This is the inaugural post in a quarterly series. The premise: take Warren Buffett's documented investing framework - the five pillars (economic moat, earnings durability, management quality, financial health, valuation) plus the Berkshire-specific sizing constraints (no leverage, no derivatives, must be understandable, big enough to move the dial on $350B of float) - and run it mechanically against the current US market.
The output is the list of 10 stocks that an honest mechanical interpretation of Buffett's published criteria would surface right now, with the financial case for each. Updated quarterly because fundamentals shift, valuations shift, and Buffett's own portfolio composition (when he reports it in 13F filings) shifts.
This is a contrarian column in the sense that the names below are almost never the ones the financial-news cycle is excited about in Q2 2026. That is exactly the point. Buffett has spent 60 years saying that the financial-news cycle is structurally biased toward growth stories, and that the patient investor's edge comes from buying boring high-quality businesses when everyone else is chasing the next AI rally.
The methodology
Every stock in the invest-like.com universe (~12,000 US-listed and major-international names) is scored on five Buffett pillars:
- Economic moat (0-100): durable competitive advantage as measured by sustained ROIC above 15 percent, gross-margin stability, and qualitative moat sources (brand, switching costs, network effects, scale, regulatory)
- Earnings durability (0-100): consistency of net income through full economic cycles, low coefficient of variation in operating margins
- Management quality (0-100): capital allocation history, insider ownership, transparency in shareholder communications, absence of corporate-governance flags
- Financial health (0-100): conservative balance sheet measured by net-debt-to-EBITDA, current ratio, interest-coverage ratio
- Valuation (0-100): owner-earnings yield (FCF / EV) relative to long-term bonds plus an equity risk premium
A composite Buffett-Fit Score above 70 puts a stock in the A tier; above 85 puts it in A+. The methodology is published in full at /methodology/buffett-fit/.
For this quarterly column we then layer on three filters that approximate Berkshire's actual constraints:
- Market cap above $20B: anything smaller can't absorb Berkshire-sized capital
- No conventional banks: Berkshire has been steadily trimming bank exposure
- No tobacco, casinos, or weapons producers: Buffett's documented exclusion list (though Berkshire has owned Constellation Brands historically)
The result is a portfolio-shaped list of 10 names that an outside observer mechanically applying Buffett's framework would arrive at. The exact 10 will shift quarter to quarter as valuations and fundamentals change.
Why this exercise matters
There is no shortage of "what would Buffett buy?" articles in financial media. Most are speculation about Berkshire's next 13F filing, or repackaged commentary on Berkshire's existing holdings. This column is different in two ways:
1. It's mechanical, not speculative. I'm not guessing what Buffett's next 13F will show. I'm running his published framework against the current universe and reporting the output. The output may not match what Berkshire actually buys (Buffett has private information, regulatory constraints, and personal preferences that no outside framework can capture). But it is the closest thing to "what would the published Buffett framework, mechanically applied, surface today?"
2. It is published openly with the methodology. Every score is reproducible from public data. Every stock has a /buffett/[ticker] page with the full pillar breakdown. If you disagree with a score, you can read the underlying numbers and decide for yourself.
What's actually in the Q2 2026 cohort
These are the 10 stocks that pass all of: composite score 70+, every pillar 60+, market cap above $20B, and Berkshire's sector exclusions. They are ordered by composite score descending.
For each name I'll give the composite score, the standout pillar, and the case in 2-3 sentences. The full per-pillar breakdown is on the linked /buffett/ page.
The actual list will update quarterly. Visit the /consensus/ and /fit/buffett/ pages for the live current cohort, which may differ from this quarterly snapshot as data refreshes.
1. Costco Wholesale (COST)
Composite: 85, standout: economic moat. Costco's membership business has 92 percent renewal rates among existing members and rising-margin private-label penetration that institutional investors now treat as a permanent moat. The valuation is the only mark against the name (owner-earnings yield is below the 10-year Treasury), but Buffett historically pays up for the wonderful businesses. See /buffett/cost/.
2. Visa (V)
Composite: 84, standout: financial health + moat. Two-sided network effects that have held for 30 years; net-debt-to-EBITDA below 0.5x; 50 percent operating margins; the company has been buying back roughly 4 percent of shares outstanding per year. The regulatory risk (interchange caps) is the bear case. See /buffett/v/.
3. Mastercard (MA)
Composite: 84, standout: economic moat + earnings durability. Substantially identical thesis to Visa, slightly lower scale, slightly higher international exposure. The buy case is that the two-network duopoly compounds at 12-15 percent for decades. See /buffett/ma/.
4. Microsoft (MSFT)
Composite: 82, standout: earnings durability. Software-platform economics that print cash; Azure's growth profile underpinning the next leg of compounding; net cash position; founder-mindset CEO succession from Nadella era. The size makes it hard to move the dial at Berkshire's scale, but the framework rates it cleanly. See /buffett/msft/.
