Felix Prehn - It Started: Warren Buffett Just Sounded the Alarm — You’ll Regret Ignoring It + Stock Market News 31 October 2025 (Goat Academy)

Chapters

• 0:00 Buffett’s Cash Pile Signal
• 1:52 Who Felix Is And His Mission
• 3:25 What Buffett Is Actually Saying
• 5:44 Valuations And Market Heat
• 7:31 UNH Buy And Opportunity Setup
• 10:40 Crashes, Recoveries, And The Math
• 14:18 Active Versus Passive Paths

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Warren Buffett is sitting on over$350 billion in cash, more than he's ever held in history. And that's not just a number, it's a massive warning signal to every investor. It literally represents about 30% of Berkshire Hathaway's total assets. The last time Buffett held this much cash relative to assets was 2004, just before the great financial crisis. So if you're invested in today's market, you need to understand what this means. This could be the difference between protecting your wealth and watching it, well, evaporate when the market turns. By the end of this video, you'll understand Buffett's three-part strategy for navigating what's coming. And more importantly, you know exactly what you should be doing with your money right now. My name is Felix Breen, I'm an ex-investment banker. That's Winston back there, the brains of it all. And this is a Rose here, who's just here to sort of soften the blow of the market news, right? That's her job. But I've seen how the market works for the last decade. I'm also the founder of the GOAT Academy, where we have over 20,000 students learning to invest like professionals. I'm also the co-founder of Tradevision.io, where we track institutional money flows in real time. And my mission is simple. I want to democratize Wall Street's knowledge. Big institutions don't want you to know what they're up to. So I'm here to change that, as was Rose, who just happens to be very fluffy and cute. So what I'm about to share with you literally isn't some random theory. It's based on decades of market data and Buffett's actual move. It's the same information institutional investors pay fortune to access, and I'm going to give it to you for free. Here is an illustration of Berkshire Hathaway's cash pile. It's literally gone up by almost 3x since 2019. Buffett's been a net seller of stocks for eight quarters. That's two years. What's he been selling? Well, Apple. He reduced his Apple stake from 6% to less than 2%. He trimmed his Bank of America holding by 4%. They're not small positions. We're talking about billions of dollars in sales. But here is what's actually important. Buffett isn't predicting a crash. Listen to what he actually said at the 2025 Berkshire meeting. Occasionally, I quote here, occasionally, very occasionally, but it'll happen again. I don't know when. It won't, it could be next week, it could be five years off, but it won't be 50 years off. We will be bombarded with offerings that we'll be glad to have the cash translation. He's preparing for the opportunity. He's not running from disaster. When everyone else is panicking and selling, Buffett wants to be the one who's buying at discount prices. Now, before we go further, I want to do something even better for you than this video. Two things. Number one, there's a full research document attached to this, which will walk you through every single step that I'm teaching you here. And you can download for free in our free community at FelixFriends.org slash resource. Second, for those of you who are actually serious about investing and serious about your portfolio, and you want to learn how Wall Street finds winning stocks before they hit the headlines. Well, check out my free mini masterclass at Felixfriends.org slash training, where I will teach you those three rules. The rules Wall Street's been using for 50 years to find the gold nuggets in any market. Let's look back at when Buffett last held more than 25% of assets in cash. It was 2004. Just before the 2007-2009 great financial crisis. Nothing great about that. It was just bigly. And in 2004, guess what he said? I found very few attractive securities to buy. He simply couldn't find deals at reasonable prices. So he didn't buy anything. Sounds similar? Well, fast forward to right now. Same story, different decade. Buffett recently said he wants to invest in good companies. He just can't find them at the current prices. The market is expensive by almost every metric. The SP is trading at 22 times PE, significantly higher than the average of 18. The Buffett indicator is at 200%. That is an historically high number. The Schiller cape ratio is around about 33. Typical is only 17. Now he did do something in August. He did buy something. He bought 5 million shares of a little stock called UNH. And I was very happy about that because I'd bought it just before, following the Wall Street rules, by the way. If you want to learn those, you know what to do. Felixrensorg slash training. And I have since bought more UNH. I'm not telling you to buy it. I'm just saying sometimes it's nice when other big people come out there and they buy the same thing. Don't care that much because I know what the rules are, but it is a nice thing to happen, right? Helps us make money faster. Why? Well, the stock had crashed 50% here today, and it was a classic buffet buying quality companies when they're beaten down. So he's looking for good stuff. And by the way, he didn't just buy it because it was cheap. He bought it also because the Wall Street rule pattern was just absolutely spot on. A little early, but spot on. Over the last hundred years, we've seen 15 recessions. We've seen 27 bear markets, and they declined on average by 35%. The average bear market lasted nine to 10 months. Recent example, 2025, tariffs, right? The market moved pretty harshly from 2022. Remember 2022? Remember as 2022? We declined 25%. A lot of people don't remember that. COVID, we declined 34%. Just a month, one of the fastest bear markets ever. Financial crisis was minus 57%. The dot-com bust was minus 49%. So markets crash regularly. It's not a question of if. They always will, it's when. But