Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Warren Buffett is 94 years old, manages a $274 billion public equity portfolio, sits on over $381 billion in cash equivalents, and is still making new investments. His Q4 2025 13F filing, released in February 2026, showed Berkshire Hathaway initiating a new stake in the New York Times, aggressively accumulating Chubb, and continuing to build in Domino's Pizza and Chevron. Most investors spend their careers trying to approximate what Buffett has been doing since 1965. Warren Buffett investments are the clearest long-running evidence in financial history that having a clear, disciplined philosophy and sticking to it actually works.

The Philosophy in Plain Language

Buffett's investing framework has three core components that he has articulated consistently for sixty years. First, buy businesses you understand. Second, pay a price that gives you a margin of safety. Third, hold for a very long time. That's it. The sophistication is in the execution, not the framework.

The "circle of competence" concept is the most useful thing Buffett has contributed to investment thinking. He has always been explicit about what he doesn't understand, notably technology companies for most of his career, and deliberately avoided those areas rather than pretending otherwise. The Apple investment, which began in 2016 and peaked at roughly 40% of Berkshire's public portfolio before Buffett began trimming, represented a late recognition that Apple was less a tech company than a consumer products business with extraordinary switching costs. That reframing allowed him to apply his existing framework to a new category.

As of Q4 2025, Apple remains Berkshire's largest holding at 22.6% of the portfolio, followed by American Express at 20.5%, Bank of America at 10.4%, Coca-Cola at 10.2%, and Chevron at 7.2%. Five positions representing 70% of the portfolio. That's what conviction looks like at scale.

The Recent Moves and What They Signal

Berkshire's most interesting current positioning is in Japanese trading houses. Buffett began building stakes in Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo in 2019, and increased those positions in 2025. The combined value of those stakes now exceeds $31 billion. These companies trade at low price-to-book multiples, pay consistent dividends, and have diversified revenue streams across energy, food, materials, and financial services. It's a classic Buffett play: find quality businesses that are being ignored because they're in an unfashionable geography or sector.

The October 2025 news that Berkshire is negotiating to acquire Occidental Petroleum's OxyChem petrochemical unit for roughly $10 billion is another data point. Buffett has been building his Occidental stake for years and clearly believes the company has durable intrinsic value well above its current trading price. Patient accumulation followed by a strategic move to deepen the position is exactly how he has always operated. It's also why Angel Squad coaches investors to think about their best positions as ongoing relationships with companies, not one-time transactions.

Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about the importance of having a consistent evaluation framework and applying it regardless of market conditions. Buffett is the most extreme example of that discipline in modern financial history.

What Early-Stage Investors Can Take From This

Buffett doesn't invest in early-stage startups. His framework requires established earnings power, durable competitive advantages, and management teams with long track records. None of those conditions apply to pre-seed or seed-stage companies.

But the underlying principles translate directly. The circle of competence concept matters enormously in angel investing. Investing in industries where you have genuine domain knowledge gives you pattern recognition that generic investors don't have. You can evaluate teams, products, and competitive dynamics with more accuracy than someone working from a pitch deck alone. Shiyan Koh, Hustle Fund managing partner, has consistently pointed to domain expertise as one of the most undervalued edges available to early-stage investors.

The margin of safety concept also applies, though it looks different at early stage. For angel investors, margin of safety comes from backing founders with multiple paths to success, investing in markets large enough to absorb a pivot, and paying entry prices that don't require perfect execution to generate a return.

Angel Squad and the Long-Game Mindset

The thing that separates Buffett from most investors isn't intelligence or access. It's time horizon and patience. Angel Squad trains investors to develop that same orientation toward early-stage investing. With 2,500 members across 50 countries, the community focuses on helping investors build portfolios with genuine long-term conviction, not just deal by deal, check by check thinking. Members invest alongside Hustle Fund, get access to live education sessions, and build the mental frameworks that compound over time. If Warren Buffett investments have taught you anything, it's that the philosophy matters more than any individual pick. Start building yours at hustlefund.vc/squad.

The Takeaway

Warren Buffett's record is extraordinary not because he gets every call right but because he has an edge in the bets he takes and the discipline to avoid the bets where he doesn't. That combination, knowing your edge and staying inside it, is the single most applicable lesson from six decades of his public investing. Whether you're deploying $274 billion or $25,000, the framework holds.