Berkshire Showed Its Hand. We Left the Stars Out of It.
Once a quarter the biggest money managers in America have to show their homework, and on May 15, 2026 Berkshire Hathaway turned in the first full quarter of the Greg Abel era. We used to read the stars of every company in a filing like this. We stopped, and the reason is the most useful thing on this page.
The filing, straight from the source
The Q1 2026 13F reads like a regime introducing itself. Berkshire opened a new position of about 2.6 billion dollars in Delta Air Lines, roughly tripled its shares of The New York Times, added to homebuilder Lennar, and raised its Alphabet Class A shares by 204 percent, with a new line of about a billion dollars in Class C shares beside them. Fifteen companies left the list entirely, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard and UnitedHealth among them, which for a shop famous for never selling is basically a scandal.
Meanwhile the anchors did not move a share. Apple is still the biggest line at about 22 percent of the reported value, American Express about 17 and Coca-Cola about 12.
What a 13F is, and what it is not
Any manager with 100 million dollars or more in US-listed stocks files one within 45 days of each quarter's end, so the next ones land in mid-August, mid-November, mid-February and mid-May. It lists long positions in US-listed shares on the last day of the quarter. It leaves out cash, short positions and shares that only trade abroad, and by the time you read it, it is six weeks old. The SEC's own FAQ has the rules.
Why there are no signs on this page
This piece used to read the stars of each company beside the move, the soda they have loved since 1988 and the search engine the new boss leaned into. It was fun, and it was misleading in a way that is easy to miss. A sign printed next to a stock someone chose reads as the sign choosing it. It did not. Berkshire's analysts read balance sheets, not ephemerides, and when we tested whether charts carry any market signal at all, the answer was no.
So the filing gets read as a filing. The companies' charts live on their own pages, with no famous investor standing next to them.
Why this is a ritual worth keeping
What the filing hands you every quarter is a plain look at what some of the most patient money in America actually did, six weeks late. That delay is the lesson. By the time anyone reads it, the news is old, so it is something to learn from, not a move to copy. Nobody here predicted a thing. We read the receipts after they landed, same as you could.
Sources: every figure above is from Berkshire Hathaway's Form 13F-HR for the quarter ending March 31, 2026, filed May 15, 2026 (CIK 0001067983), compared line by line with the filing for the quarter before. Greg Abel became chief executive on January 1, 2026, per Berkshire's announcement, and Coca-Cola first appears in the 1988 shareholder letter.