TheChek News Flow

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Laurent Chekroun | Mar 2, 2026

FULL NOTE ATTACHED

▎SNAPSHOT

Q4 op. earnings $10.2B (-29% YoY). FY25 op. earnings $44.5B. Cash/T-bills $373.3B (down from record $381.6B). 13F portfolio $274B across 42 positions. Insurance float ~$176B. No buybacks. No dividend. Abel's first letter: balance sheet is a strategic asset, not a retreat.

▎13F MOVES (Q4 2025, filed Feb 17)

NEW: NYT (5M shares, Buffett's final pick)

ADDED: CVX (+7%, now 130M shs), CB (8.5% ownership), DPZ (+12%), LAMR

CUT: AAPL (-4%, -74% from peak since 2023), BAC (-9%, ongoing since Jul-24), AMZN (-77%), DVA (-1.3%), STZ (-3%), AON, POOL, ALLY, COF

EXIT FILED: KHC (28% stake, sale announced Jan-26, $8.3B impairments booked)

▎TOP 10 HOLDINGS (live weights)

1. AAPL 22.1% | 2. AXP 17.1% | 3. KO 11.9%

4. BAC 9.4% | 5. CVX 8.8% | 6. OXY 5.1%

7. MCO 4.3% | 8. CB 4.3% | 9. KHC 2.9%

10. GOOGL 2.0%

Top 10 = ~90% of portfolio. Avg P/E ~10x.

▎SELL CANDIDATES

• KHC — Full exit imminent. Sale filed. Buffett's admitted mistake.

• AAPL — Reduction continues. Tax + concentration mgmt. Still #1 holding.

• BAC — Steady trimming since mid-2024. Gain harvesting.

• AMZN — Residual position after 77% Q4 cut. Near-term exit likely.

• DVA — 45% ownership awkward. GLP-1 overhang on dialysis.

• VRSN — Already sold 1/3 in mid-2025 for $1.2B.

▎BUY / ACCUMULATE

• GOOGL — AI monopoly play. $4B+ built since Q3-25. HIGH conviction.

• CVX — Abel's energy DNA. Permian. FCF + dividends. ADDING.

• CB — Insurance float fit. 8.5% ownership. Steady build. HIGH.

• DPZ — Franchise + tech moat. 9.9% ownership. MEDIUM.

• NYT — Digital content moat. 12.8M subscribers. Buffett's parting gift.

• Japan 5 trading houses — Not in 13F. Stakes lifted through 2025. Yen arb.

▎ELEPHANT TARGETS ($373B deployable)

Abel: "Our balance sheet allows us to act decisively when others are fearful."

Buffett (May-25): "If you have a great $100B idea, let's talk."

• FedEx (FDX) — Logistics. BNSF complement. $60-70B.

• Constellation Energy (CEG) — Nuclear/AI power demand. BHE fit. $50-70B.

• Midstream (EPD/ET) — Pipeline toll roads. Abel's expertise. $30-60B.

• Grid infrastructure — Modernization for AI era. BHE natural. $20-50B.

• Boeing (BA) — Contrarian deep-value. Distressed American icon. $100B+.

Key catalyst: market correction = deployment. No elephant = dividend pressure mounts.

▎ABEL vs BUFFETT — WHAT'S CHANGED

Continuity: AXP/KO untouched. No dividend. Decentralized model.

Change: First in-house counsel. New CFO from BHE. Combs out to JPM. KHC exit. AAPL dramatically cut. Pivot from tech concentration toward insurance/energy/consumer.

Full PDF note attached.

Former Goldman CEO says finance industry should plan as though another 2008-style meltdown is coming

Lloyd Blankfein has one piece of advice for anyone fearing that a financial reckoning is on the horizon: plan like it is coming. 

Blankfein, who led Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis, said steering the investment bank was about contingency planning and being brutally honest about what assets are worth.

“I would be very aggressively marking to market, making people sell certain things that even if they’re liquid, try just to make sure you could,” he told the FT in an interview at his apartment in New York’s Upper West Side. 

