Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett is a longtime student of the silver market. The company made a sizable investment in silver in 1997 and 1998 when the metal was around $5 an ounce.
The company purchased 129.7 million ounces of the metal, but sold out of the position within a decade at an unspecified profit.
That holding now would be valued at about $13 billion with silver trading at $100 an ounce. Silver has tripled in price over the past year, including a 40% gain so far in 2026.
Buffett had followed the silver market for decades before the company purchased the metal in 1997.
“I bought it very early. I sold it very early. Other than that, everything I did was perfect,” Buffett said at the 2006 Berkshire annual meeting. “I was the silver king there for a while. We did make a few dollars on it. But we’re not good at the game of, when it gets into the speculative area, figuring out how far a speculative boom will go.”
The silver foray is one of several examples of Buffett making a smart call, but then selling the investment too soon. He sold most of Berkshire’s stake in Apple in 2024 and 2025 and a group of bank stocks in 2020 and 2021 at below current prices.
I guess ...
One has to wonder ...
So many story lines ...
Google Gemini:
The average annual rate of return for an investment that grows from $5 in 1996 to $100 in 2026 is 10.50%.
Silver:
The overall market during the same period -- from Google Gemini:
Since 2006, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) has shown strong, often market-beating performance, but has largely closely tracked or slightly underperformed the S&P 500 (SPY) in the last decade, with significant outperformance during downturns like 2008 and 2022. While long-term, Berkshire's CAGR remains strong, the last 10–15 years have seen tighter competition with the S&P 500.
One year, and since then, appreciably worse:
