Berkshire Hathaway's Q1 2026 13F posted to EDGAR after Friday's close. The filing's headline figure is the Alphabet position: 17.8 million shares became roughly 58 million — about a $17 billion buy. [1][2] The companion add was Delta, where Berkshire bought another 40 million shares for about $2.6 billion. A new small Macy's position appeared. Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Domino's, and UnitedHealth came off the book entirely. The portfolio shrank from $274 billion to $263 billion and from 40 names to 26. [1][2]

The paper's May 15 standard committed to discipline: read the actual 13F when it posts, not the vibe before. The May 14 brief noted that Friday, not Thursday, was the filing date and pointed to the May 2 10-Q's cost-basis decline in banks, insurance and finance as the breadcrumb to watch. The filing landed Friday. The 10-Q breadcrumb led somewhere — though not all the way to the bank lines. It led to a portfolio that Greg Abel, in his first reporting period as CEO, made smaller, more concentrated, and structurally different from the portfolio he inherited.

The Alphabet add will dominate the recap copy. It deserves part of the attention. A $17 billion position is real, and the AP report flagged the timing of the buy against Alphabet's late-2025 share weakness as conventional Buffett-style value behavior. [1] But the personality narrative — "Buffett's tech aversion broken" — gets the proportion wrong. Alphabet is one name out of a deletion list that contains five. The deletions are the structural story.

Visa and Mastercard left the book together. That is not housekeeping. Berkshire has held both for over a decade. The two names were the canonical example of the "toll-booth" payments-rail thesis Buffett described in shareholder letters. Both gone in one quarter, under a new CEO, is a position. UnitedHealth left the book as well — a managed-care exit during a period of unusual managed-care regulatory pressure and a stock that was previously held as a defensive compounder. Amazon and Domino's came off. [1][2] Together, the five exits read as a payments-and-managed-care retreat rather than five separate calls.

Seeking Alpha's coverage of the Q1 filing emphasized the same name list and pegged the post-Q1 portfolio at 26 holdings — concentration up. [2] Forbes's recap from Q4 noted that Buffett had trimmed Apple and added new positions, including the New York Times, as part of a methodical thinning. [3] The Q1 filing extends the same trajectory, but with a different signature. Where Buffett's Q4 was incremental, Abel's Q1 was decisive. Forty names became 26 in a quarter. That is not a continuation. That is a portfolio manager rationalizing a book.

The Bank of America position will get its own audit. The May 2 10-Q cited cost-basis declines in banks, insurance and finance — implying sales, since cost-basis only declines when positions are reduced. [4] The Q1 13F is the filing where those sales become visible at the security level. The AP recap noted that Buffett's longtime Bank of America thesis has been under reduction for several quarters; the new filing was expected to confirm continued reduction rather than reverse it. The actual figure must be verified against the EDGAR form. [5]

Apple is the other watch. The AP narrative summary does not call out an Apple move. Berkshire's Apple stake has been the single largest position by market value for years. A flat Apple in the Q1 filing would mean Abel held the inherited concentration rather than acting on it. A sale would mean the largest position by market value moved on his first reporting period. Either reading is meaningful. The EDGAR form will be definitive on the share count. [5]

Cash is the structural question the 13F does not directly answer. Berkshire's cash pile at year-end 2025 sat at a public near-record. A portfolio that shrank from $274 billion to $263 billion in a quarter, against a roughly stable equity market in Q1, implies modest net selling — which would feed cash. Abel's deployment posture remains the open file. The Macy's new position is small enough to read as a Combs or Weschler trade rather than an Abel-led commitment.

Attribution within Berkshire's investment book has historically been opaque. Buffett ran the elephant-sized positions; Todd Combs and Ted Weschler ran subset portfolios. Combs's reported departure to other operating responsibilities at Berkshire, signaled across recent quarters, has been the subject of speculation about whether his book would be liquidated or absorbed. The Q1 filing reads like absorption-and-rationalization: the deletion list contains several names with Combs-style scale and sector. Visa, Mastercard, UnitedHealth, and Domino's are all consistent with the subset-portfolio profile. [3]

The Q1 13F also lands on a Friday that produced two other large business-news events. Cerebras Day 2 closed down roughly 10 percent, snapping the Day 1 IPO surge. [6] Wall Street snapped a six-week Nasdaq winning streak: Dow -1.07%, S&P -1.24%, Nasdaq -1.54%. [6] The Berkshire filing is therefore embedded in the most volatile single business-news Friday of the IPO season. Holding the filing against the same-day tape is the audit the paper said it would do. The tape, not the personality narrative, is the institutional context that matters.

The reading therefore lands in three places. First, the Alphabet triple is real and big, but it is the cover story, not the structural one. Second, the deletions — payments, managed care, e-commerce, an iconic franchise name — are a portfolio-manager rationalization with Abel's signature on it, not a series of personality calls. Third, the portfolio is now smaller and more concentrated, with 26 names instead of 40, which is the operating shift the May 14 breadcrumb hinted at and the May 15 piece committed to reading.

A 13F is a filing, not a vibe. The paper has now read the filing. The vibe was Alphabet. The filing is a portfolio that Abel made decisively his own — by addition, by deletion, and by what he chose not to keep.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco