Berkshire Hathaway stock continued its strong 2025 advance Monday, hitting a record high and putting it way ahead of the S&P 500 index so far this year.

Berkshire’s Class A stock rose 1.8% to $784,957 while the Class B shares ended at $523.01, up 1.6%. Both are new closing highs for the shares. Berkshire’s Class A stock now is up 15.3% year to date, against a 3.2% decline in the S&P 500 index.

Berkshire now is comfortably ahead of the index for the past three, five, 10, and 20 years.

There was no notable news to account for the gain. Berkshire disclosed higher holdings in five Japanese trading companies in filings overnight, but the increases weren’t significant. 

Berkshire’s proxy released late Friday showed the company didn’t repurchase any stock from Feb. 10 to March 5, continuing a buyback drought dating back to May 2024. The lack of buybacks was no surprise given the strength in the stock and indicates CEO Warren Buffett, who oversees the repurchase activity, hasn’t viewed the stock as cheap.

The lack of buybacks hasn’t proven to be a damper on the stock in recent quarters. Investors have continued to pile into Berkshire since it reported strong fourth-quarter earnings in late February showing a 70% rise in after-tax operating profits.

Investors have viewed Berkshire as a haven, given its more than $300 billion in cash and equivalents and earnings power. And the rotation out of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks appears to be helping Berkshire as the largest value stock in the S&P 500 index. The entire property and casualty insurance sector has been strong and that helps Berkshire as the industry’s largest operator. The company is valued now at $1.1 trillion.

Regarding the Japanese holding companies, Berkshire has held those shares since 2019. Berkshire raised its holdings in Itochu, Sumitomo, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, and Mitsui, regulatory filings on Monday showed, upping its stakes to between 8.5% and 9.8%.

Buffett wrote in his recently released annual shareholder letter that Berkshire likely would boost its ownership of the five stocks “somewhat” and that it had approval from the five companies to “moderately relax” what had been a 10% ownership cap.

As of year-end 2024, Berkshire’s stake in the five was worth $23.5 billion, nearly double its cost of $13.8 billion. The Japanese trading companies have been one of Berkshire’s most successful investments in the past decade.

Here are some numbers on shareholder returns: Over the past five years, Berkshire is up an annualized 22.1%, against 17.9% for the index. And during the past 10 years, Berkshire has risen 13.7% annualized, one percentage point ahead of the S&P 500. And during the past 20 years, it’s Berkshire, 11.4% annually against 10.2% for the index. All these are based on Bloomberg calculations.

Berkshire now trades for over 1.7 times its year-end 2024 book value and around 25 times projected 2025 earnings, both at the high end of its range over the past 10 years.

But investors are comfortable investing their money with Buffett, 94, and it appears, his likely successor, Berkshire executive Greg Abel.