2025 appears to have represented something of a swan song for Warren Buffett, the 95-year-old Oracle of Omaha and magnetic investment personality. Buffett has long been the spiritual and strategic center of the firm Berkshire Hathaway, a textile company he eventually came to own and then grew into a multipronged investment tool with irons in virtually every conceivable fire. Buffett started his journey as an investor early in life, and is estimated to possess a net worth of over $146 billion. Buffett has finally stepped away from the game, separating the titles of chairman and CEO earlier in 2025 and ultimately leaving behind both leadership positions to start the new year.
His legacy is one of astounding success. There have been some stumbling blocks along the way, certainly: Among some of the worst stock predictions in U.S. history was Buffett’s purchase of Dexter Shoe in 1993. Specifically, he bought the company using Berkshire Hathaway shares rather than cash, yielding a cumulative value loss of around $9 billion in traded value. But Buffett’s trailing 20-year alpha in the 1980s was almost 20% annualized, meaning he was beating the market on an average yearly basis for two decades but vast, double-digit figures. His prowess in picking fantastic investments is almost completely unrivalled in its potency and longevity. These investments represent some of his most valuable investment decisions throughout a truly legendary career trying to soak value out of a famously fickle marketplace.
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Berkshire Hathaway has to be the starting point for any discussion of Warren Buffett’s triumph as an investor. He began buying shares at roughly $7 apiece in 1962, and interestingly has said that his investment in the then-textile company was potentially his worst investment. Yet, his intuition has frequently been a powerful tool to cut through the noise. Soon after acquiring the company outright he liquidated the textile manufacturing components of the business and transformed it into a holding company that went on to procure National Indemnity in 1967. In much the same way a bank utilizes the money its clients hold in the vault to provide loans, Berkshire’s growth strategy relied on leveraging its float capital to make additional investments. Taking monthly premiums from insurance policies and investing the money not required in the short term to pay out claims allowed the brand to continue growing, and frequently at an amazing pace.
Berkshire Hathaway has accumulated a large portfolio of other insurance providers, as well as a widespread collection of businesses and stock positions across industry lines. With Buffett at the helm, Berkshire has blended a range of stalwart dividend producers with growth options, tending to focus on buys that provide a position in assets that the analysis suggests are undervalued, yielding BH a market cap of over $1 trillion. BRK has famously steered away from paying its investors dividends, but the growth curve is undeniably steep, especially since class A shares have never been split. In 1980 they traded at $275, today one share is worth around $750,000.
Most of Warren Buffett’s investments are classic buys in the stock market or direct investments in companies. But one of his most rewarding investments involves a bit of his time, specifically, time leveraged all the way back at the beginning of his journey. When the book “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham was published in 1949, Buffett got his hands on a copy and devoured the lessons contained within. His appetite for knowledge has remained a staple of the approach he leverages into the present day. The commitment to reading that he has developed is one money management and investment tool that anyone can take for themselves.
Buffett himself has noted that his preeminent investment was in buying a copy of the book. He has also said that it remains a key point of focus in guiding his investment decisions through to the present. After reading Graham’s book, Buffett ultimately plotted a course forward that included enrolling in Columbia Business School specifically to take Graham’s classes and become close with the thinker. Within the pages, Buffett extracted one of the most important tenets of his investing approach: “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” This mentality has driven virtually every decision he has made through a decades-long career of wild success.
Warren Buffett began purchasing shares of American Express in the 1960s. His primary investments were made in a pair of acquisitions in the 1990s, however. The position has stood within the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio completely untouched since then. The American Express stake is worth roughly 22% of the company, making BH a significant investor in the gigantic financial firm. Even with a few red flags lingering in the background, AXP is a classic Buffett pick. The company exhibits a fairly strong moat, with revenue being generated from both its status as one of the primary global credit card networks and a brand that issues payment cards directly to consumers.