The comments from Blankfein, 71, come as concerns mount about the economic disruption from artificial intelligence and the underwriting standards at many non-bank lenders, which have proliferated in the past two decades. 

He said the lack of a major “shakeout” since 2008 means people “aren’t as scared” and had “got more complacent”. 

“The longer it takes between reckonings, there is a potential for a more severe reckoning,” Blankfein said. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow or what direction it comes from. But when something goes off you’re going to find all the assets that have been carried at prices that can’t be realised in the market.”

Eight years after leaving Goldman, Blankfein is out with a memoir this month, Streetwise: Getting To and Through Goldman Sachs. It charts his unlikely rise from Brooklyn public housing to running one of the world’s most important financial institutions. Forbes pegs his net worth at around $1.7bn. 

Blankfein said he initially started jotting down his life story for his three children, who grew up surrounded by privilege that would have been unthinkable to a young Blankfein.

But after getting about a third of the way through, he paused for several years before resuming writing. His wider aim was to demystify Goldman and show that a path to the top is more attainable than people realise. 

“I’ve met a few people in my life where they were so smart I couldn’t even figure out how they saw the world,” Blankfein said, naming Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. “But most of the time, people aren’t that great. They’re just lucky, in the right place at the right time. Worked harder. And maybe even smarter but not smarter of an order of magnitude. Just a little smarter.”

Blankfein went to Harvard at 16, and started as a tax lawyer before deciding to move into finance. He was initially rebuffed by Goldman but joined through the back door as a commodities salesman at J Aron, which Goldman acquired in 1981. 

Streetwise is written with the biting and self-deprecating humour that Blankfein became known for on Wall Street. He calls his comment in 2009 to the Sunday Times that he was “off doing God’s work” a “Lloydian slip”. The quip has stuck to Blankfein and Goldman ever since.

The book is full of detail for Goldman Kremlinologists: the culture clash between upper crust Goldmanites and the scrappy J Aron traders, the squabbling at the top between Hank Paulson and Jon Corzine, partners agonising about taking Goldman public, John Thornton’s no-show leadership following the 9/11 attacks, and the sudden departures of Stephen Friedman and Jon Winkelried during various crises. 

“Most of the time these people are by and large my heroes. And heroes have flaws too,” he says. “Not everybody is wonderful in every context.”

The main drama in Streetwise is the 2008 financial crisis, a market blow-up that sceptics still feel Goldman contributed to and profited from. Blankfein rejects these accusations. 

He took over as Goldman’s chief executive in 2006, after Paulson left to become Treasury secretary in the George W Bush administration. Blankfein writes about his crisis starting in 2007, studying Goldman’s daily P&L while in the cinema watching Live Free or Die Hard. He noticed a decline in a Goldman-managed hedge fund. 

That kick-started more than a year of risk management and gut checking of asset prices that Goldman was holding. Blankfein’s view is that the crisis would have been much less severe if more of Wall Street had thought like Goldman. 

Sectors such as utilities, energy and materials have emerged as winners from the AI anxiety gripping Wall Street, as investors flee sectors seen as vulnerable to disruption. Instead they seek businesses with tangible assets.

The S&P 500 software sub-index last week tumbled to its lowest level since the immediate aftermath of President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement last April, losing $1.2tn in combined market capitalisation in less than a month.

This group has borne the brunt of worries that new AI tools could upend entire industries, including wealth managers and insurers.

Meanwhile the S&P 500 utilities sub-index is up more than 10 per cent this year, while energy stocks have gained 22 per cent, as sectors with substantial physical assets find themselves suddenly back in vogue after years of underperformance relative to asset-light tech business.

“All these capital-light businesses that could scale historically are also the ones that could be easily disrupted,” said Guillaume Jaisson, European strategist at Goldman Sachs.

On the other hand, “capital-heavy businesses are difficult to replicate, it takes time”, Jaisson said.

