Warren Buffett officially retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRKA) (NYSE: BRKB) at the end of 2025. However, he’s still chairman of the board, so it’s not like he’s completely hands off from the trillion-dollar company that he built.
Throughout his career, Buffett taught investors countless lessons on how to act in the stock market, and I believe he gave us one final one during his last quarter in the CEO role.
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One of Buffett’s most successful investments was Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and at one point in time, it made up about half of Berkshire’s total investment portfolio. However, Buffett didn’t have any nostalgic strings attached to this holding. During his last quarter, he was still selling Apple stock because it no longer fit his investing framework.
This final lesson is a good one: Never get too attached to a stock that you’re unwilling to sell when your thesis changes.
During the fourth quarter, Berkshire decreased its Apple position by about 4%. It’s still Berkshire’s largest overall holding, but there are several that are close to overtaking it. Why is Berkshire selling? I think it has a lot to do with the thesis behind the stock shifting.
In 2016, when Buffett and Berkshire first took a stake in Apple, it was dominating the smartphone market, yet trading for a dirt cheap price-to-earnings ratio.
Now, Apple is among the most expensive big tech stocks, trading for more than 33 times forward earnings. While Apple’s latest growth trajectories are a move in the right direction, they’re still nowhere near where some other big tech stocks are growing.
Additionally, Wall Street analysts believe that Apple’s first-quarter results (ended Dec. 27, 2025) were a flash in the pan. For the rest of fiscal year 2026, Wall Street analysts expect 12% growth, while they only predict 7% growth next year.
That doesn’t look like a stock that deserves to trade at that high a premium, let alone one that has failed to launch any game-changing new products over the past few years and is way behind its peers in AI deployment. Apple has a long way to go before it can regain its place among other stocks that are pushing what’s possible with tech, yet the stock price assumes that it has already done it.
So, Buffett and his crew are slowly decreasing their stake because the risk-reward profile just isn’t as positive anymore. They’re clearly still bullish on the stock overall, but not as much as they once were. This gives investors one final key lesson: Never get too attached to a stock that you aren’t willing to sell when the circumstances change.
