Berkshire Hathaway

BRK.B's 20-day volatility stands at 0.60% a day, making it one of the calmer of the stocks Kinzan tracks (their median is 1.81%).

Measured against BRK.B's own volatility rather than anyone else's, a −1.4σ reading is the kind it has roughly once a week.

It sits near the bottom of its 24-hour range of 541.38–548.2, measured on hourly closes.

The New York block (13:00–22:00 UTC) did most of the work — roughly 54% of the movement over the last 24 hours.

Over the last 60 sessions of daily returns, it has moved most closely with RTX (+0.42, a moderate relationship), and most inversely to LUNR (−0.47).

Its last close is at the 99th percentile of its own last 82 sessions, and its 20-day volatility at the 6th, near the bottom of its range for the period.

Market read: Berkshire Hathaway is pinned at its daily lows, reflecting broad weakness in the New York session.

What it is

Insurance is the engine. Berkshire owns GEICO, the car insurer, a large reinsurance operation, and several commercial and specialty insurers. Insurers collect premiums long before they pay claims, and the money held in between, known as float, is invested for Berkshire’s benefit; if underwriting is profitable, that money effectively costs nothing. Around the insurers sit wholly owned businesses: the BNSF railway, utilities and pipelines, industrial, aerospace and chemical manufacturers, and a long list of consumer and retail brands. There is also a large portfolio of minority stakes in listed companies. Each class B share carries one fifteen-hundredth of the economic interest of a class A share and a far smaller fraction of the vote. Data providers write the symbol variously as BRK-B, BRK.B or BRK/B.

What drives it

Investors value it on book value and intrinsic value rather than quarterly earnings, partly because of an accounting rule: unrealised gains and losses on the stock portfolio pass through net income, so headline profit swings with the market and the company points instead to operating earnings. Underwriting results matter, and major hurricanes or wildfires show up in the reinsurance numbers. The railway is a read on US freight volumes, and wildfire liabilities at its western utility have become a material risk. Berkshire pays no dividend and buys back shares only when management judges them cheap, so buyback activity is read as a valuation signal. Very large holdings of short-dated Treasury bills have made short-term interest rates a meaningful source of income. The handover from the investor who built the group to a new generation of management is a structural question.

How it trades through the day

Quarterly results are published on a Saturday morning, so the reaction is traded at Monday’s open, 13:30 UTC in summer and 14:30 UTC in winter. The annual meeting in Omaha, in early May, also falls on a Saturday. Quarterly filings of its equity holdings, usually published after the US close, often move the shares of the companies it owns more than Berkshire itself.

What it tends to move with

It tracks the S&P 500 with lower amplitude and tends to hold up better in sell-offs. Its closest links are to value indices, to insurers such as Progressive, Chubb and Travelers, and to railways such as Union Pacific.