Berkshire's new CEO overhauls portfolio, dumping a slate of stocks

Berkshire Hathaway’s Q1 2026 13F showed a major portfolio overhaul under Greg Abel, with Alphabet shares increased 224% to a $16.6 billion position and new stakes initiated in Delta Air Lines ($2.8 billion) and Macy’s ($59 million). Berkshire also tripled its New York Times stake to 15.1 million shares, while eliminating or sharply reducing several holdings including Visa, Mastercard, UnitedHealth, Amazon, and a 35% cut in Chevron worth more than $8 billion. The filing suggests meaningful portfolio repositioning, but the overall impact is company-specific rather than market-wide.

Analysis

This filing reads less like routine rebalancing and more like a governance signal: Abel appears willing to run Berkshire's equity book with a higher turnover, more explicit sector tilts, and less attachment to legacy positions. The biggest implication is not the names sold, but the breadth of the purge — if the prior regime’s “miscellaneous” book is being cleaned out, the market should expect Berkshire to become a more concentrated expression of management conviction rather than a passive compendium of old ideas.

Alphabet’s outsized increase matters because it suggests Berkshire is now more comfortable underwriting durable cash compounding in large-cap software/ads than it has been historically. That raises the odds Berkshire becomes a marginal buyer in any AI-adjacent selloff, which should put a floor under megacap growth on pullbacks; conversely, it weakens the bearish thesis on Alphabet that “Buffett won’t own it” and may attract other value-oriented allocators looking for permission to own quality tech. The immediate winner is not just GOOGL, but any large-cap cash-rich platform trading at a discount to its growth duration.

Delta’s return is a more interesting second-order tell: Berkshire may be expressing a view that airline pricing power is now structurally better than in prior cycles, but the timing is late-cycle and oil-sensitive. If crude stays elevated, the earnings upside from passenger demand can be offset quickly by fuel and labor costs, making DAL a high-beta spread trade rather than a pure fundamental compounder. Macy’s looks more like a trading lot than a thesis, but it signals Berkshire is willing to own consumer turnarounds with asymmetric optionality when asset value and buybacks do the heavy lifting.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long GOOGL on a 3-6 month horizon into any AI/news-driven volatility; Berkshire validation lowers left-tail perception, but size as a starter position only because the stock has already re-rated on the filing.
• Short basket: V/MA/UNH/DPZ/AON/CHTR on a 1-3 month relative-value basis versus SPY; the clean-out raises the risk these are now 'orphaned' with less strategic sponsorship, though catalysts are mostly flow-driven rather than fundamental.
• Pair trade long DAL / short XLE for the next 1-2 months if crude stays firm: DAL benefits from revived airline capacity discipline, but the short leg is needed because fuel is the main reversal risk.
• Avoid chasing M outright; if anything, structure as a small call spread for 3-6 months. The setup is asset-sum-of-parts and buyback optionality, but retail demand remains too weak for clean fundamental upside.
• Hold BRK.B as a defensive core long, but do not extrapolate Q1 activity into a higher-conviction activist posture; the better trade is to own Berkshire as a volatility dampener while expressing the stock-specific views separately.