Warren Buffett has amassed a level of wealth few of us could ever comprehend, let alone achieve. His $154 billion net worth puts him not just among the wealthiest people today, but the wealthiest people in history – rarefied air where only the likes of Rockefeller, William the Conqueror, Augustus Caesar and Genghis Khan could ever look down upon him.
And as you’re well aware, he became one of the richest people in the world on smart investing decisions.
The CEO of the trillion-dollar Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) is hardly perfect, of course. Warren Buffett has made his fair share of mistakes.
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But investing is more like baseball than pre-playoffs college football: You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to win a decent amount more than you lose.
Warren Buffett has done exactly that across eight decades of investing. But as you’d imagine, some of those winning investments stand out more than others. And today, we’re going to point a spotlight at some of his top picks.
Coca-Cola
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Warren Buffett is positively giddy about Coca-Cola (KO).
“Do you mean the stock or the drink?”
“Yes.”
OK, if I’m being precise, Buffett’s deep affection isn’t for Coca-Cola Classic, but for Diet Coke and Cherry Coke, telling Fortune about a decade ago that between the two, he drank five cans a day.
“If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola.” That’s a direct quote!
Can’t blame the man for supporting the brand. Coca-Cola has been one of Buffett’s most spectacular holdings since 1988, when Berkshire Hathaway began spending $1.3 billion to amass what today is a $24.9 billion, 9%-plus stake in the ubiquitous beverages giant.
It has all of the hallmarks of a good Buffett investment. It has a bulletproof brand and significant industry “moats.”
It pays dividends, too – and has for a long time. Indeed, KO is a Dividend King that has grown its cash distribution to shareholders for 63 consecutive years. And based on Coca-Cola’s most recent dividend increase, to 51 cents per share quarterly, KO will owe Buffett $204 million in dividends every quarter.
Buffett hasn’t been afraid to be critical of Coca-Cola during his 37 years of owning the stock.
In 2006, Buffett said during Berkshire’s annual meeting that he regretted not selling Coca-Cola in 1998 after it had exploded to wildly high valuations. “You can definitely fault me for not selling the stock,” he said. “I always thought it was a wonderful business, but clearly at 50 times earnings it was a silly price.” And in 2014, Buffett vocally opposed an executive pay plan, though he merely abstained from the vote because he didn’t “want to go to war” with Coke.
Regardless, Coca-Cola is one of the few stocks that Buffett says he plans on owning forever. Given his returns, it’s easy to understand why.
American Express
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In a discussion about Buffett holdings, American Express (AXP) and Coca-Cola are often mentioned in the same breath. That’s because they’re both longtime Berkshire holdings that Buffett has said he wants to hold forever.
Buffett’s original foray into AmEx started long before Coca-Cola, in the 1960s, but most of the $1.3 billion spent on building the position came during the 1990s. Berkshire now owns more than 21% of the company, and despite not adding a single share since 1995, his position has swelled to $35 billion in worth.
American Express enjoys many of the same positive characteristics as Coca-Cola: a renowned brand, strong moats and a good dividend. AXP doesn’t have quite the track record of uninterrupted growth that KO does, but the growth itself has been excellent — the distribution has more than tripled in just the past decade alone. With the newest payout, which was raised by 17% to 82 cents per share in March, Buffett will be due almost $500 million in 2025.
“I can’t really think of a company like American Express that has a position and a credit card that is extremely strong,” Buffett has said. “It has strengthened dramatically over the last 20 years for a lot of reasons.”
Apple
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That’s not the end of the quote, however. It continues:
“That’s the story of why we own American Express, which is a wonderful business. We own Coca-Cola, which is a wonderful business. And we own Apple, which is an even better business, and we will own, unless something really extraordinary happens, we will own Apple and American Express and Coca-Cola.”
Berkshire began buying Apple (AAPL) in 2016. Between that and additional purchases over the next few years, Buffett spent a total of $40 billion on a stake that would eventually swell to account for about half the worth of the Berkshire Hathaway equity portfolio.
But the quote above? That came from at Berkshire’s annual meeting in May 2024 – after he had already started trimming his position in Apple, but right before he really hacked away at it. All told, between Q4 2023 and Q3 2024, Buffett unloaded two-thirds of his stake, or roughly $126 billion. The biggest tranche of that came in Q2 2024, when he sold more than $80 billion worth of AAPL stock.
Despite seemingly sprinting away from Apple, Buffett’s reasons for selling shares had little to do with the company itself – indeed, only a couple of years prior, he referred to Apple as “probably the best business I know in the world.” Instead, his sales were largely chalked up to AAPL’s high valuation, as well as wanting to take advantage of capital gains tax rates ahead of a possible increase.
In fact, even after all of those sales, Apple remains Berkshire’s No. 1 position by a mile – a $75 billion stake that represents 28% of the portfolio’s assets, versus 17% for No. 2 AXP.
GEICO
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While many people love keeping up with what Warren Buffett is buying and selling because they might want to repeat those moves in their own portfolios, one of the Oracle’s best investments is inimitable.
That’s because Berkshire owns GEICO outright.
That wasn’t always the case – decades ago, GEICO was a publicly traded company. Buffett bought shares in 1951 when he was at Columbia University, but sold them by 1952. Still, GEICO had made an impression.
“At the time I felt that GEICO possessed an extraordinary business advantage in a very large industry that was going to continue to grow,” Buffett said. “Since that time they never have lost that advantage – the ability to give the policyholder back in losses a greater percentage of the premium dollar than any other auto insurance company in the country, while still providing a profit to the company.”
Then in 1976, Buffett started buying … and kept buying for the next two decades. By 1995, he owned 49% of the company, then spent another $2.3 billion buying the rest of it outright.
Today, GEICO has some $32 billion in assets.
“When I count my blessings, I count GEICO twice,” Buffett has said.
Japanese trading houses
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This last investment might not be one of Buffett’s greatest trades yet, but it’s off to a spectacular start, and Buffett is nothing but bullish about it.
In July 2019, Berkshire began building stakes in five Japanese “sogo shosha” (trading houses). The firm has spent a total of $13.8 billion on these positions, which are now collectively worth $23.5 billion.
And clearly, he’s still enamored.
In Berkshire’s 2023 shareholder letter, Buffett lumped his Japanese investments in with Apple, AmEx and Occidental Petroleum (OXY) as holdings he expects to maintain indefinitely. Then in 2024’s letter, he signaled his willingness to keep buying longer-term.
“Our holdings of the five are for the very long term, and we are committed to supporting their boards of directors. From the start, we also agreed to keep Berkshire’s holdings below 10% of each company’s shares. But, as we approached this limit, the five companies agreed to moderately relax the ceiling. Over time, you will likely see Berkshire’s ownership of all five increase somewhat.”
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