More to the point, Buffett has made it clear in the past that he intends to hold onto his American Express shares forever. It’s easy to see why considering that the investment’s value has surpassed $50 billion. Similarly, in 2025 the shares generated nearly $500 million in dividend payouts. That’s a half a billion dollar payout in just one year simply for maintaining the ownership stake! Buffett doesn’t always seek dividend generators, but AXP is a highly potent option in this corner of the stock market. Dividend investments act as a great compound interest generator, and American Express is consistently thought of as a strong dividend option.
BYD (Build Your Dreams) is a Chinese automaker focused on developing hybrid and electric vehicles. They’re often sleek and stylish, with spacious and comfortable adornments. While the company started off building batteries for mobile phones, it has quickly grown into a genuine force within the EV marketplace. In 2023 the company surpassed Tesla in sales volume and has become a significant presence in numerous global markets. Naturally, the explosive growth that BYD has enjoyed didn’t go unnoticed by one particular investor with a penchant for getting in on exciting companies ahead of explosive growth. Warren Buffett naturally owns a stake in the automaker. In 2008, before the company was on most Americans’ radars, Buffett invested $232 million in the company. At this point, BYD was roughly a decade old, and EVs were still seriously underrepresented in the American auto market.
In 2022, Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway began scaling back the position, one that had grown to a value of roughly $9 billion. In the years since, Buffett has continued to reduce the size of the investment, and in 2025 Berkshire Hathaway officially zeroed out its ownership stake in the brand. Buffett trends toward investments in companies with high growth potential and sell-offs of brands that he anticipates have reached a natural peak in value or are on an extended bullish run. With BYD continuing to gain traction and expanding its sales significantly, it would seem that Buffett saw an opportunity to bring the investment full circle and move on to the next growth opportunity.
Berkshire Hathaway seemingly never acts in half measures. Even gigantic conglomerate industries get the Warren Buffett treatment when BH invests in them. Berkshire’s Coca-Cola investment amounts to a roughly 9% stake in the drink maker with a $307 billion market cap. This is a stock pick close to Buffett’s heart, as he drinks as many as five cans every day. The investment is a booming one, with a value growth from an initial buy in at roughly $1.3 billion to a late-2025 valuation of over $28 billion.
This is another dividend producer that yields huge value to Buffett and Berkshire simply for the continued ownership of the shares. KO has increased dividends annually for over 60 years, making it a favorite for many dividend seekers. Buffett’s stake is currently worth around $204 million in quarterly distributions. Even with a lot going for the brand, Buffett hasn’t always been a silent player content to remain in the background. He is on the record stating that he wished he had sold at least a portion of the stake in 1998. The company enjoyed a significant peak in valuation at that time, and required nearly 20 years to return to the same cost basis. In the decade since surpassing that level, it has nearly doubled in price.
Warren Buffett’s investment savvy hasn’t always been spot on, but frequently he finds a unique knack for buying into positions at great times and then selling out of them before calamity. One such investment was in Freddie Mac. The lending agency is a government-sponsored enterprise that seeks to deliver affordable lending tools to homebuyers. During the financial crisis of 2008, it was a key player at the center of the housing market’s implosion, however.
As a GSE involved in the mortgage arena, Freddie Mac has long stood as a potent investment option, and in 1988 Buffett invested $108 million in the outfit. Its split-adjusted price per share for the buy in was just $4 apiece. At the time he told Fortune Magazine in an interview: “You’ve got a lot price-earnings ratio on a company with a terrific record … You’ve got growing earnings …” This made is an investment perfectly in tune with Buffett’s priorities. But in 2000 he had a meeting with Freddie Mac’s CEO and experienced a gut-check on the investment. By the end of that year he had pivoted completely out of the company and yielding a roughly 1,500% return on the investment. His concern was over the lender’s efforts to generate high returns on its business operations, which essentially meant lending to more people, perhaps even if they didn’t meet the existing thresholds in place for eligibility. Looking back, this is the exact set of practices that led to the industry’s collapse. But in 2003, shortly after Buffett’s exit, it became public that Freddie Mac was regularly reporting incorrect earnings data.
