• Warren Buffett socked away $321 billion while waiting for stocks to crash like they did Thursday.
• The legendary investor specializes in buying cut-price assets during periods of market panic.
• Buffett gurus told BI the billionaire may wait for lower prices or a clearer outlook before buying.

Warren Buffett famously says to "be greedy when others are fearful" and "when it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble." The legendary bargain hunter has been waiting years for stocks to crash like they did on Thursday — but he might not be buying yet.

President Donald Trump's declaration of a near-universal 10% tariff on foreign goods, and even steeper import taxes for the "worst offenders" such as China, vaporized $2.4 trillion or nearly a Nvidia's worth of market value from the S&P 500 on Thursday. The benchmark stock index tumbled further on Friday.

Some of Buffett's favorite stocks got spanked with Apple, American Express, Bank of America, and Occidental Petroleum all tumbling more than 9%.

Buffett didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The downturn is likely to hearten the Berkshire Hathaway CEO, given he's a value investor who seeks to buy businesses at a discount to their worth. He's also known to capitalize on crises, for example when he deployed a full $26 billion across five deals between 2008 and 2009.

Buffett wrote in his 2017 shareholder letter that sharp sell-offs can create "extraordinary opportunities" for investors who heed poet Rudyard Kipling's words to "keep your head when all about you are losing theirs."

However, surging valuations have priced him out of buying stocks, acquiring businesses, and even repurchasing his own company's stock in recent years.

Buffett, 94, has also offloaded a net $158 billion of stocks over the past two calendar years. Berkshire's cash pile has roughly tripled from under $110 billion in September 2022 to $321 billion at the end of 2024 — that's bigger than Coca-Cola's market value.

Armed with an overflowing war chest, Buffett appears well-placed to wade into the market rout and scoop up stocks on the cheap. The internet certainly agrees — social media is rife with comments and memes about Buffett sitting pretty while markets are in chaos.

Wall Street has also rewarded Buffett's cash hoarding: Berkshire's stock price is up about 15% this year, trouncing the S&P's near-11% decline.

The share surge has added $23 billion to Buffett's personal fortune and vaulted him past the likes of LVMH's Bernard Arnault and Oracle's Larry Ellison into fourth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Yet the famously patient and disciplined investor might wait longer before pouncing.

"When prices fall, it certainly encourages Buffett to buy unless he views new permanent damage greater than the price discount," Steven Check told Business Insider. He oversees $2 billion of assets as the CEO of Check Capital Management and has attended every in-person Berkshire annual meeting since 1996.

Stocks may be cheaper than before, but Check said Buffett will likely "require a much larger drop to do significant buying."

Waiting game

Buffett's followers will likely have to wait until Berkshire's meeting in May or its second-quarter portfolio update in August to learn whether the investor topped up his holdings this week.

Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University who's been teaching Buffett-style valuation to students for decades, told BI he's "watching his next move with the most careful and anxious attention" as it will "tell us a great deal about where he thinks the economy is going."

"If he plunges into the market and starts buying, it will signal that he believes the Trump tariffs were nothing more than a minor economic annoyance that created wonderful buying opportunities," he said. Hanke is a former economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan and was the president of Toronto Trust Argentina when it was the world's best-performing mutual fund in 1995.

If Buffett holds off, Hanke said it would suggest he's keeping in mind the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of March 1930, which "broke the back of the stock market, and helped to plunge the world into the Great Depression."

Hanke's "tentative guess" is that Buffett's knowledge of economic history will lead him to "remain on the sidelines, at least for a while" until the scope of what he's dealing with grows clearer.

If the frantic selling in markets continues, Buffett's moment might come sooner rather than later.

• Hedge funds are seeking out data to understand the impact of President Donald Trump's tariff policies.
• Data exchanges say requests for import-export info and Canada-specific data have skyrocketed.
• Funds, typically focused on a specific sector or stock, are looking for country-level data to forecast fallout.

The smart money is dumbfounded.

The most sophisticated investors in the world, members of the $4.5 trillion hedge fund industry, constantly scour the globe for new data to better inform their trading decisions and improve their models. But President Donald Trump's tariff policies, which sent global markets reeling Thursday, have them scrambling to find relevant info to help them understand just how devastating the policies might be to the global economy.

Data exchanges and consultancies told Business Insider that interest in country-level data has skyrocketed. Typically, firms are interested in datasets that can tell a story about a specific stock or sector, such as credit-card data on Amazon or e-commerce, but because of the widespread impact of the tariffs, hedge funds that specialize in various strategies — macro gamblers, fundamental stockpickers, quant traders, and more — are all on the hunt for this elusive data.

Matt Ober, a former data buyer for hedge funds such as Dan Loeb's Third Point and WorldQuant, who runs data marketplace Initial Data Offering, said interest in such datasets has "doubled or tripled" over the past few weeks.