5. Moody's (MCO)
Composite: 81, standout: economic moat. A duopoly (with S&P Global) with explicit regulatory entrenchment that gets stronger as global capital markets grow. Operating margins above 50 percent. Buffett has owned this since 2000 and there is a reason. See /buffett/mco/.
6. S&P Global (SPGI)
Composite: 80, standout: economic moat + earnings durability. The other half of the credit-ratings duopoly, with the additional benefit of the S&P index franchise (the index licensing royalty stream alone is high-multiple recurring revenue). See /buffett/spgi/.
7. Brookfield (BAM) / Brookfield Corporation (BN)
Composite: 79, standout: management quality. Bruce Flatt's capital allocation track record on alternative-asset fee streams plus owner-operator infrastructure assets. The scoring catches both the asset-light manager (BAM) and the parent (BN) - different positions for different investors. See /buffett/bam/ and /buffett/bn/.
8. Berkshire Hathaway itself (BRK.B)
Composite: 78, standout: management quality + financial health. Buffett's own holding company is a passing Buffett-Fit stock - the inside joke writes itself. Float-driven balance sheet plus operating subsidiaries plus the equity portfolio plus the cash pile. The bear case is the post-Buffett succession risk premium, which has compressed but not vanished. See /buffett/brk.b/.
9. Texas Instruments (TXN)
Composite: 77, standout: economic moat + capital allocation. Analog chip leader with 50+ year compound returns. The capital-return program (heavy buybacks plus dividend) is textbook Buffett-style capital allocation. The cyclical exposure to industrial end-markets is the bear case. See /buffett/txn/.
10. Waste Management (WM)
Composite: 76, standout: earnings durability + economic moat. Local-monopoly waste-collection franchises that compound through pricing power and tuck-in M&A. Boring on purpose. The valuation has expanded over the last five years (as investors woke up to the moat), so it's no longer obviously cheap. See /buffett/wm/.
What's deliberately NOT in this cohort
Worth calling out the names you'd expect to see that didn't make the cut:
Apple (AAPL). Composite 73. Passes the cohort tests on quality and moat but the valuation pillar is a fail (owner-earnings yield is at or below the 10-year Treasury at current price). Berkshire's actual recent trimming of AAPL is consistent with this. See /buffett/aapl/.
Coca-Cola (KO). Composite 72. Passes on moat and management but earnings durability has cracked (real volume declines for three of the last four years) and valuation is full. Berkshire has held KO forever; mechanical application of the framework wouldn't initiate a new position today. See /buffett/ko/.
Bank of America (BAC), Wells Fargo (WFC). Both eligible on quality and management but excluded by the sector filter (no conventional banks for this column). Buffett's framework historically permits banks (he has owned them for 50 years), so the user-toggleable filter at /fit/buffett/ will surface them if you uncheck the bank-exclusion option.
Chevron (CVX), Occidental (OXY). Berkshire's actual oil-major positions. They score above 70 on the composite but fail the earnings-durability pillar by a small margin (oil-cycle volatility). The framework's strict reading would exclude them; Buffett's larger latitude includes them.
Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla. The current AI-cycle market leaders. None pass on the valuation pillar at current price. Whether the framework is "wrong" to exclude these depends on whether you think the AI rally has fundamentally re-rated their long-term earnings power. The mechanical answer is no until/unless free cash flow catches up to the multiple.
A note on what this column does not promise
This column is not a buy-list. It is the output of mechanically applying a published framework. The framework was designed by Warren Buffett over six decades; that doesn't mean the framework is right, complete, or applicable to your circumstances. The framework is a structured filter. The decision of what to actually own is yours.
Three honest caveats:
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The framework has lookback bias. Every metric we measure (ROIC, FCF, margin stability) is backward-looking. A business that has been wonderful for 10 years can stop being wonderful next year. The framework cannot see secular shifts in real time.
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The framework excludes innovation. A company in its first 3-5 years of compounding can't pass the durability test because it has no track record yet. By the time it can, the obvious mispricing is gone. Buffett famously missed Amazon for exactly this reason.
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Past performance does not predict future returns. The Buffett framework has a multi-decade record of working. That is evidence, not a guarantee. The companies named above could underperform the S&P 500 over the next five years for entirely defensible reasons.
How invest-like.com handles this
The live current cohort (which will diverge from the snapshot above as quarters pass) is at:
- /fit/buffett/ - top 25 stocks by Buffett-Fit Score, refreshed daily
- /consensus/ - stocks passing 5+ of 7 frameworks (Buffett is one of seven)
- /track-record/ - the published 5-year backtest of the multi-framework consensus
The per-stock detailed Buffett breakdown is at /buffett/[ticker] for any of the 12,000 indexed stocks.
Next quarter
The Q3 2026 edition will rerun the same framework. Names will shift as valuations, fundamentals, and Berkshire's actual positions change. The methodology stays the same.
Educational only. Not investment advice.