Legendary investors: the investment styles of the most famous investors, from Graham to Simons

Basics12 min read · updated 27 October 2026 · 42 sources

Legendary investors such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Jim Simons have achieved results over decades that most fund managers fail to match, and with very different investment styles. Here you will find the best-known investors with their style and most important decisions, and you will learn how to track their portfolios via 13F filings, what research knows about copycats and why copying is harder than it looks.

What you can learn from great investors

The biographies of great investors are textbooks: they show how a clear style emerges, how to survive mistakes and how much patience success takes. Three traps make learning harder, though:

• Survivorship bias: you know the names because things went well. Those who failed with the same style do not write bestsellers. This distortion caused by the survivors makes success appear more frequent and more persistent than it is (Brown et al. 1992).
• Luck or skill: among thousands of managers, some deliver top results for years by chance alone. According to Fama and French (2010), only a few funds show genuine skill. The longer and more public a track record, the more likely it reflects skill.
• Delay: you only find out what great investors are buying weeks or months later, often when part of the price gain is already over.

What you can learn is therefore mainly the way of thinking: how someone looks for opportunities, limits risks and sizes positions. Copying individual purchases is something else.

The most famous investors and their investment styles

The table sorts 27 investors by style. It only states what the sources cited support: their own books, shareholder letters, biographies and official documents.

The investment styles at a glance

• Value investing: buying stocks below their intrinsic value, with a margin of safety. Graham looked for statistically cheap stocks; under Munger's influence, Buffett shifted the focus to quality. According to the shareholder letter, the market value per Berkshire share rose by 19.7% a year from 1965 to 2025, and the S&P 500 with dividends by 10.5% (Berkshire Hathaway 2026). The craft is explained in fundamental analysis.
• Growth: companies with above-average earnings growth over long periods, even at higher valuations. Lynch made sure that the price matched the growth (GARP).
• Global and contrarian: contrarian investing means acting against the prevailing sentiment. Templeton searched worldwide wherever sentiment was worst; Kostolany emphasised investor psychology.
• Global macro: these hedge funds use futures, currencies and bonds to bet on the economy, interest rates and politics, often with leverage. Dalio applied macro thinking to a fixed allocation, the All Weather portfolio.
• Quant: rules and models instead of gut feeling. Thorp used probability theory and the Kelly criterion (Thorp 2006), Asness the value and momentum factors, Simons statistical patterns. Related rules are described in trend following.
• Activist investors and short sellers: an activist investor buys a stake and pushes for change. Short sellers use short selling to bet against overvalued or questionable companies; before the US Congress, Chanos justified his Enron bet by saying that its pre-tax return on capital was around 7%, while its cost of capital was more like 9% (Chanos 2002).
• Indexing and allocation: Bogle popularised the low-cost index fund. It is the counter-model to searching for legends (active or passive). Swensen shaped the endowment model.

Tracking portfolios: 13F filings

For US investors there is a public source: the 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The rules according to SEC, Form 13F (2026):

• Who: investment managers with discretion over at least US$100 million in reportable securities, so hedge funds as well as banks, insurers or Berkshire Hathaway.
• When: quarterly, no later than 45 days after the end of the quarter.
• What: mainly shares traded on US exchanges, plus ETFs, closed-end funds, certain convertible bonds and options held, from the official list. Not reported are short positions, written options, open-end mutual funds and shares traded only outside the USA.
• Exceptions: positions of fewer than 10,000 shares and less than US$200,000 may be omitted. On request, the SEC grants temporary confidential treatment to positions; they then appear later.
• Where: public filings are submitted electronically via EDGAR, the SEC's database. It is the primary source.

Schedule 13D is faster: anyone who acquires more than 5% of a class of shares and intends to exert influence has had to report this within five business days since a 2023 reform (SEC, Schedule 13D 2023). Purchases by company executives are explained in insider trading.

Tracker websites process the filings for free or for a fee, such as Dataroma with the quarterly portfolios of well-known value investors, or WhaleWisdom with 13F, 13D and insider data (both accessed on 25 October 2026). These are examples, not recommendations; the filing on EDGAR remains authoritative. At the end of October 2026, the trackers still showed holdings as of 30 June for most investors, because the filings for 30 September are not due until mid-November.

