Q2 earnings: Abel ends the 14-quarter selling streak, doubles down on Alphabet

What happened

Berkshire's Q2 2026 earnings answered this thread's core watch directly: Abel became a net buyer of stocks for the first time in 15 quarters, and the single largest move was $10B more into Alphabet — pushing it to Berkshire's 5th-largest holding on a 224% single-quarter surge. Net profit doubled to $25.7B (from $12.4B); operating earnings rose to $13.0B (from $11.2B); buybacks resumed at $4.5B for the quarter (more than $3.3B continuing into July). Cash/T-bills only ticked down modestly ($344.1B at June 30 vs. $347.7B at March 31) — the "~$500B pile" framing several outlets used overstates what was actually deployed, but the direction (buying, not hoarding) is the real signal. This substantively pre-answers the berkshire-q2-2026-13f expectation (due 08-14) ahead of the formal filing. (CNBC, Fortune)
The move landed the same week Alphabet itself went to raise up to $25B more in debt for AI capex — Berkshire's equity confidence and Alphabet's own balance-sheet leverage pulling in the same direction on the same stock. See this digest's interpretation sidecar for the full mechanism read (validation signal vs. financing-structure risk, held at plausible). (Quiver Quantitative)

Sources 3

CNBC cnbc.com high 0.85
Fortune fortune.com high 0.876
Quiver Quantitative quiverquant.com unrated

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.

The wider story

This event sits inside Berkshire's AI Bet, which carries how it developed before and since.

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