Berkshire Hathaway didn’t do much buying in Warren Buffett’s final quarter as CEO. But the company did make some investments, including a new position in the New York Times.
That however, wasn’t the stock that jumped out at me when I looked at the firm’s latest release. I was much more interested in a bigger investment in a different company.
Insurance
When Berkshire started investing in Chubb (NYSE:CB) in 2023, the firm asked to withhold it from their 13F filing. This gave them time to build a position without the market seeing.
While people were speculating about what the stock might be, Chubb wasn’t a name that I heard mentioned. But it’s one of those cases where it all just made so much sense after.
Chubb’s an international insurance business headquartered in Switzerland. And it’s the kind of operation that a company like Berkshire is well-placed to appreciate.
Over the last five years, it’s been the outstanding name in the industry in terms of margins and profitability. And the business appears to be going from strength to strength.
Durable strength
Over the last five years, Chubb’s achieved profit margins close to 11% while the rest of the industry has mostly broken even. And it reached new highs in 2025 at around 15%.
That’s hugely impressive and it’s built on a few key competitive strengths. The first is the firm’s focus on underwriting discipline over volume and not chasing growth at any price.
Another is the company’s cost structure. Chubb’s recently been working hard to automate as much of its claims process as possible, bringing down expenses and boosting margins.
On top of this, the firm’s immense scale allows it to spread its fixed costs across a huge premium base. These are some major advantages and I think it’s hard to see them going away any time soon.
Risks
It’s easy to see why Chubb stands out to Berkshire Hathaway. It has durable competitive strengths in an important industry that Buffett’s company is very familiar with.
There are though, some important risks to consider. In fact, the insurance industry is all about assessing and taking on risk and that’s the case with Chubb as much as any other carrier.
The company has an outstanding track record in this regard. But I think the rise of AI brings with it some unique threats that are going to be especially difficult to assess accurately.
Chubb’s disciplined approach and diversified strategy might help it to mitigate this kind of risk better than its rivals. But it isn’t something investors can afford to just ignore entirely.
Should I buy?
Berkshire’s latest investment in Chubb isn’t the classic blood-in-the-streets opportunity that Buffett’s famous for. The stock didn’t really crash during the first three quarters of 2025.
In other ways though, it’s a clear case of the approach Buffett has advocated for. It’s a case of buying shares in a wonderful business at a fair price, rather than the other way around.
I’ve thought about buying the stock for my portfolio before. But I decided that I could find a company with the same sort of advantages much closer to home in the FTSE 100.