Capital-light business models were particularly sought-after in the low interest rate environment that followed the global financial crisis, as investors focused on easily scalable business models at a time of easy borrowing conditions.

But a rise in interest rates since the pandemic has put pressure on these valuations at a time when investment has increased in capital-intensive sectors such as defence and infrastructure.

“The thing that has been working best for the last 15 years is now the most vulnerable,” said Gerry Fowler, head of derivatives strategy at UBS. “The avoidance of things at the moment centres around: is your business based on intangibles and intellectual property?”

Victory Capital sparks bidding war for Janus Henderson

Victory Capital has gatecrashed an earlier deal agreed with Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management and General Catalyst to buy asset manager Janus Henderson.

On Thursday, Victory announced that it had bid $57.04 a share for Janus in a transaction that would value the British-American group at $8.6bn. The competing offer comes just weeks after a Trian and a group of investors, led by venture capital group General Catalyst, had agreed to buy the business for $49 a share, valuing it at $7.4bn.

Activist investor Peltz was previously Janus’s biggest shareholder with a 20 per cent stake.

Victory’s surprise move adds impetus to the wave of consolidation in the global asset management sector. Earlier this month, US fund group Nuveen struck a deal to acquire London-based Schroders for £9.9bn.

The proposed deal would give Janus’s shareholders $30 in cash per share, with the remainder paid in Victory Capital stock. The Texas-based asset manager said its plan represents a 16 per cent premium to Trian’s bid. The combined entity would have a total enterprise value of about $16bn and Janus shareholders would own about 38 per cent of the new group.

Victory Capital has dramatically bulked up over the past decade through a series of acquisitions. In 2024, it combined with French asset manager Amundi’s US offshoot, increasing its assets under management by roughly $100bn.

Victory now has $320bn in assets under management. Janus manages about $484bn, meaning a combination would more than double Victory’s size.

Victory Capital has been pursuing a deal with Janus in advance of the investment firm reaching a deal with the Trian-led investor group. It made a $52-a-share cash and stock offer in December. Janus rebuffed the approach because of the strength of the existing deal and certainty of closure, according to people familiar with the matter.

Under the terms of the merger agreement with the Trian-led group, Janus can terminate the deal before June this year if it reaches a superior agreement with another party.

Greg Abel’s debut Berkshire letter commits group to dealmaking

Greg Abel on Saturday used his first Berkshire Hathaway investor letter since taking over in January as chief executive to underscore his investment bona fides, committing to the principles that his predecessor Warren Buffett had long extolled.

Defending the conglomerate’s robust balance sheet, which held $373bn of cash at year-end, Abel cast himself as the protector of Buffett’s long legacy of always seeking value in dealmaking.

“Our balance sheet is a strategic asset to be deployed at the right time,” he wrote. “It allows us to act decisively, invest when others are tentative or fearful, and stand firm when financial storms roll through.”

He told shareholders that Berkshire has been active in evaluating new investments and that it would remain a key port of call when companies wanted to sell. The Nebraska-based conglomerate would be “an asset, not a risk, to America and the global financial system”, he also wrote.

He pointed to Berkshire’s $9.7bn purchase of the chemicals business of Occidental Petroleum, which it completed earlier this year, as well as its agreement to buy pest control business Bell Laboratories.

Investors and analysts traditionally scour Berkshire’s annual letter, which in the past were filled with Buffett’s personal anecdotes, for insights into how the so-called Oracle of Omaha saw the world.

Abel has already begun to reshape Berkshire’s corporate headquarters. The company last year hired its first internal legal counsel and announced a top executive from Berkshire’s energy business, the unit Abel rose up through, would become its next chief financial officer later this year.

One of Buffett’s investment deputies, Todd Combs, departed for JPMorgan Chase as part of the reshuffle.

The letter accompanied fourth-quarter results that showed Berkshire’s operating earnings had weakened, falling 30 per cent from the year prior to $10.2bn, as profits slumped within its insurance division.