Buffett spent the better part of this year telling anyone who’d listen that the market had turned into a casino, that it was “tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling.” Meanwhile Berkshire’s cash pile grew into a running joke about its own size. So it’s a little funny that the first real move out of Greg Abel’s shop, now that he’s the one signing off on things, was to spend $4.5 billion buying back Berkshire’s own stock.

Read that as an investment thesis and it says something almost paradoxical: the market’s too expensive everywhere except right here, in the company holding the world’s most famous stash of dry powder. A buyback is a bet that your own shares are undervalued relative to what you know about your own business, and fine, management usually knows more about itself than about anyone else. But it’s also the closest thing Wall Street has to an artist running out of subjects and turning the camera on themselves. When nothing outside looks cheap, you buy the one thing you can actually price with confidence: you.

Operating profit rose. There was a $13 billion investment gain, largely on paper, largely thanks to a market Buffett himself called overheated. So the same quarter that vindicates the “everything’s expensive” case is also the one that produced the gains making the balance sheet flush enough to finally start spending. I don’t think that’s a contradiction so much as just what a long bear case sounds like right up until the portfolio makes you rich anyway.

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