Warning: The Buffett Portfolio Your OMAH ETF Copies Is Disappearing One 13F at a Time

The VistaShares Target 15 Berkshire Select Income ETF (NYSEARCA:OMAH) was built on a simple promise: own a basket that mirrors Warren Buffett’s disclosed equity portfolio, write calls against it, and collect a targeted 15% annual income stream. That premise assumes the underlying book is the one Buffett spent six decades assembling. It no longer is.

Greg Abel took over day-to-day operations, and in his first full quarter, Berkshire (NYSE:BRK-A | BRK-A Price Prediction, NYSE:BRK-B) exited sixteen positions, including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Visa (NYSE:V), Mastercard (NYSE:MA) and UnitedHealth (NYSE:UNH). The disclosed holding count fell from around 40 to 29, the Alphabet stake was tripled, and new positions were opened in Delta and Macy’s. Buffett remains chairman and continues to weigh in on capital allocation, so this is a portfolio in transition under ongoing oversight.

OMAH trades at $19 after an 8% year-to-date gain, and it manages roughly $748.6 million in net assets. Whether it still belongs in your portfolio depends on what you thought you were buying.

A Rules-Based Copy of a Changing Portfolio

OMAH is a mechanical replication vehicle. It reads Berkshire’s quarterly 13F, rebuilds the equity book at meaningful weights, and sells short-dated calls on the largest names to fund monthly distributions.

The fund carries a 0.98% expense ratio, which is steep for what is essentially an index copy with an options overlay. That price is defensible only if the underlying index is genuinely worth copying and stable enough that the lag between disclosures does not matter much.

Both of those conditions are now in question. The book is being actively reshaped, and the 13F reporting lag has turned from a minor annoyance into the central mechanic that determines what you actually own.

The April 30, 2026 disclosure still showed Amazon at roughly 4% and Visa, Mastercard, and UnitedHealth at combined mid-single-digit weights, because that snapshot predated the Berkshire filing that disclosed the exits.

Why the 13F Lag Now Matters

A 13F is filed up to 45 days after quarter-end, which means the market learns what Berkshire did in Q2 sometime in mid-August. OMAH then rebalances toward that snapshot.

By the time the fund reflects Abel’s Q2 exits, Berkshire itself has been living without those positions for months. Shareholders of OMAH were holding Amazon, Visa, Mastercard and UnitedHealth on Berkshire’s behalf long after Berkshire had moved on.

That lag was tolerable when the portfolio was Buffett’s slow-turning book. It becomes a real problem when succession compresses years of decisions into a single quarter.

The fund does not front-run the filing and does not deviate from what has been disclosed, which is the straightforward bargain of a rules-based product. The bargain simply costs more when the rules point at a moving target.

Who OMAH Still Fits

If you bought OMAH as frozen Buffett exposure, that thesis no longer holds, and the right response is to acknowledge it rather than assume the fund will drift back to what it was.

If you bought it as an income vehicle, collateralized by a high-quality American equity book selected by Berkshire’s investment office, including the current chairman, the case is still intact. The names are blue-chip, the call-writing continues, and the 10% one-year return shows the strategy is functional through the transition. Readers building around monthly checks may find our free Paycheck Portfolio guide useful for considering where a covered-call sleeve like this fits within the rest of the income mix.

For income-focused holders who trust Abel and the team Buffett built around him, OMAH remains a defensible 5%-10% sleeve. For anyone whose original reason for owning it was the Buffett name specifically, the fund you own today has meaningfully diverged from the one you bought, and the right move is to re-underwrite it on its current merits.

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