Berkshire Hathaway Once Had a Big Silver Investment. Too Bad It Was Sold. — Barrons.com

Andrew Bary

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.

Berkshire put out a press release in February 1998 saying it held the 129.7 million ounces of silver accumulated over a six-month period and that it had no intention of buying any more. The Berkshire purchases — which then amounted to about 25% of annual mined supply — attracted attention in the silver market and among regulators.

There was apparent regulatory concern that Buffett might be trying to imitate the Hunt brothers, who drover up the silver market in the 1970s. The strategy worked for a while as the price of silver briefly rose to $50 an ounce before it collapsed.

Buffett had invested in silver during the early 1960s, when the silver price was effectively set by the U.S. government at around $1.29 an ounce. That was the value of silver in U.S. coins minted before 1965, including dimes, quarters, and half dollars. Certain coins were 90% silver. There was roughly 0.18 ounce of silver in a quarter of that era.

Buffett figured in the 60s that the government was artificially suppressing the price — and releasing silver from a government stock to help keep down the price — in the face of strong industrial demand that would support a higher price. Buffett turned out to be right when silver was demonetized in 1965 and the price went up.

Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger marveled at the 1998 annual meeting about Buffett's investment breadth, insight, and patience.

"Think of the discipline it takes to think about something for three or four decades, waiting for a chance to employ 2% of your assets." The Berkshire silver holding then had a value of less than $1 billion.

That is typical of Buffett. He has encyclopedic investment knowledge on a wide range of asset classes accumulated over a lifetime of investing dating back to the early 1940s.

It's notable that in 1997, Berkshire had holdings in the physical oil market, silver, and in zero-coupon Treasury bonds. Before Berkshire bought insurer Alleghany in 2022, Buffett had read decades of its annual reports.

Buffett saw a silver opportunity in the 1990s for much the same reason that investors now are buying silver. Demand was exceeding supply.

"In recent years, widely-published reports have shown that bullion inventories have fallen very materially, because of an excess of user-demand over mine production and reclamation. Therefore, last summer Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire, concluded that equilibrium between supply and demand was only likely to be established by a somewhat higher price," Berkshire said in the 1998 press release. That reads like the current bull case for silver.

The Silver Institute has estimated a 2025 silver supply deficit of more than 100 million ounces before investment demand on mined supply of about a billion ounces. There was a deficit of about 150 million ounces in 1997.

Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com

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