake to guess. What is clear is that the $373 billion question passes to someone whose intrinsic-value estimate the market has not yet learned to trust, at a moment when the stock has lagged the index and the premium attached to Buffett's name has faded.
We called the halt a cautionary signal, and it was a signal, just not the one we described. It said Berkshire would rather explain idle cash than explain overpaying for itself. That trade made sense for a quarter and arguably for a year. At $373 billion and under a new chief executive, the cash has become unfinished work, and the next person to decide what Berkshire is worth inherits all of it.