Daryl Smith, the head of research for alternative data consultancy Neudata, said demand for Canada-specific data has skyrocketed due to the trade war between the country and the US. Because the tariffs will impact consumers worldwide, not just those in the US, Smith said funds are also seeking ways to track international buyers' habits and how they might change.

"Previously, the vast majority of consumer spending questions were about the US, but now people want that high-level data on all countries," he said.

The issue, though, is this data is not something many vendors have ever sold before, mostly because there wasn't enough interest in understanding the spending habits of the average Vietnamese or Canadian consumer. It's a callback to the GameStop saga of early 2021 when funds rushed to track the tickers being mentioned by retail investors on the Wall Street Bets subreddit who banded together and bought enough GameStop shares to put a short squeeze on Gabe Plotkin's Melvin Capital.

Sixteen months, several documentaries, and a congressional investigation later, Melvin shut down.

Compared to the meme stock mania, the tariffs pose a broader challenge for data-hungry funds. One data scientist at a large fund said firms are already reworking existing data feeds from credit-card receipts to get more country-specific perspectives. Ober mentioned vendor Dun & Bradstreet as a potential winner because of the company's supply chain and manufacturing data.

But anyone rushing to the space claiming they have the perfect product for the current volatility is likely exaggerating, another data buyer at a quant fund said. Funds need datasets with years of track record to backtest and prove their legitimacy.

The unprecedented nature of the tariffs means a legitimate track record will be hard to find.

"Unless someone has data on global trade in the 1920s, there's not going to be a silver bullet," the data buyer said, referring to the last time a US administration slapped such severe tariffs on its global trading partners.

• Hillwood Estate was the home of breakfast-cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.
• She collected art from 18th-century France and imperial Russia for display in her 36-room mansion.
• Hillwood was her fall and spring home. She also built Mar-a-Lago and lived there during the winter.

Marjorie Merriweather Post was once known as America's richest woman, with an estimated net worth of $250 million, or around $1.8 billion today when adjusted for inflation.

Although she inherited her father's Post cereal fortune in 1914, Post also helped build the company into the General Foods Corporation by acquiring brands like Jell-O and Maxwell House. She also served on its board of directors.

With her success as a businesswoman, socialite, and philanthropist, Post built homes to match her elite status.

In 1955, she purchased Hillwood Estate in Washington, DC, and renovated it into a 36-room, 26,000-square-foot mansion with a focus on entertaining and displaying her priceless art collections.

Post only lived at Hillwood during fall and spring. She spent winters at her Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, now owned by President Donald Trump, and summers at Camp Topridge in New York's Adirondack Mountains.

Access to Mar-a-Lago remains limited due to Trump's residence there, but Hillwood is a museum open to the public.

I visited Post's opulent home and its surrounding gardens in September 2024. Take a look inside.

Hillwood is a 36-room Georgian-style mansion located on a 25-acre estate in Washington, DC.

Hillwood's interiors and gardens first opened to the public in 1977, then reopened in 2000 after extensive renovations.

One adult ticket can be purchased with a $17 suggested donation on weekdays and $20 on weekends through Hillwood's official website.

Hillwood offers self-guided tours through its Hillwood app, as well as guided tours throughout the day.

Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post cereal fortune and known as America's richest woman, purchased Hillwood in 1955.

Post's father, CW Post, founded the Postum Cereal Company in 1895. When he died in 1914, Post, at 27, took ownership of the $20 million company. She helped grow the cereal company into the General Foods Corporation and served on its board for over 20 years, becoming one of the first women in America to serve on a corporate board of directors.

Post was married and divorced four times and had three children: Dina Merrill, Eleanor Post Hutton, and Adelaide Breevort Close. She bought Hillwood after divorcing her third husband, Joseph Edward Davies.

My tour of Hillwood began in the entry hall full of art from 18th-century France and imperial Russia, Post's two main areas of interest as a collector.

Portraits of the Romanovs, the Russian dynasty that ruled from 1613 to 1917, hung above the grand staircase, and a marble bust depicted the Duchesse de Châteauroux, one of King Louis XV's mistresses.

Post devoted entire rooms to her collection of French and Russian porcelain.

Post intended for Hillwood to become a museum open to the public, and had display cases built in almost every room on the first floor.

The French Drawing Room would not have looked out of place in the Gilded Age.

The room's gilded wood paneling and fireplace mantle came from King Louis XVI-era homes in Paris.

Post used the French Drawing Room as a reception area to greet guests as they arrived for her dinners and garden parties.

A hallway led into the Pavilion, Post's primary entertaining space where she hosted film screenings and square dances.

The Pavilion was equipped with a projector and sound system for movie screenings, and the walls were covered in velvet for better acoustics.

