Why Warren Buffett Is Calm During Market Crashes | Berkshire 2025

[Transcript]

BECKY QUICK: The first quarter ended March 31st and it did show that Berkshire’s cash pile expanded from the end of the last year (2024). But the greatest market turmoil came in April (2025). Martin Devine, a shareholder from Scotland who is attending the meeting today, wants to know: has the recent market volatility presented Berkshire with opportunities? And Martin just wrote in an addendum in the last 40 minutes or so, pointing out that you mentioned Berkshire almost invested $10 billion recently and wanting to know if you could talk more about that.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I can give you a good answer to the second part, which is no. (Laughter) But $10 billion wouldn’t have done that much, you know that's the other side – another side of it.

What has happened in the last 30-45 days, 100 days, whatever you want to pick up, whatever this period has been, is really nothing. There have been three times since we acquired Berkshire that Berkshire has gone down 50% in a fairly short period of time – three different times. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the company at any time. But this is not a huge move.

The Dow Jones average hit 381 in September of 1929 and got down to 42. So that's by going from 100 to 11. This has not been a dramatic bear market or anything of the sort.
I mean, as I pointed out, I’ve had 250 trading days a year you know for many years. I’ve been old enough to trade stock. I got 17 or 18,000 days. There have been plenty of periods that are dramatically different than this.

I mean when the day I was born, the Dow Jones was at 240 and my first – that was August 30th, 1930. And between that and the low, it went from 240 to 41. I mean – (Laughs) – so if people think that it made a really major change, it didn't.

If it had gone up 15% instead of down 15%, people would take that with remarkable grace. (Laughs) But if it makes a difference to you whether your stocks are down 15% or not, you need to get a somewhat different investment philosophy because the world is not going to adapt to you. You’re going to have to adapt to the world.

And you will see a period in the next – certainly in the next 20 years, you'll see a period that will be in – somebody in the market described one time as “hair curler” compared to anything you’ve seen before. I mean that just happens periodically.

The world makes big, big, big mistakes, and surprises happen in dramatic ways. And the more sophisticated the system gets, the more the surprises can be out of right field.

That’s part of the stock market, and that’s what makes it a good place to focus your efforts if you’ve got the proper temperament for it and a terrible place to get involved if you get frightened by markets that decline and get excited when stock markets go up.

I don’t mean to sound particularly critical – I mean I know people have emotions, but you’ve got to check them at the door when you invest. (Applause)

Source: https://buffett.cnbc.com/2025-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting/

 

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