that's the good news. Markets recover after every bear market bottom. The SP has recovered and gained an average of what? I'm gonna have to change the pen color here to something less gloomy. On average, the market recovers by 44% in the first year, plus 73% in the next three years and 121% over the five years after. So you want to be invested, particularly in crashes. And Buffett doesn't wait for crashes to invest, by the way. He's an active investor looking for good opportunities at any time, but he's more selective when markets are expensive, like right now. And when the market does crash, well, he's got lots of cash to buy stuff with. Think of it like shopping. You buy some things at regular prices, but you stock up during the sale. That's basically his strategy. So there are three pillars to Warren's genius. And by the way, Warren Buffett had a mentor. He didn't just wake up one morning and was, oh, I'm a genius. His mentor was uh Benjamin Graham, who, by the way, had a mentor. It goes all the way up, right? Uh back to Adam and Eve, who was apparently a great stock investor. So Buffett is very clear. Don't copy me. I'm an active investor, which isn't the right thing to do for everybody. You need to choose your path. Are you active or are you passive? What do I do? I'm actually 50-50. They call it schizophrenic. Um, so Buffett picks individual stocks, he researches those companies. That takes a little bit more time and effort, potentially higher risk, but potentially also much higher reward. But it does require some knowledge. You need to acquire some skill. Passive investing, and that's always what irritates me slightly that all the active investors always say, oh, don't do what we do. Uh, we're a genius. And I know Buffett's a nice guy, but you know what I mean. He says, I don't think it's uh it's it's right for people to be active investors. I think people should be passive investors. Most people should be passive investors, that's what he keeps saying. Basically, buy an index fund, like you know, Vu or something like that, uh, and and and forget about it. It's very little time, it's lower risk, you get steady average returns. But if it's good enough for Buffett, why isn't it good enough for you? That's what I always wonder. But yeah, I think there is definitely something in this, the ABB strategy, always be buying. Invest every single week or fortnight or month. I do it every week. And you can buy some funds, like you know, SPY is probably not the greatest example because the expense ratio is relatively high. I'd probably look at something like Vu, which I think has 0.0, is it 5%? Tell me in the comments down below if I'm getting that right or wrong. Um, but yeah, that's kind of what I would look at. Just buy the bloody index. If you're a lazy investor, you don't really want to get involved in the scare stab Jesus out of you, then just buy a big index fund like the SP 500, buy the one with the lowest fees and just add to it every week or every month. That's it. And that's your only job, right? Just add money to that. You don't need to worry about the market, you don't need to worry about crashes, stop reading about the news, stop watching this channel, it's completely pointless. Just keep investing. If you automate that, forget about it. Just hit unsubscribe right now. Now, if you want to capitalize more on opportunities, what does Buffett do? Well, there are a couple of opportunities. There are economic opportunities where the whole market collapses, like COVID or 2008 financial crisis, because uh the good folks at the uh credit rating agencies were um either insanely stupid or corrupt. It's kind of for them to pick which one they want to own up to. And then he looks for stock-specific opportunities, and we do that. Like United Health, for example. We literally bought that before he did. And I wouldn't buy it because Buffett buys it, by the way. I would buy it because it matches my rule book. Why why was that a good example? Okay, from a story point of view, I think the CEO got shot, right? Uh, then we had, well, criminal investigations into it. Albert's here because he's in charge of our healthcare investing, aren't you, Albert? And and and so it gives us a nice, nice in. And then it's actually a good company with you know good recurring income and so on. People don't change their health insurance provider very much, um, even if they are, you know, potentially evil people. I said potentially, since I didn't accuse them of being evil. I'm just saying, you know, there's some uh some love loss there, perhaps, between them and their their premium payers. So, what are the risks right now? Well, we still have pretty high interest rates. Papa Powell just came out and said, I will not relent, you know, something like that. Um, but he's gonna be out of the job by by 2026 and he'll be he'll be replaced with a a poodle, um, one of one of Trump's poodles. Uh, but inflation is still pretty high, and I think they're gonna keep it high. I think in fact they might even want to keep it a little higher. Why higher inflation? What does it do? Well, it lowers the value of the dollar. Why is that good? Well, if you had, say, you had$38 trillion of debt, wouldn't it be nice if you could lower the value of that? That's what the government's up to. But consumer spending also isn't very, very good. The US would be in a recession if it wasn't for tons of government spending and AI infrastructure investments. So definitely something to think about with the kind of stocks and the kind of sectors you're picking right now. You don't want to just randomly buy everything. At least that's my point of view. Now, number three is be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. A famous Buffett quote. It's the hardest part of investing. Sounds so easy, but it's very hard to do. The financial media makes money from your emotions, right? I know it. If I put out a title that has a negative connotation, we get about 17% more views than if we put one out that is, you know, it's got sunshine on it. So I don't like making doom and gloom videos because I think