Warren Buffett could keep investors waiting for his long game to work out—but can Greg Abel?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Patience may be the greatest virtue, but few professional investors have the privilege of practising it. In real life, money managers live in constant fear that their investors will flee—and their jobs will be toast—if they fail to keep up with their benchmarks for several quarters or, heaven forbid, years. The only living exception is Warren Buffett.

And Greg Abel, Buffett’s successor as Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO, is already having to come to terms with that reality.At his first annual meeting as CEO, Abel preached the gospel of investing discipline against a backdrop of the worst stretch of underperformance for Berkshire’s stock in a quarter century. The shares have lost 10.8% in the past 12 months, a 40.4 percentage point underperformance to the S&P 500 Index—the worst, that is, since March 2000. And one needn’t look far for an explanation: Berkshire reduced its stock holdings by a net $8.1 billion in the first quarter, leaving its cash position at $397 billion, or about 32% of total assets.

That’s even higher than the pile Buffett accumulated prior to the financial crisis. The conglomerate’s main exposure to the buzzy artificial intelligence (AI) theme was Apple, a once massive position that’s been swiftly downsized since 2024. Now, Berkshire is effectively clipping coupons while index investors elsewhere profit from a bonanza.

Here’s how Abel described the situation (emphasis mine): “One of our greatest strengths at Berkshire is patience and being disciplined when it comes to allocating our capital. There will be opportunities that come over time... and it doesn’t mean there’s not opportunities now, but it doesn’t mean you need to deploy all your capital or spend all your money