Adam Levy, The Motley Fool

Sun, May 18, 2025, 9:00 AM5 min read

• Berkshire Hathaway has been a net seller of stocks for 10 straight quarters.

• Buffett would love to spend the money on an investment, but he's waiting for a good opportunity.

• Average investors have a big advantage over Buffett.

• 10 stocks we like better than Berkshire Hathaway ›

Warren Buffett has overseen the investment portfolio at Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) (NYSE: BRK.B) for 60 years. In that time, he's produced mind-boggling returns for shareholders.

Since Buffett took over the company in 1965, Berkshire shares have returned an average of 20% per year. Over the course of 60 years, that adds up to a whopping 6,135,058%. Even if you had waited until the end of the trading session when Berkshire announced Buffett's takeover and bought a single $18 share, it'd be worth over $750,000 as of this writing.

That's why the investing world pays close attention to the moves Buffett and his team of investment managers make in Berkshire's portfolio. Unfortunately, the Oracle of Omaha has been selling much more than he's bought over the last two and a half years. The last big investment he made was in Alleghany Corp. in 2022, which Berkshire acquired for a value of $11.6 billion.

At the company's annual shareholder meeting earlier this month, Buffett said he and the team came pretty close to spending $10 billion recently, which would have been Berkshire's biggest acquisition since Alleghany. But one thing held him back and continues to hold him back from making any big investments right now.

Buffett contends that investment decisions aren't as complicated as some experts might lead you to believe. In fact, he says a decisions can be downright easy as long as there are two things in place.

"We'd spend $100 billion," Buffett told the audience after revealing Berkshire came close to a $10 billion deal. "Those decisions are not tough to make when something is offered that makes sense to us and that we understand and offers good value."

If the business is understandable and offered at good value, Buffett will buy it. Perhaps in more recent years, there should be a caveat that Buffett probably isn't looking at deals unless they're in the $10 billion range or bigger. Buffett later commented, "$10 billion wouldn't have done that much," referencing Berkshire's approximately $630 billion in liquid assets between its cash and equity portfolio.

But Buffett's simple investing philosophy has led to unparalleled long-term success, and it's not like the 94-year-old has completely lost touch with how businesses work. The explanation for why it's been so tough for Buffett to invest a lot of money recently is that there's not a lot of value in the market, especially among bigger companies.