Warren Buffett starts to say goodbye to a pile of equity-index options

Berkshire's contracts are European style, meaning that they can be exercised only at the expiration date

Warren Buffett is beginning to say farewell to his equity derivatives.

Equity-index put options written by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. started expiring in June, and the last of them will be gone by January 2026. Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive officer, initiated the deals between 2004 and 2008 to bet that stock prices would rise in the long run. The options, tied to four major equity indexes, added a total of $2.4 billion to earnings from 2008 to 2017.

“This is a really unique piece of business,” Jim Shanahan, an analyst at Edward Jones, said in a phone interview. “Not a lot