The most powerful investor in the world sat in the audience for the first time in six decades last Saturday, watched his successor take the stage, and then told a television camera what he actually thinks is happening to financial markets. What he said was not reassuring.
Warren Buffett, 95, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway - the American conglomerate that owns everything from Geico insurance to BNSF Railroad to a $288 billion stock portfolio - sat down with CNBC's Becky Quick on the sidelines of Berkshire's 2026 annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. It was the first meeting he has attended as a spectator since stepping down as chief executive at the end of last year, handing the job to Canadian-born Greg Abel. Buffett still manages part of the investment portfolio and remains the company's chairman and largest shareholder.
The interview lasted roughly 25 minutes. In that time, Buffett described today's stock market - the system of exchanges where people buy and sell ownership stakes in companies - as something he has never seen before. Prices are high. Deals are scarce. And the people with money are not investing. They are, in his words, gambling.
The background
Berkshire Hathaway is, by most measures, a financial fortress. The company's cash pile hit $397.4 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2026 - that is more than the entire annual economic output of countries like Denmark or Hong Kong. Most of it is parked in short-term US Treasury bills, the safest and most liquid financial instruments available.
For context, in the 60 years Buffett has run the company, he has moved that cash aggressively exactly a handful of times. He bought Coca-Cola stock in the late 1980s for around $1.3 billion. That stake is now worth more than $31 billion. He piled into American Express during the 1964 "salad oil scandal" when the company's share price collapsed. He loaded up on Goldman Sachs and General Electric preferred stock during the 2008 financial crisis, extracting terms that no ordinary investor could command.
The strategy - at its core - is to wait. Wait until prices fall enough to make the math obvious. Wait until panic forces sellers to accept terms they would never accept in a calm market. Wait, even if that means sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars earning modest Treasury yields, while everyone else is making money doing something else.
The question that has followed Berkshire for years is: what is it waiting for?
Buffett's answer on Saturday was essentially that the market is not giving him what he needs. Prices are too high. And the reason prices are too high - at least in part - is that the market is full of people who are not making long-term bets on companies. They are placing short-term wagers on numbers moving up or down within a single trading day.
What is actually happening
Buffett's diagnosis of the current market rested on one specific product: zero-day options, also called 0DTE options. An option - in financial terms - is a contract that gives the buyer the right to buy or sell a stock at a set price before a set date. Traditionally, options were used by investors and companies to protect themselves against large price swings, the way a farmer might lock in a price for grain months before harvest.
Zero-day options expire the same day they are bought. There is no next month, no hedge, no underlying business logic. The buyer is making a single-session bet that a stock or index will move in a particular direction before the market closes.
Buffett was direct about what he thinks of this. "If you're buying one day options, or selling them - that's not investing, it's not speculating, it's gambling. Just totally."
The data supports the concern. In 2025, 0DTE options averaged 14 million contracts per day in the US, up 41% year-on-year. Total US options volume topped 15.2 billion contracts in 2025, 26% above the previous record set in 2024 - the sixth consecutive record year for the industry. Retail traders lose on average around 16.4% over three-day periods when trading complex options around earnings announcements.
Buffett connected this behavior directly to asset prices. When people are trading for the thrill of a single session's movement rather than the value of the underlying business, prices get detached from economic reality. Companies get bid up not because their earnings justify the price but because enough people are making the same bet at the same time. Then the bet unwinds, and the price collapses.
He used a pointed example - Avis, the car rental company, which has been around for 50 years and experienced a dramatic short squeeze just the previous week. No one was buying Avis because they believed in its long-term prospects. Someone made money; many others lost it.
Meanwhile, Berkshire's insurance underwriting climbed 28.5% to roughly $1.7 billion in the first quarter, and the company posted a solid jump in first-quarter operating earnings even as economic uncertainty weighed on consumer-facing businesses. The company is profitable and generating cash. It simply cannot find anywhere useful to put it.
Buffett acknowledged that Greg Abel has now inherited this tension. Berkshire's stock has trailed the S&P 500 - the benchmark index tracking the 500 largest US companies - by more than 30 percentage points since Buffett announced he would step down. The market, in other words, has been rewarding momentum and risk-taking while penalizing patience.
The money trail
There is a clear beneficiary of the zero-day options boom, and it is not retail traders.
Retail investors account for an estimated 50% to 60% of zero-day options volumes, according to Cboe, the exchange that operates the largest US options market. Cboe itself has been one of the biggest financial winners of the trading boom. Its data show index options averaging 5 million contracts per day in 2025, with record volumes in volatility and S&P 500 products.
The brokerage platforms - apps like Robinhood, which brought commission-free options trading to millions of retail users - collect payment for order flow, meaning they receive money from market makers in exchange for routing customer trades to them. The more trades, the more revenue. The product is designed to be used frequently. Short-dated options, by construction, force users to make a new decision every single day.
This is what Buffett was gesturing at when he said the market has become a casino attached to a church. The church - long-term investing in productive businesses - still exists. But the casino has become far more profitable for the people who run it, and far more attractive to people who mistake activity for progress.
The structural consequence is that Berkshire's patience - its defining competitive advantage - becomes harder to maintain without a visible payoff. Buffett's clearest signal of what an opportunity looks like was not a sector, not a valuation ratio, but a behavioral cue: "the most likely time to buy things is when nobody else will answer their phones." That moment has not arrived.