it's depressing. So I don't, but sometimes there are serious topics which you need to address. And my goal is always to give you guys an actionable outcome that actually educates you and helps you to make better decisions rather than just scare the bejesus out of you, which is probably the better tactic if we wanted to sell something aggressively. But when the market is amazing, the media drives the FOMO. Everyone's like, buy this stock and you make 100x by Friday. And you know, that kind of thing. Well, people buy and then they panic sell when we're at the bottom of the market, and you know we're down 30% or down 57%, like the last big crashes. And then they are so scared and traumatized, PTSD from the stock market, that they don't buy again until we're at the top of the market again. Now, if that's you, you you have two options. One, just take all your savings off the year, drive to midtown Manhattan, that's where all the Wall Street bankers walk around. You see them, they wear the little vests, they've got all the little logos on them in case they they get lost and they need to be returned to their bank, right? They're like, oh, this is one of the Goldman lodges, just return him back to that lobby, he'll be fine. Um, and and and um you could just give him your money, because that's basically what you're doing. Now, the second thing you could do is you could actually acquire the skill of investing. The simplest skill of investing is just automate the bloody thing and just don't ever walk close to your brokerage account, uninstall all your apps uh because you're scared of yourself. But I would argue you might want to take it a little bit higher because you're capable of this, because you actually earned the money. And I always think if you earn the money, I think you are capable to manage that money. Because the hard part was actually bringing the money in, and you did that. So learn. That's what I'd say. You can start by learning by going to Felixrens.org slash get free. So my hope is for you to get free. Um but don't sit on the sidelines. If you miss the 10 best days, what do you think happens? It cuts your returns in half. Because you know what happens? The market does this and then it does that, right? So you sold somewhere here, right? You sell here. I could spell the word sell, told you about bankers and smartness, but then you miss the rally on the way up. And that's the problem, right? So the longer you hold, if you hold 20 years, you basically have a hundred percent chance of making money. Now there's nothing that's guaranteed, so maybe let's call it 99. But you get the idea. You hold one year, you have about a 75% chance of making money. Now you could be unlucky and you could be in that in that 25% where you know you don't, but the longer you hold, generally speaking, the more money you make. So if you're a passive investor, automate the bloody thing, set up automated transfers, automated buys, keep it simple, uninstall all your brokerage apps. You don't want them. The market crashes, you will be an emotional wreck. You will do things you will regret. Have three to six months of emergency funds, you never need to touch your investments. If you're more of an active investor, well, learn to be a selective. Have some money on the side for opportunities, create a watch list of quality companies, and learn the skill of managing money. It's a bit like swimming. Actually, I posted something yesterday. I did my first free handstand ever yesterday. Might have to put that video on there on here. It's not very long, it's about three seconds. In the middle of the room, handstand. That's taken me 10 months, two coaching sessions a week. I know I've got a lot of time in my hands. And so if you think about that, that's a hundred hours. So if you think about, so that's a skill, right? To be on your hands, you know, that's a head, body, legs, you know, arms. Um, that literally took me a hundred hours to learn. And I'm not claiming I'm particularly quick, but think that through. The average work week is about 53 hours. So, what I'm actually saying is that in two weeks, you can acquire pretty much any skill. And that might be managing money, or it might be doing handstands. You can debate which one's more useful and has a greater impact on your life. But you know, once you once you have time on your hands, you can do things on your hands. And I'm very happy with it. So, what I'm saying to you, the hard part is not the learning, because everybody has two weeks. We all have the same amount of time. The hard part is starting now. Because if you start tomorrow or next week, or on Saturday, or on Sunday, or at Christmas, or in the new year, that'll never happen. Right? Um, that's what one of my lovely mentors taught me. He basically said, uh, you know, someday is never. And I think he's right. So my hope is here that I've encouraged you a little bit to learn more. Oh, this is the wrong link. So I'm gonna write in the right link for you. We'll also put it on the screen for you. We'll also put it down below in the description. But it is you can't read that either. Let's do it on red. It is get free. FelixFriends.org slash get free, because my hope is it'll help you to get free. But you definitely want to know what your strategy is. You want to understand. I think you want to capitalize on opportunities. That's beautiful as like the UNH one, for example. I'm again, I'm not telling you to buy that one, but you really need to control your emotions. How do we do that? I'm an emotional being like you are, we all are. I just know what I'm not good at. And I actually know what you're not good at because I've taught 20,000 people. We can switch that off. We can deal with that through automations, and that's what we do. So we have automations to take care of all of our risk. So, what I'd say to you is come and learn, come and learn the skill. And if you've got some value out of this video, share it with somebody who also might get some value out of this. I think that's the greatest gift we can give people is just nudge them, encourage them, teach them, share.