Post had trays added to the lilac sofas so that guests could enjoy drinks and snacks while watching movies such as "The Jungle Book."

Staff members served drinks in a wet bar located just outside the Pavilion.

The Pavilion also featured priceless works of art such as "A Boyar Wedding Feast" by Konstantin Makovsky.

Painted in 1883, "A Boyar Wedding Feast" is one of the most famous Russian paintings in existence. It depicts a wedding between two noble Russian families as it would have looked in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Icon Room displayed around 400 pieces of art connected to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Post called the Icon Room her "treasury."

The centerpieces of the Icon Room were two gold and diamond-encrusted eggs made by Fabergé, a jeweler catering to Russian imperial rulers.

Both eggs were gifts from Tsar Nicholas II to his mother, Maria Feodorovna.

Another notable piece was a Fabergé music box commissioned by Prince Feliks and Prince Nikolai Yusupov in 1907.

The Yusupov princes gifted the music box to their parents for their 25th anniversary. The building shown on the front is Moika Palace, best known as the site where Gregori Rasputin was killed in 1916.

The Library on the first floor evoked 18th-century England with pine paneling and a marble mantle.

Post used the Library as a smaller gathering space with friends or to read and relax on her own. A portrait of her father, CW Post, hung above the fireplace.

In the Dining Room, waiters would serve multiple courses at elaborate dinner parties.

The oak paneling on the walls in the Dining Room came from an 18th-century home in Paris, and the walls featured Dutch paintings of hunting scenes.

The dining room table, handcrafted in Italy with 11 semiprecious stones, was originally designed for Mar-a-Lago.

The table could seat over 30 people. A leaf from the table was displayed separately to allow visitors to get a closer look.

The table was set with Post's rare collection of 18th-century French porcelain.

The porcelain dishware was originally made in France for European aristocrats in the 1740s and later collected by wealthy art enthusiasts such as Post and the Rothschilds.

In a nook off the Dining Room, Post took meetings and business lunches as the majority shareholder of the General Foods Corporation.

While the enclave is called the Breakfast Room, Post usually ate lunch and dinner there.

The rest of the house was furnished with period decor, but the kitchen was state-of-the-art for the 1950s.

The kitchen didn't have a dishwasher because all of Post's dishes had to be washed by hand.

The butler's pantry was always stocked with General Foods brands such as Maxwell House coffee and Birds Eye frozen food.

The butler's pantry also featured a dumbwaiter for transporting Post's porcelain and glass dishware to and from storage in the basement.

Menus on display in the kitchen revealed what Post served for dinner.

Jell-O, a General Foods brand, made appearances at Post's dinner parties in the form of aspic rings and gelatinous salads, a popular food trend in the 1950s.

On my way upstairs, I noticed that the railing was covered in velvet, a luxurious feature I also saw when I toured a Vanderbilt mansion in New York.

The Vanderbilt family's 54-room mansion in Hyde Park, New York, also featured a grand staircase with a velvet-covered railing.

The first room at the top of the stairs was known as the Snooze Room.

True to its name, the Snooze Room included a daybed for midday naps.

The Snooze Room connected to the English Bedroom Suite through a doorway.

The English Bedroom, named for its 19th-century English furniture set, served as a guest room when Post's daughters visited Hillwood.

The Adam Bedroom Suite was named for its Adam style of decor featuring pastel colors and medallion designs.

The Adam style, popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was coined by Robert and James Adam, who were architects and designers from Scotland.

The Adam Bedroom Suite also functioned as a guest bedroom.

The second floor featured a library smaller than the one on the first floor, but decorated in a similar style with wood paneling and portraits.

The second-floor library housed a television, a touch of modernity amid the English country house aesthetic.

Post's bedroom was full of French furnishings and paintings of her children.

A display case held around 50 items made from bloodstone, Post's birthstone.

In the adjoining dressing room, Post would often attend to paperwork related to her role on the General Foods board or philanthropy.

"She took her various board duties seriously, and she planned her schedule, whenever possible, around those duties," Post's financial secretary, Betty Canella, said of her boss according to the audio tour.

Her bathroom was decorated with "Mamie pink," a color popularized by first lady Mamie Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Call buttons by the bathtub allowed Post to summon a maid, social secretary, or seamstress.

The hallway leading to Post's closet displayed pieces of her jewelry.

This platinum and diamond necklace was designed by jeweler Harry Winston.

The display also featured a diamond from an engagement ring given to her by Herbert May, her fourth husband, in 1958.

Diamond engagement rings were a relatively new phenomenon at the time — the De Beers advertising campaign that popularized diamonds in connection with engagements and weddings ran in the 1940s.

Post and May were married for six years, divorcing in 1964.

My final stop inside Hillwood was the Second Floor Gallery displaying particularly notable and valuable works from Post's art collection.

