Warren Buffett is now retired, but the new boss of Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel, just got a bullish technical endorsement from Wall Street in the form of a "golden cross" chart pattern.
Shares of the conglomerate $(BRK.B)$, which has gotten a large chunk of its earnings the last few years from investment gains, have not yet recovered everything they've lost since the shock announcement in May that Buffett, 95, was stepping down, but they are getting close. And while the stock's path over the past several months has been bumpy, it has generally been upward, to provide an optimistic setup for 2026.
In morning trading on Friday, the stock's 50-day moving average, a widely followed short-term trend tracker, rose to $498.18 from $498.03 at Wednesday's close, to cross above the 200-day moving average, a longer-term trend gauge, which fell to $497.92 from $498.05.
These moving-average crossovers aren't necessarily meant to be market-timing signals, given how telegraphed they are, but can act as an acknowledgment of how recent gains have been sustained long enough to impact the long-term outlook.
Berkshire's Class B shares were off 0.8% in recent trading. While they have have lost 7.6% since Buffett said he would step down as chief executive, they have rallied 8.6% since it closed at a seven-month low in early August. Buffett is retaining his chairmanship of the company's board.
The less-active Class A shares $(BRK.A)$ were down 0.8% in recent trading.
It's difficult to get much of a technical message from the latest golden cross, since it appeared only a little more than two months after the last one. But, in general, history shows that golden crosses are positive omens for investors.
Over the past 25 years, Berkshire's stock had seen a total of 14 golden crosses before Friday's. The average gain for the stock before the following death cross - when the 50-DMA crosses below the 200-DMA has been roughly 30%.
Berkshire shares underperformed the S&P 500 index SPX in 2025, with a gain of 10.9% versus a 16.4% rise for the broad-market tracker. But they extended their annual-performance win streak to 10 years, while the S&P 500 has advanced in eight of the past 10 years.
Also read: Berkshire has problems brewing after Buffett leaves, but losing stock picker Todd Combs isn't one of them
And, over the much longer term, the stock has outperformed by a wide margin.
-Tomi Kilgore
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 02, 2026 11:19 ET (16:19 GMT)
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