With as impressive of an investing track record as Warren Buffett has achieved, you'd expect his Berkshire Hathaway portfolio would be loaded with great stocks. And you'd be right. The good news is that you don't need a huge amount of cash to buy many of those stocks.

S&P 500 investors are playing it safer in 2025 — so Warren Buffett's careful stock-picking is in style again.

Has Warren Buffett given up on the stock market? Buffett bought 10 stocks in all of 2024 (excluding buybacks of Berkshire's shares). Several of the stocks Buffett bought last year were existing positions for Berkshire.

Berkshire Hathaway ( BRK.A 1.42%) ( BRK.B 1.11%) owns shares of more than 40 different companies in its portfolio. To be perfectly honest, there's a solid investment case to be made for all of them. After all, Warren Buffett and his team tend to invest in industry leaders with excellent cash flow and durable competitive advantages.

The third industry-leading AI stock Warren Buffett secretly owns shares of via New England Asset Management is Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG). Despite NEAM selling shares of Alphabet for five consecutive quarters, the fund still held 5,195 Class A shares (GOOGL) as of Sept. 30.

It's not easy for a stock investor to beat the S&P 500 in any given year, and it's even harder to do that regularly. Consider this: From the year when Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway through the end of 2023,

Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway's 1998 Letter to Shareholders Start Your Mornings Smarter! Wake up with Breakfast news in your inbox every market day. Sign Up For Free » Warren Buffett has created incredible wealth for shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.

These three top Warren Buffett stock picks have the potential to offer passive income investors a lifetime of reliable dividends.

Buffett has trimmed some stocks more than others. Integrated oil and gas company Chevron (NYSE: CVX), for example, is Berkshire's fifth-largest position, and Buffett only sold small amounts in the first and second quarters of 2024 and didn't sell any in the third quarter.

Warren Buffett is widely considered the greatest investor. From 1965 through 2023, his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, delivered an astounding 4,384,748% total return to shareholders, or nearly 20% on an annualized basis.