Worked example: what the delay means

For advanced readers: Buffett's alpha broken down

Frazzini et al. (2018) broke down the return of Berkshire Hathaway. The stock achieved a Sharpe ratio of 0.79 and a clear alpha relative to the classic factors. With the factors betting against beta (safe stocks with low beta) and quality minus junk (quality stocks), the alpha was no longer significant. On top of that came leverage of about 1.7 to 1 on average. The authors' conclusion: neither luck nor magic, but the reward for holding cheap, safe, high-quality stocks with leverage. The listed holdings performed better than the wholly owned companies. This points to good stock picking.

The study explains with hindsight which characteristics Buffett's stocks had. Picking them correctly in advance remains the real achievement, and a leveraged factor portfolio is no substitute for Buffett.

What research shows

• Copying Buffett: Martin and Puthenpurackal (2005) analysed Berkshire's reported purchases from 1976 to 2006. A portfolio that bought the stocks only at the start of the month after publication clearly beat the S&P 500.
• Copycat funds: Frank et al. (2004) replicated active mutual funds as soon as their holdings were published. For a small sample of expensive funds from the 1990s, the copycats were statistically on a par after costs, possibly ahead (copycat strategy).
• Hidden positions: according to Agarwal et al. (2013), it is mainly hedge funds with large, unusual portfolios that have some positions treated confidentially and report them later. These very positions performed above average for up to twelve months. So the best ideas are often missing from the regular 13F filing.
• Activist investors: Brav et al. (2008) studied campaigns by activist hedge funds in the USA from 2001 to 2006. In two thirds of cases they succeeded fully or partially; the abnormal return around the announcement was about 7% and did not reverse in the following year.
• Best ideas: according to Antón et al. (2021), the stocks that active fund and hedge fund managers bet on most heavily beat the market and the other stocks in their portfolios by about 2.8 to 4.5% a year; the remaining positions mostly show no significant excess return. A complete list of holdings therefore dilutes the good ideas.
• Measuring skill: holdings allow more precise performance measurement than returns alone. Daniel et al. (1997) compare each stock held with benchmark portfolios of the same size, valuation and momentum.

Limitations and common mistakes

• Partial view: 13F only shows US long positions. Short positions, bonds, currencies and futures are missing, which for macro and quant funds usually means the core of the strategy.
• No timing: you see the holdings at the end of the quarter, not the purchase price, the time of purchase or any sales since.
• Different purpose: a position can be part of a hedge or a larger package. What suits a multi-billion fund does not automatically suit your portfolio.
• Size changes the style: according to Buffett's letter, Munger warned him that Graham's bargain hunting only works on a small scale (Buffett 2024).
• Dry spells: even legends often lag the market; in 2025 Berkshire returned 10.9%, the S&P 500 17.9% (Berkshire Hathaway 2026).
• Not a recommendation: this article presents investment styles and is not investment advice, including on copying the purchases of famous investors.

How Portfolio Lab calculates

• Templates: in the portfolio grid, for example in the Backtest, you can load allocations based on famous investors under “Templates”: Buffett's 90/10 from his letter on 2013 (90% S&P 500 index fund, 10% short-term government bonds; Buffett (2014)) in a US and a European version, the All Seasons allocation after Ray Dalio, the Swensen portfolio and the Bogleheads three-fund portfolio. They are starting points for your own tests, not recommendations, and not replicas of the real funds.
• Measuring style: the Factors page regresses the monthly returns of a stock, fund or portfolio on market, size, value, profitability, investment and, optionally, momentum; the alpha with its t-value shows what the factors do not explain. The rolling regression (24 to 120 months, default 36) shows whether a style remains stable. The app does not offer betting against beta and quality minus junk; profitability captures only part of quality.
• Style analysis: Style analysis explains returns with style indices following Sharpe and separates out the selection return (methodology). “Replicate factors” builds a portfolio from building blocks with a factor profile similar to that of a role model.
• Testing reported holdings: you can enter positions from a 13F filing as individual stocks in the backtest; the app does not read 13F filings itself. If you take today's known winners back into the past, you are subject to survivorship bias.

This article explains a method; it is not investment or tax advice. Worked examples are simplified and rounded. All terms in the glossary.