Berkshire Hathaway Has Entered a New Era With Greg Abel at the Helm

While Berkshire Hathaway's operating businesses have generally provided the firm with a narrow moat on a combined basis, it has been management's ability to produce additional excess returns from the cash flows thrown off by its disparate operations that historically pushed our moat rating into wide territory. However, a wide moat rating would be harder to justify now that Warren Buffett has retired as CEO, which we expect to dampen future investment returns, because we've been seeing slippage in some of the moat sources that support the economic moats in a few of its main operating businesses for a number of years.