Warren Buffett's successor just put US$20 billion to work after 14 quarters of selling stocks — what it means for Canadians

Abel isn’t acting out of desperation. Berkshire’s operating earnings for the quarter climbed 16% to nearly US$13 billion, while net earnings attributable to shareholders more than doubled to US$25.7 billion, largely on investment gains.

For investors, this shift in position isn’t about which stocks Berkshire picked; it’s about what a move like this signals — and what Canadian investors sitting on their own uninvested cash might take from it.

What changed under Greg Abel

Greg Abel took over as Berkshire’s chief executive on January 1, 2026, inheriting a cash position that had grown past US$360 billion. Buffett had built up a large cash reserve primarily because he said he could not find enough value in the market to justify spending it.

After taking the helm of Berkshire and settling in the first quarter of the year, Abel opted to put that cash to work in the second quarter of 2026.

The single biggest move was a roughly US$17-billion addition to Berkshire’s stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, pushing that position to about US$36.6 billion — now Berkshire’s third-largest holding, behind only Apple and American Express. Berkshire also expanded its bet on Delta Air Lines by 44%, adding roughly US$1.6 billion to bring that stake to about US$5.1 billion, and repurchased US$4.5 billion of its own shares.

Why a growing cash pile isn’t automatically a warning sign

For years, Berkshire’s swelling cash hoard was read as a caution flag — a sign that even one of the world’s most disciplined investors thought stocks, broadly, were priced too high to buy.

This doesn’t mean that Abel’s pivot is a signal that the whole market suddenly got cheap. Instead, it means that Berkshire found a specific opportunity, largely tied to Alphabet’s position in AI-driven growth, that was worth deploying capital into. The lesson for Canadian investors isn’t to copy the trade. It’s a reminder that a large cash position, whether it’s Berkshire’s or your own, isn’t a strategy by itself — it’s a holding pattern while you wait for a clear reason to act.

What investors should do to prepare

Investors can take a few steps, including:

• Check whether your own cash position reflects a deliberate wait for value, or just inertia
• Confirm which account holds your U.S. stocks — RRSP, TFSA or non-registered — since the tax treatment differs depending on the account in which they are held
• Watch for Berkshire’s next 13F filing, due mid-November, to see whether Abel keeps buying or pulls back
• Resist buying Alphabet, Delta or anything else simply because Berkshire did — the reasoning behind a purchase matters more than the purchase itself

Remember, Buffett spent decades insisting that patience, not activity, was the hardest skill in investing. Abel’s first big move as CEO doesn’t abandon that lesson; he waited until a specific opportunity, not a market mood, to justify spending cash. Canadian investors sitting on cash of their own can borrow that same discipline. The goal isn’t to trade in step with Berkshire. It’s to have as clear a reason as Abel apparently did.