Barchart is sounding an alert over Berkshire Hathaway’s recent stock performance, saying that Berkshire (NYSE: BRK.A) has slipped further behind the broader market since Warren Buffett announced his retirement in May 2025. The report frames the issue as a significant divergence from the S&P 500, describing it as a persistent underperformance that has widened over time rather than quickly normalizing.
At the center of the story is a timing comparison: Barchart ties the start of the gap directly to Buffett’s May 2025 retirement announcement. The implication is that markets expected Berkshire’s leadership transition to be either seamless or at least not immediately damaging to relative returns. Instead, the analysis presented by Barchart suggests the opposite—Berkshire’s performance versus the S&P 500 has deteriorated enough to create an estimated difference exceeding 47 percentage points.
The core claim is numerical and comparative: Berkshire Hathaway’s shares (specifically BRK.A in the Barchart framing) are said to be underperforming the S&P 500 by more than 47 percentage points over the post-announcement period. That magnitude is presented as striking, especially given Berkshire’s historical reputation for long-term investing discipline and resilience. The report uses the size of the relative gap to underscore that investors who hold Berkshire may not have benefited from the same market gains as those invested in the index.
While the headline emphasis is on the breadth of the underperformance, the underlying narrative is about investor expectations and market reaction to leadership change. Buffett’s retirement announcement typically functions as a major corporate governance milestone, and for a company closely associated with a single figure, such an announcement can influence sentiment even before any operational changes occur. In this story, the sentiment interpretation is reflected through performance data: after the retirement announcement, Berkshire’s relative returns appear weaker than the S&P 500, suggesting that the market has not priced in a smooth transition in a way that translates into consistent outperformance.
The Barchart update positions the gap as “breaking” and visually striking, using dramatic framing and emojis to emphasize the scale of the divergence. Although the technical details of the calculation are not provided in the headline-style summary, the report’s key takeaway is clear: compared with the S&P 500 since May 2025, Berkshire Hathaway’s BRK.A has failed to keep pace and has fallen materially behind.
This kind of comparison is often used by market analysts to judge whether a stock is performing in line with macro trends. If the S&P 500 rises strongly and a stock lags by a wide margin, the conclusion is typically that investors have not received comparable returns from holding that company’s shares. In this case, Barchart’s framing suggests that even if Berkshire remained stable in absolute terms, it did not capture the same upside available in the overall market.
The story also implicitly raises questions about what investors should focus on going forward. When a stock’s underperformance becomes large enough to span tens of percentage points, it usually prompts scrutiny of multiple potential drivers—changes in portfolio composition, differences in how capital is deployed, execution risks, or simply a shift in investor expectations. Even if none of these factors is explicitly detailed in the Barchart headline itself, the scale of the underperformance invites such considerations.
Additionally, because Berkshire Hathaway is widely viewed as an investment holding company with a distinctive approach, analysts and investors often look for signals about whether the company’s strategy remains effective after leadership transitions. In the absence of specific strategic changes in the headline text, the performance gap becomes the focal evidence, standing in as a proxy for broader questions about competitiveness and execution.
Overall, Barchart’s message is that the post-retirement period has not been favorable for Berkshire relative to the S&P 500. By tying the relative underperformance to the May 2025 retirement announcement and highlighting an estimated shortfall of more than 47 percentage points, the update emphasizes that the market gap is substantial and has reportedly persisted long enough to matter to investors evaluating relative returns.
Source: Barchart
Barchart: BREAKING 🚨: Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A is now underperforming the S&P 500 by more than 47 percentage points since Warren Buffett announced his retirement in May 2025 📉🤯👀. #breaking
— @Barchart May 1, 2026
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