Re: berkshire hathaway
As others have alluded to, if you're concerned about volatility, you don't care about beta. Just download the closing prices from yahoo and take the standard deviation of daily/monthly returns and compare that to the same measure calculated for spy or vti. (This won't tell you what future volatility will look like, of course, but it's better than nothing.)
The very low beta indicates a low correlation with the market, not a lower absolute volatility than the market.
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