ROW Partners

Few Inverse Head & Shoulders forming on indices

Warren Buffett spent three years quietly selling everything while the rest of Wall Street was throwing a party. Between 2022 and 2024, Berkshire Hathaway sold a net $172 billion in stocks while buying almost nothing in return. In 2024 alone, he offloaded $134 billion in equities, a pace of selling so fast that most investors did not even notice it was happening. He sat through a bull market, watched stocks climb to the moon, and kept stacking cash anyway. The result is $373.3 billion sitting in Treasury bills right now, the largest corporate cash hoard in the history of American business. That number is not a mistake or fear, it is a loaded weapon waiting for the right moment to fire. His own market valuation signal, the Buffett Indicator, is now sitting at 220 percent, a level that has only been higher during the dot-com bubble of 1999. The Shiller CAPE ratio, another valuation measure, recently hit 39.42, which is the second-highest reading ever recorded outside of that same dot-com era. Buffett has previously said that when the indicator crosses 200 percent, it is like playing with fire. Now he has confirmed it publicly in an interview, when a big market decline comes, Berkshire will deploy, and they will deploy because businesses become attractive, not because someone told him the bottom is in. He is not guessing at timing, he is simply waiting until the math works in his favor again. When Berkshire had just $31 billion in cash going into 2008, Buffett turned that crisis into over $16 billion in pure profit through deals with Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and General Electric. Today he has $373 billion, twelve times that firepower sitting ready while recession warnings are louder than they have been in years. Goldman Sachs and Capital Economics have both warned that the S&P 500 could face a double-digit decline if earnings disappoint or economic conditions weaken further. Berkshire has already outperformed the market by 23 percentage points in 2026 alone, simply by doing nothing while everyone else lost money. Meanwhile, that $373 billion in Treasury bills is generating roughly $13 billion in risk-free interest every single year while Buffett waits. He is being paid billions to be patient, and the patience itself is the strategy. Apple is still his largest single equity holding roughly 19 percent of the entire portfolio and he called it publicly better than any business Berkshire owns outright. He admitted he sold Apple too soon but made over $100 billion pre-tax on the trade anyway, which is the kind of mistake most people spend a lifetime dreaming about. The new CEO Greg Abel has described the cash pile as a "strategic asset" that allows Berkshire to act decisively when others are fearful which is the clearest signal yet that a major move is coming. When Berkshire finally pulls the trigger, it will not be a cautious nibble, it will be one of the largest single capital deployments in the history of financial markets. The only thing left to figure out is what price breaks him off the sideline. Based on every signal he has sent over the last three years, that price is getting closer.