Happy Friday the 13th to those who celebrate!
Berkshire Hathaway will release its 13-F after the bell on Monday afternoon, revealing which stocks it bought and sold during the third quarter.
Early signs point to a relatively sleepy quarter.
With only $2.4 billion of purchases against $2.8 billion of sales, there probably won’t be anything too crazy in the filing — but we will know for sure soon enough.
Barron’s thinks Berkshire may have trimmed Bank of America and added a little more Alphabet in the third quarter, which all sounds eminently plausible.
Also coming Monday is this month’s Uncommon Sense article for paid supporters. I’m digging into one of my all-time favorite (and earliest) Warren Buffett interviews. What I especially love about it is how, even a generation later, his overall message has remained startlingly consistent. But how he expresses that message has changed.
Buffett was at his free-wheeling best here — and I hope everyone will enjoy it.
So if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, there’s no time like the present.
Before we completely move on from Berkshire’s Q3 2026 earnings report, there were a couple of leftover odds and ends that didn’t make it into Monday’s summary.
Consider this a bonus round of sorts:
Berkshire’s float finished the quarter at $178.5 billion, up $2.1 billion since the start of the year. And since its insurance businesses remain profitable, that float effectively costs less than nothing. In other words, Berkshire is getting paid to hold (and put to work) other people’s money. Pretty sweet deal.
OxyChem, the newly-acquired chemicals business, brought in $1.3 billion of revenue last quarter and $3.9 billion so far this year. Pre-tax earnings, though, came in at just $71 million because of increased non-cash depreciation and amortization expenses related to accounting for the acquisition.
Berkshire is no bond shop. It holds roughly $17 billion in fixed maturity securities — a rounding error next to $335 billion in common stocks. Roughly 77% of what’s there comes due in one year or less.
And, finally, while I try to keep the focus of this newsletter on Berkshire’s business performance — and not its stock price — I’d be remiss not to mention that both the Class A and Class B shares hit new all-time highs several times this week. 🎉
Other items of interest from the Berkshire Hathaway orbit…
Berkshire Hathaway is gearing up for another trip into the yen bond market. Early reports put this offering at ¥182.3 billion ($1.1 billion) with wider spreads than in the past. Historically, Berkshire has used the proceeds of these sales to both roll over existing yen debt and invest in Japanese businesses like the sogo shosha and Tokio Marine. As of the end of the third quarter, Berkshire’s yen notes totaled $15.3 billion — at a mouth-watering weighted average rate of just 1.4%.
The stunning end of the Jensen Huang era at Nvidia could end up taking a bite out of Apple. Semafor reports that one name being considered for the top spot is Apple’s hardware chief Johny Srouji, the man who turned the Cupertino-based tech giant into a custom-silicon powerhouse. Losing him would hurt. Srouji was only just promoted to Chief Hardware Officer this spring, though there have been rumblings and rumors in the past that he might be interested in a move elsewhere. Stay tuned on this one.