Among the gallery's many artifacts was the Buch Chalice commissioned by Catherine the Great in 1790. The gold goblet, used in religious rituals, featured 5,492 diamonds totaling 152.11 carats, according to Hillwood's official website.

There was much more to see outside the home with the estate's 25 acres of gardens.

The Hillwood app featured a separate self-guided tour just for the gardens.

The side of the house featured a French parterre, a formal garden design dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

The French Drawing Room inside led out into this garden, with the English ivy walls making it feel like another room. Paths of water called rills divided the space and led to a statue of Diana, the goddess of the hunt, on the other side.

The top of the Washington Monument was just visible through the trees on the Lunar Lawn in the back of the house.

The Lunar Lawn, named for its half-moon shape, was dotted with elms, false cypresses, and various flowers.

The Japanese-style garden was designed by landscape architect Shogo Myaida in 1957.

Visitors could step across the pool of water on a path of millstones.

The Greenhouse still housed Post's collection of tropical plants, including over 2,000 orchids.

The Greenhouse allowed Post to enjoy fresh flowers at Hillwood year-round. She even had fresh flowers shipped from Hillwood to Mar-a-Lago and Camp Topridge.

I noticed numerous butterflies as I walked around the grounds, likely attracted by the sweet floral smell of the property's many blossoms.

In addition to the Greenhouse, Hillwood also had a cutting garden that supplied seasonal floral arrangements.

My final stop was the Rose Garden, where Post's ashes were spread after her death in 1973.

Every year, on her birthday and death anniversary, Hillwood puts a bouquet of fresh flowers on the memorial in the Rose Garden. I visited on September 13, which happened to be the day after her death anniversary, so the flowers on the monument still appeared fresh.

Located just 5 miles from the heart of Washington, DC, Hillwood is an art museum and botanical garden wrapped up in one historic home.

It's not often that one gets to look inside the home of a modern businesswoman who was one America's wealthiest figures, but Post always intended for Hillwood to welcome members of the public.

She often hosted school groups and educational events during her lifetime to allow people to view her art collections, and her legacy continues today through the museum and gardens at Hillwood Estate.

• As a Costco employee of 19 years, I'm always looking for great new products at the store.
• This month, Costco is carrying delicious food items like the Kirkland Signature extra-crispy fries.
• I also think the Sunvilla outdoor chair is perfect for relaxing in the warmer weather.

I've been working at Costco for 19 years and am always on the hunt for exciting new products. This month, the warehouse is stocking its shelves with everything from tasty food items to chic home decor.

Here are eight products I recommend checking out at Costco this April.

Prices and product availability may vary by location.

I love making the Kirkland Signature extra-crispy fries in the air fryer.

The new Kirkland Signature extra-crispy french fries can be made in the oven, on the stovetop, or, my favorite method, in the air fryer.

At $5.70 for a 5-pound bag, I recommend grabbing a package at Costco.

The Sunvilla outdoor chair is perfect for spring.

With warmer weather approaching, I think the Sunvilla egg-style chair would make the perfect addition to any patio.

The cushions are made for outdoor use and have a special fabric that resists fading, mildew, and stains. The wicker is also made to withstand the elements.

This chic chair is available for $500 at my Costco location.

Kevin's Parmesan-basil chicken bowls are popular at my store.

When I started seeing more and more Kevin's Parmesan-basil chicken bowls in members' carts, I knew I had to try them.

The microwavable bowls contain chicken breast pieces in Parmesan sauce with broccoli and zucchini. It contains 34 grams of protein and keeps me full for a long time.

Each box comes with four single-serve bowls for $15.

Costco has Michelin wiper blades in a variety of sizes.

It's no secret that April can be rainy, so now is a great time to switch out your windshield wipers.

The Michelin wiper blades come in various sizes and are designed to last. These are available for $11 each at my store.

The Mission Hill Bistro sliced beef brisket makes dinner easy.

I love the tasty, sliced beef Brisket from Mission Hill Bistro. The best part is that it comes fully cooked and can be ready after just five minutes in the microwave.

This item is sold by the pound, so the price varies by weight.

These Bose earbuds also come with a $50 gift card.

The Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra earbuds have noise-cancellation technology and can hold a charge for up to six hours. They even come with a $50 gift card that can be used at the Apple or Google Play stores.

My Costco sells these Bose earbuds for $300.

Red's carne asada breakfast burritos are the perfect way to start the morning.

If you're looking for a good, hearty meal, you may want to try Red's carne asada breakfast burritos.

Each box contains 10 delicious burritos stuffed with carne asada, poblano peppers, and eggs. These can be found in the freezer section at Costco for $18.

Treat your furry friends with the Catry cat tree.

I recommend checking out the 5-foot Catry cat tree if you have cats at home. It has a cozy hammock, a washable bed, and toys to keep your cats happy. This item is available at my Costco for $90.