One of Warren Buffett’s most important decisions as the head of Berkshire Hathaway was the pivot into the insurance game. Buffett’s investment strategy involved the float capital from his insurance tools, and the preeminent name in this part of the portfolio is GEICO. The insurance giant isn’t a publicly traded company because Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway bought the brand outright.
In 1976, Buffett started buying up shares of GEICO and continued to grow his position in the company until 1995, when BH owned just under half of the business. Instead of keeping up the steady march of investments, he bought the remainder of the company for $2.3 billion. Naturally, the investment has only grown in value since. GEICO controls roughly $32 billion in assets, making it worth a great deal more than the total purchase price Buffett ultimately paid for the massive insurer. He has said, “When I count my blessings, I count GEICO twice,” about the investment.
Even with its more recent history making all the headlines, this is a long trending infatuation that started far earlier than his Berkshire Hathaway days. Buffett was investing in the company as a student in the 1950s, touting the brand’s ability to take care of policyholders’ needs better than other auto insurers. As a result, he long saw it as a company with a huge competitive advantage within an industry that could only grow over the long term. It would seem that his instincts on this one were right on the money.
A member of the famed technology-sector roundup known as FAANG stocks, Apple lends itself to the acronym as one of the “As” in the name. Apple is a brand with truly immense global reach and unrivalled brand power. Everyone knows the name and countless consumers around the world love its products. Investors like Warren Buffett has long been connected to the potent consumer electronics brand. He bought into the business to the tune of $40 billion in 2016. Most buyers won’t have that pile of cash laying around, but for someone who invested $1,000 in Apple ten years ago, a very healthy 582.7% return would have resulted in over $6,000 in equity. Buffett’s much larger stake naturally created a far greater dollar figure for Berkshire Hathaway.
Not quite 10 years on from his investment, Buffett began scaling back the position. Between the final quarters of 2023 and 2025, Buffett sold off over 70% of the investment, bringing a cash infusion from the proceeds of about $150 billion back into the portfolio and (partially) closing the books on a wildly successful return. The real reason for his sale of Apple shares, however, had nothing to do with a change of heart or new research that signaled negativity within the business. Buffett simply pivoted out of an overloaded stance (at one point accounting for around half of the investment firm’s entire portfolio value) when it appeared to be overvalued.
PetroChina is an investment that stands out a bit. Warren Buffett spent $488 million to buy 1.3% of the company in two buys made in 2002 and 2003. His analysis placed the brand’s value at an estimated $100 billion while its actual market cap at the time was $37 billion. He envisioned growth largely based on oil pricing increases over time and other potential points of untapped competitive advantage. He couldn’t have known that the oil giant would discover new sources of production, blasting its value far beyond Buffett’s estimation. This makes it an investment that largely benefitted from luck, even as Buffett’s analysis pointed to an underlying upside.
Berkshire Hathaway netted a massive profit when selling a few years later. Buffett and BH sold out of the company in 2007, bringing a $3.6 billion value gain along for the ride. The annualized average return for the brand was 52%, making this a huge win for the investment firm and its leader.
Warren Buffett is an investor who values the fundamentals. One of the best ways for early-stage traders to identify good companies that may be worth a buy is to look at the things in your own life. The brands you buy and use on a regular basis are companies that have won you over as a consumer. There’s a good chance that good business practices and strong financials help underpin their position in the marketplace, especially if they’re popular choices. Looking at your wardrobe, the car in your garage, the appliances in your kitchen, and the TV and phone you look at for communication and entertainment needs can help set you on the path of intuitive investing with your own experience as a guide.
Buffett bought the sundae company Dairy Queen with largely the same principle in mind. He is an avid reader and studier, and anecdotal reports suggest that he often spent his time pouring over financial reports while sitting at the Dairy Queen in his hometown. That frequent patronage eventually turned into an acquisition. Buffett bought the company in 1998, spending $585 million to seal the deal. The conglomerate’s purchase of DQ was made using a stock swap, and shareholders at the time could sell their position for $27 per share or buy Berkshire Hathaway shares at $26 each. In 2024, Dairy Queen brought in sales valued at $6.4 billion, so it’s safe to assume that the purchase has yielded an extreme rate of growth.
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