He was explicit about Jay Powell, the outgoing chair of the US Federal Reserve - the central bank that sets the base cost of borrowing across the economy. "I'll feel better when he's there than when he's not," Buffett said, in remarks that were notable partly because of their brevity. He did not elaborate. He did not need to.
On inflation - the rate at which prices across the economy rise over time - Buffett was historically minded and quietly alarmed. He mentioned the Volcker era of the early 1980s, when interest rates - the price charged for borrowing money - were raised to around 20% to break an inflation spiral. He said the US is not immune from a similar scenario. "We have a lot of control over whether rates may go up a half a point or down a half a point. But we may have less control over whether they go up 50 points."
That is not a forecast. It is a risk acknowledgment from someone who has watched multiple currencies collapse in his lifetime.
What people are doing about it
Berkshire itself has taken the clearest action available: it is doing less. The company resumed share buybacks in March 2026 for the first time since 2024, meaning it is slowly returning cash to shareholders by purchasing its own stock rather than deploying capital into acquisitions. It is a signal that the company cannot find external investments worth making at current prices, but it cannot justify leaving all that money completely idle either.
Greg Abel, who now runs the company day-to-day, told shareholders at the annual meeting that Berkshire would not pursue artificial intelligence - the category of software systems trained on large datasets to mimic human reasoning - simply because it is fashionable. Abel said the company would treat new technology as a tool rather than a slogan, which is consistent with Buffett's longstanding approach of only investing in businesses he can evaluate on their economic fundamentals.
On the other side of the market, the exchanges and data providers are extending the infrastructure for short-term trading. Cboe expects AI and prediction markets to play a key role in the options industry in 2026, alongside new products like zero-day exchange-traded funds and dispersion futures. The casino, in other words, is adding more tables.
Individual investors in volatile conditions have been adopting what market researchers describe as hedging strategies - buying protective options to limit losses on their existing stock holdings. JPMorgan strategists have noted that option-selling activity has become a mechanical drag on the market's upside, as dealers rebalance by selling into strength and buying on weakness, creating a dampening effect that limits how far prices can rise in rallies. The market's gambling infrastructure has grown complex enough to influence its own direction.
Meanwhile, attendance at the Berkshire annual meeting fell sharply this year - the first since Buffett stepped down as CEO - a reminder that the crowds that once flocked to Omaha were often there to see one person, not one company.
The bottom line
Warren Buffett has spent 60 years waiting for prices to fall. Today, with nearly $400 billion in cash, he is still waiting - and the reason is not lack of ambition. It is that the market is full of people treating stocks like lottery tickets, which has kept prices high and genuine opportunities scarce. The zero-day options boom is not a side story. It is the explanation for why the most famous value investor in the world cannot find anything worth buying. When the gambling stops - and Buffett has always believed it will, eventually, violently - he will be ready. Whether Greg Abel will make the same calls when the phones stop being answered is the question Berkshire's next decade will answer.
Timeline
- Late 1980s - Berkshire Hathaway acquires 400 million shares of Coca-Cola for around $1.3 billion; the position is now worth more than $31 billion
- 2008 - Buffett deploys capital during the financial crisis, acquiring preferred stock in Goldman Sachs and General Electric on favorable terms unavailable to ordinary investors
- 2021 - Zero-day options account for less than half their 2025 share of S&P 500 options volumes, according to industry data
- 2023 - Buffett writes in his shareholder letter that markets "exhibit far more casino-like behavior" than when he started investing, as reported by Fortune
- 2024 - Berkshire halts share buybacks; zero-day options account for 21.5% of total US options volume, per Cboe data
- Q4 2024 - 0DTE options on the S&P 500 Index become the most-traded options product, surpassing all other expiration dates combined, according to Yahoo Finance data cited by Numerix
- January 2026 - Greg Abel officially becomes CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; Buffett moves to chairman
- February 2026 - Abel publishes his first letter to shareholders, acknowledging Buffett as "arguably the greatest investor of all time"
- March 2026 - Berkshire resumes share buybacks for the first time since 2024
- 2025 full year - US options volume reaches 15.2 billion contracts, the sixth consecutive record; 0DTE options average 14 million contracts per day, up 41% year-on-year
- May 2, 2026 - Berkshire reports Q1 cash pile of $397.4 billion, a record; annual meeting held in Omaha without Buffett on stage for the first time in 60 years; Buffett tells CNBC "we've never had people in a more gambling mood than now"
Summary
Who: Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and incoming CEO Greg Abel
What: In a post-meeting interview with CNBC, Buffett described today's stock market as more gambling-crazed than any he has seen in six decades, singled out zero-day options trading as "pure gambling," and explained why Berkshire's record cash pile of nearly $400 billion remains undeployed
When: Saturday, May 2, 2026, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska
Where: Omaha, Nebraska - and, by implication, the broader US financial markets, where 0DTE options averaged 14 million contracts traded per day in 2025
Why: Rising asset prices, speculative trading behavior, and a shortage of businesses Buffett says he understands well enough to buy have made it rational - in his framework - to hold cash and wait for the panic that has historically created the best buying opportunities