Berkshire Hathaway Cash Position and Future Stock Market Return

A subscriber asked about the relationship between Berkshire Hathaway cash position and S&P 500 Index returns. To investigate, we:

1. Located annual “Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) – Cash on Hand” data as a baseline cash pile.
2. Asked Grok to construct a table showing annual Berkshire Hathaway cash plus U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills), annual total assets and annual cash plus T-bills as a percentage of total assets. Grok stated that these data come “directly from Berkshire Hathaway’s official SEC filings — no third-party estimates, no aggregators.” We also asked Grok to explain any differences between its cash plus T-bills series and the baseline series.
3. Performed lead-lag analyses between each cash series as percentage of total assets versus annual S&P 500 Index (SP500) annual returns.

Scaling cash position to total assets measures the importance of cash to Berkshire Hathaway management. Using the specified annual data for 1996 through 2024, we find that: (more…)