(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)

Berkshire gains ground but still trails S&P as '26 enters second half

With 2026 a bit more than half over, Berkshire Hathaway's B shares are down 1.8% year-to-date and 12.4 percentage points behind the S&P 500's 10.7% gain. (Including dividends, the S&P is up 11.4% giving it a 13.1 percentage point lead).

A strong June for Berkshire erased almost a third of its 17.5 percentage point deficit as of June 1, its biggest losing margin of the year so far.

Even with that June bump, however, it's been a tough Q2 (+ 10 days) for Berkshire with a gain of a bit more than 3% versus the benchmark's strong tech-driven 16% advance, totally erasing what was a slim 1.8 percentage point Berkshire lead at the end of March.

Last year, Berkshire underperformed the S&P by 5.5 percentage points excluding dividends. The deficit was 7.0 percentage points with dividends included.

Berkshire execs spotted at exclusive Sun Valley conference

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel and portfolio manager Ted Weschler aren't featured in the Forbes article on "Sun Valley's Billionaire Summer Camp" now underway in Idaho.

But they are on the magazine's list of attendees and photos from CNBC's David Grogan and Brendan McDermid of Reuters provide visual evidence they are present at the annual Allen & Co. invitation-only gathering of moguls, along with names like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman.

Warren Buffett went to Sun Valley for decades but has not attended the last few years.

In 1999, at the height of the dotcom craze, he gave a notable speech at the conference warning that while the internet would be transformative, investors were expecting too much and were bound to be disappointed.

BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET

• Financial Express (India): Warren Buffett vs. Indian grandmothers: Who wins the great gold debate

HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC'S BUFFETT ARCHIVE

AI could make financial scams a 'growth industry' (2024)

Warren Buffett describes seeing a convincing AI-generated video of himself that has him worried the technology will make financial scams much more effective.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you think about the role of technological advances, especially generative AI, on more traditional industries? Thank you...

WARREN BUFFETT: I don't know anything about AI. But I do — I do have — I don't — that doesn't mean I deny its existence or importance or anything of the sort.

And last year I said, you know, that we let the genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear weapons, and that genie has been doing some terrible things lately.

And the power of that genie is what, you know, scares the hell out of me. And on, the other hand, I don't know any way to get the genie back in the bottle.

And AI is somewhat similar. It's out — it's part-way out of the bottle. And it's enormously important, and it's going to be done by somebody...

Now AI, I had one experience that does make me a little nervous. And I'll just explain it.

Very recently — fairly recently — I saw an image in front of my eyes on the screen, and it was me, and it was my voice and wearing the kind of clothes I wear. And my wife or my daughter wouldn't have been able to detect any difference. And it was delivering a message that no way came from me.

So — it — when you think of the potential for scamming people, if you can reproduce images that I can't even tell, that say, I need money, you know, it's your daughter, I've just had a car crash. I need fifty thousand dollars wired.

I mean, scamming has always been part of the American scene. But this would make me, if I was interested in investing in scamming, it's going to be the growth industry of all time.

And it's enabled in a way — you know, obviously AI has potential for good things, too, but I don't know how you — based on the one I saw recently, I practically would send money to myself over in some crazy country. (Laughter)

So I don't have any advice on how the world handles it because I don't think we know how to handle what we did with the nuclear genie.

But I do think, as someone who doesn't understand a damn thing about it, that it is — it has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm, and I just don't know how that plays out.

BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH

Berkshire market capitalization: $1,064,452,706,579

Berkshire Cash as of March 31: $397.4 billion (Up 6.5% from Dec. 31)

Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $380.2 billion (Up 3.0% from Dec. 31)

Berkshire repurchased $234 million of its shares in Q1 2026.

BERKSHIRE'S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS - Jul. 10, 2026

Berkshire's top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.

Holdings are as of March 31, 2026, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway's 13F filing on May 15, 2026, except for:

• Alphabet, which includes the $10 billion in shares that Berkshire agreed to buy directly from the company, as announced on June 1, 2026. Berkshire has not yet formally disclosed whether the transaction has been completed. The entry is a combination of Class A and Class C Alphabet shares. The market price is a weighted average of the prices of the two classes.
• Mitsubishi, which is as of April 30, 2026

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS

Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at [email protected]. (Sorry, but we don't forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

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Also, Buffett's annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire's website.

-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch