Stats › Long run returns › Berkshire Hathaway
Berkshire Hathaway against the index
Berkshire Hathaway is the record everyone reaches for when they want to argue that picking stocks works. Over sixty one years Warren Buffett compounded money faster than the S&P 500 by a margin nobody else has matched over anything like that stretch. It's the most cited track record in finance, and it's cited for a reason.
What this page does is put the whole thing in one place, including the part that usually gets trimmed off. The long run figures for Berkshire and for the index, what $100 became in each, and then the last twelve calendar years on their own. I put those two things next to each other deliberately. The lifetime number and the recent number tell you different stories, and you can't think clearly about either one in isolation.
There's also a piece of arithmetic here that's worth more than the biography. A nine point annual edge doesn't leave you nine times richer over a lifetime, it leaves you about a hundred and thirty four times richer. That's the compounding lesson, and it runs in reverse too, which is why this page connects straight to the one on fees. Two sources feed it, both linked underneath with the dates they cover, and the returns come straight from them rather than from anything I've calculated. Click through if a number here matters to your thinking.
Berkshire Hathaway compounded at 19.7% a year from 1965 to 2025 against 10.5% for the S&P 500. Over sixty one years that gap turned $100 into $6,088,896 at Berkshire against $45,469 in the index, a cumulative return of about 6,088,796%. It is the most extreme documented case of sustained outperformance in public markets. It is also front loaded: in the last dozen years Berkshire has beaten the S&P 500 in roughly half of them, and the recent record is close to ordinary.
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