Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters
Warren Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire shareholders from 1977 to 2024, free on Berkshire's own plain website. They are the best course on capital allocation, insurance float and owner-minded investing ever written.
Free to read
Berkshire's site has every Buffett chairman's letter from 1977 through the 2024 letter, published in early 2025. The early years are HTML pages; from 2004 on they are PDFs. Together they cover how to value a business, why float makes insurance so powerful, the gap between accounting earnings and economic earnings, buybacks, acquisitions, management incentives and the behavior of markets, all explained through Berkshire's real decisions and mistakes.
The letters work as a sequence. Reading them in order shows Buffett moving from cigar-butt bargains to great businesses at fair prices, and shows his framework holding up through 1987, the dot-com era and 2008. A separate page on the same site carries Greg Abel's letters as Buffett's successor, beginning with the 2025 letter, and another holds Charlie Munger's Wesco Financial letters from 1997 to 2009.
New readers can start with a few landmark years and then go back to the beginning. For a full education, read one letter a week and keep notes on the principles that come back again and again.
Start with
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1
1987 Chairman's Letter
Contains the Mr. Market parable, the cleanest explanation of how to treat price swings.
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2
2002 Chairman's Letter
His warning on derivatives and counterparty risk, five years before the financial crisis.
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3
2014 Letter (50th anniversary)
Buffett and Munger each look back on 50 years of Berkshire and look ahead to the next 50.
