Echoing an observation he’s made more than once as one of the world’s most-heralded stock pickers, in an interview given at Berkshire Hathaway‘s (NYSE: BRKA) (NYSE: BRKB) annual shareholder meeting held in May, retired CEO Warren Buffett likened the current stock market to “a church with a casino attached.”
In other words, the foundation for sound and solid investing is still in place, but “we’ve never had people in a more gambling mood than now.”
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It’s getting in the way of Berkshire’s performance, too. As he recently told CNBC’s Becky Quick, “It’s tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling.” And Berkshire Hathaway’s current cash hoard of $397 billion confirms that both he and current Berkshire CEO Greg Abel believe what Buffett’s saying.
The question is, is the Oracle of Omaha just prompting another cleverly worded thought exercise, or is he actually right?
The data affirms his opinion
Don’t misread the message. Simply avoiding stocks altogether because of the unhealthy market environment isn’t necessarily the right call either. Overbought stocks can and do climb even higher. There are also plenty of undervalued names outside of the richly valued technology sector to consider right now.
Still, Buffett’s got a fair overall point. The S&P 500‘s (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) forward-looking price/earnings ratio currently stands near a record high of just over 32. In contrast, its longer-term, inflation-adjusted CAPE (Case-Shiller P/E) ratio of over 41 nearly matches its all-time peak following the rapid rise of dot-com stocks in the late 1990s.
Both valuation measures got here, of course, because investors are expecting — or at least hoping for — big-time profit growth in the very near future, largely driven by the artificial intelligence industry. Indeed, they’re so confident it’s coming that they’ll pay rarely seen prices to own the stocks expected to deliver these profits.
It’s not just a matter of valuation, though. U.S. investors’ margin balances — money investors borrow from their broker to purchase stocks with — have also soared just since 2025 to a record-breaking $1.5 trillion.
The rapid pace of this recent rise is a worry in and of itself, as it suggests a bunch of people simply raced into buying as much of the rising stock as they’re allowed to own as quickly as they could, ignoring factors like valuation or sustainability.
