Greg Abel's First Full Quarter Running Berkshire Hathaway Has Arrived. Here's What the 13F Reveals.

Berkshire Hathaway’s first-quarter 13F under Greg Abel showed a major portfolio reset: 15 positions were exited, two new holdings were added, and Alphabet was increased by about 40 million shares, bringing the stake to roughly $11 billion and 6.9% of the portfolio. Apple, American Express, and Coca-Cola were left unchanged, while Bank of America was trimmed just 1%, signaling continuity with Buffett’s high-conviction, value-oriented approach. The additions of Delta Air Lines and Macy’s highlight selective bets on travel and retail recovery.

Analysis

The key signal is not the portfolio reshuffle itself, but the concentration of incremental capital into a handful of liquid, high-quality franchises while exiting lower-conviction positions. That pattern reinforces a regime where Berkshire is acting less like a diversified asset accumulator and more like a quasi-long-duration quality factor ETF with an active edge in timing and sizing. In practice, that should keep valuation support under mega-cap compounders with durable cash conversion, while pressuring the cheaper but lower-moat financial/consumer names that were trimmed out of the basket.

Alphabet looks like the clearest beneficiary of this setup. A large add at an already-large size suggests the market is still underestimating the optionality embedded in its cash flow stream: search remains the funding engine, but the real second-order effect is that AI investment is increasingly a moat-strengthener rather than a margin destroyer if monetization lags only modestly. The risk is that multiple expansion gets front-run; once a name becomes consensus-quality, future returns depend on earnings delivery, not just re-rating.

The consumer-oriented adds are more nuanced. Delta and Macy’s are both cyclical value expressions, but the difference is timing: Delta is a macro call on resilient premium travel and corporate mobility over the next 6-18 months, while Macy’s is a deeper operating-improvement story that needs quarters of execution before the market rewards it. That creates a useful dispersion trade: travel can re-rate quickly on stable demand data, whereas department-store upside is more dependent on margin discipline and asset monetization.

The more interesting contrarian takeaway is what was not touched: the decision to leave top-tier cash generators intact implies Berkshire sees no urgent need to de-risk despite full valuations in parts of large-cap quality. That argues against chasing the “Berkshire is rotating out of old economy” narrative; the real message is that capital is still being allocated toward businesses with visible reinvestment runway and defensible economics. For investors, this favors buying strength in the highest-conviction compounders on any volatility, rather than trying to catch every cheap laggard Berkshire may have sampled.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long GOOGL on any 3-5% pullback over the next 2-6 weeks; thesis is that concentration buying validates a still-underappreciated earnings compounding story, with downside limited by cash flow support and upside from AI monetization optionality.
• Pair trade: long GOOGL / short AMZN for 3-6 months; Alphabet has cleaner near-term re-rating potential from portfolio validation, while Amazon faces a tougher path to multiple expansion because margin improvement is already more widely modeled.
• Trade DAL as a tactical long into the next 1-2 earnings windows with a tight stop if business travel indicators soften; this is a cyclical reopening/normalization expression with faster catalyst realization than retail.
• Small starter long M only if you can tolerate 6-12 month hold period; upside is asymmetric if execution continues, but position should be sized modestly because the rerating depends on sustained operational proof, not sentiment alone.
• Use BRK.B weakness to add tactically over the next 1-3 months; the portfolio message implies no strategic deterioration, and the stock remains a lower-volatility way to express quality/concentration exposure.