Warren Buffett is known for picking stocks. These days, he is increasingly picking cash.

The mountain of cash and Treasury bills at the famed investor’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, rose above $300 billion in the third quarter—easily a record and its highest as a percentage of company assets in data going back to 1998, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Holding lots of cash is standard practice for Berkshire, but the scale of the recent buildup has raised eyebrows among some observers of the Omaha, Neb., conglomerate. 

They are preparing to parse Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders on Saturday for clues about how the Berkshire chairman and chief executive is thinking about the stock market and any opportunities he might see for investing the cash. Berkshire’s annual report, which includes the letter, will show how much cash the company held at the end of 2024.

“The issue is, what are they going to do with all this cash?” said Steven Check, chief investment officer of Check Capital Management, who has attended Berkshire’s annual meetings since 1996. “This is as extreme as I can recall.”

Berkshire generates cash from its stable of operating businesses, which range from insurance to rail, from utilities to candy, as well as from its investments. Recently, the company’s investing moves have involved selling a lot of stock. Berkshire was a net seller of equity securities in the past eight reported quarters, and a regulatory disclosure of its U.S. stock positions in December suggests the selling extended to a ninth period.

Buffett’s storied reputation means his company’s trades are watched like those of few investors. When Berkshire sells, it can spark worries that the outlook for stocks is poor. Financial advisers at Edward Jones have voiced their concerns to James Shanahan, a senior equity research analyst at the firm who covers Berkshire.

“I hear that from our advisers: Why should we be buying stocks if Warren Buffett’s not buying stocks?” Shanahan said.

Close observers of Berkshire think about the rise in cash this way: Within the company’s hunting ground of large, high-quality businesses in industries Buffett understands, prices have risen too high for the stock picker to feel confident an investment would lead to worthwhile returns for Berkshire and its shareholders. 

Buffett and his deputies are searching for bargains while stocks trade at records. The S&P 500 notched its latest all-time high Wednesday and has advanced 4% in 2025 after two years of annual gains above 20%. The broad U.S. stock index recently traded at 22.4 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, above a 10-year average of 18.6, according to FactSet.

At Berkshire’s most recent annual meeting, in May, Buffett weighed in on the company’s tower of cash: “We’d love to spend it, but we won’t spend it unless we think we’re doing something that has very little risk and can make us a lot of money.”

“We only swing at pitches we like,” he added later in the session. “It isn’t like I’ve got a hunger strike or something like that going on. It’s just that things aren’t attractive.”

If Buffett did find a company that looked appetizing, he might well have the cash to buy it in full. Based on its third-quarter report, Berkshire could easily pay the market price of all but the biggest U.S. companies, with ample cash to buy a household name such as Deere, United Parcel Service or CVS Health.

Buffett watchers tend to say the drumbeat of stock sales doesn’t amount to a call on the overall market. Rather, they say, it has resulted from case-by-case determinations that individual companies’ prospects don’t merit the price at which other traders are willing to take the shares off Berkshire’s hands.

One reason behind the cash buildup is Berkshire’s extensive sales of Apple stock, which has traded in recent years at much richer valuations than when Buffett’s company was establishing its position from 2016 through 2018. 

Berkshire slashed its stake in the iPhone maker for four consecutive quarters starting in late 2023, reducing its ownership of Apple from nearly 6% to 2%, according to FactSet. Berkshire held off on further Apple sales in the fourth quarter, and the consumer-electronics company remained its largest stockholding at the end of 2024 with a market value of $75 billion.

The move to lighten a position that had grown to an outsize share of Berkshire’s stock portfolio is seen by some observers as part of the 94-year-old chief executive’s efforts to smooth the transition when his designated successor, Greg Abel, eventually takes the reins.

“Some might say that this is housekeeping, that he’s cleaning everything up and getting ready to hand over the company,” Shanahan said. “He would want to give Greg Abel a good starting point and not have any legacy problems.”

Also contributing to the climb in cash: Stock buybacks have ground to a halt, with Berkshire repurchasing no stock in the third quarter for the first time in several years. The company says it can buy back stock whenever Buffett “believes that the repurchase price is below Berkshire’s intrinsic value, conservatively determined,” as long as its holdings of cash and Treasury bills wouldn’t fall below $30 billion.

Berkshire’s stock has rallied to start the year, with both Class A and Class B shares closing at records this week. The company’s market value passed $1 trillion for the first time last year.

And the cash pile itself is making money. Berkshire reported $8 billion in interest and other investment income in its insurance operations in the first nine months of 2024, along with $3.8 billion in income from dividends.

Berkshire’s streak of net stock sales has coincided with a climb in the overall market. Since the end of the third quarter of 2022, the S&P 500 has risen around 70%.

But longtime shareholders don’t seem too anxious about missed opportunities. They say they trust Buffett to decide how to use Berkshire’s hoard. Nor are they clamoring for the company to release cash through a dividend.

“We own Berkshire to see the capital be reinvested,” said Darren Pollock, portfolio manager at Cheviot Value Management. “We own it for the hope that the big whale will come along and they’ll be able to snare it. That just is taking a long time, obviously.”