Once again, billionaire investor Warren Buffett has shown that he is incredibly skilled at avoiding market meltdowns.

While many analysts mocked Buffett’s move last year to keep selling stocks and hoard an extraordinary $500 billion in cash, they will now have to eat their words after Buffett not only survived but thrived during the Donald Trump tariff market meltdown and partial recovery.

He is the only one of the top 10 richest billionaires whose net wealth has actually risen since January 1 despite the US market crash and given Buffett’s usual style he will once again make plenty of money as opportunities begin to abound for his massive cash pile.

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is also one of the few shares showing a rise for 2025, despite taking a modest hit during the market turmoil.

How to time market buying from here?

One of the biggest areas of debate since the market crash is which of the series of complex indicators people should follow as a way to pick the bottom of the market.

I think a much better method is to just keep watching what Warren Buffett is up to and when he starts investing in some serious opportunities, that is as good an indicator as any that the market is preparing to turn around.

This tariff correction/bear market rout should not be underestimated either, with the world’s 500 wealthiest individuals collectively losing more than $500 billion dollars, making this the steepest loss ever recorded by the Bloomberg billionaires index.

Trump ally Elon Musk was one of the worst hit with more than $50 billion being stripped from his wealth making for a scary total of $217 billion in 2025 alone, although he remains on top of the diminished pile as the world’s richest man.

Progressive share selling and lack of buying

In typical Buffett fashion, his method was deceptively simple as he held back from purchasing more shares in 2024 and sold many holdings for what now looks like extremely high valuations as he continued to build up his Berkshire Hathaway cash pile.

His sales of big chunks of his holdings in Apple, Citigroup and Bank of America look particularly well timed, although at the time they were made with the bull market roaring along many scoffed as Buffett built up Berkshire’s cash pile.

That pile of cash now represents about a third of Berkshire’s $1.7 trillion market value and what he does with the cash will be very interesting to watch.

Already, he has been playing in the bond market and has been making plenty of money.

As he put it in his February shareholder report, “We were aided by a predictable large gain in investment income as Treasury Bill yields improved and we substantially increased our holdings of these highly-liquid short-term securities.”

Watch out for the value buying to start

However, Buffett has always said he doesn’t like keeping too much money in cash and bonds but is happy to be patient to see when valuations move into the area where he is happier to invest.

That point will happen at some time in the future, the only question is when but you can be sure there is plenty of action within Berkshire Hathaway as the company’s analysts comb through the US and offshore markets looking for great value acquisitions.

As he said in his prescient February newsletter: “Berkshire shareholders can rest assured that we will forever deploy a substantial majority of their money in equities—mostly American equities although many of these will have international operations of significance.

“Berkshire will never prefer ownership of cash-equivalent assets over the ownership of good businesses, whether controlled or only partially owned.”

Buffett’s tax lesson a great one to learn

One of the greatest lessons that everyday investors can learn from Buffett’s activities is that it is wrong headed to be too concerned about paying tax after making large capital gains.

Due to the rash of selling stock in 2024, Berkshire Hathaway paid an extraordinary $54 billion in corporate income tax to the IRS in 2024, an amount Buffett said was “the largest ever paid by any US company.”

How many of us can now look back and see the wisdom of at least pruning some of their better performing stocks in 2024, even if that did result in a higher capital gains tax bill?

It is one thing to say that you should ignore tax in favour of market strategy, but selling shares is one of the toughest lessons that share investors need to learn and it is often hardest when the market is running upwards rapidly.

There is also no shame in keeping an eagle eye on Buffett’s activities from here onwards and most investors could do much worse than using his market purchases as a signal to once again start some buying of their own.