5 Great Investors Who Aren't Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is regarded by most as being one of the greatest investors of our time. His buy-and-hold style has allowed him to purchase hundreds of companies that he felt were fundamentally undervalued. Buffett’s ability to identify great companies at the right time has helped him to become one of the richest individuals in the world, with a net worth of over $100 billion.

Even though Buffett has beaten the S&P 500 nearly 50 years during his career, there are some critics that raise the question as to whether or not he has lost his mojo. Since the recession in 2009, Buffett has gone through several years where he failed to outperform the S&P 500.1

Here are five other investors, not named Warren Buffett, that are also considered to be the best of the best in the industry.

George Soros

Hedge fund manager George Soros is a completely different kind of investor compared to Warren Buffett. Soros doesn’t have a defined investing strategy; instead, he makes investments that come from gut decisions. He is most well known for his $10 billion bet against the British Pound in 1992. That bold move made Soros over $1 billion and forced the Bank of England to purchase 1 billion British pounds and raise interest rates by 2%.

Carl Icahn

Carl Icahn is one of the greatest investor of the past 25 years; however, at times his performance can be overshadowed by his corporate antics. Icahn, also known as a “Corporate Raider,” regularly gets involved with companies that he feels lack leadership. Love him or hate him, his involvement usually leads to a company’s turnaround, giving Icahn a 31% annual rate of return from 1968 until 2011. In comparison, Warren Buffett had an annual rate of return of just 20%. Icahn's rate has also beaten Buffett's over the last 20 years.

John "Jack" Bogle

Jack Bogle is the founder and retired CEO of The Vanguard Group. Bogle started Vanguard over 40 years ago, and today it is the largest fund company – even ahead of BlackRock Inc. (BLK) – with over $6.2 trillion under management.2

Bogle has an extremely simple investment style. He believes in putting money into low-cost index funds that have low commissions and very little turnover of assets. That alone is a big reason why so many people trust him and his company with their money.

Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham is the author of one of the most popular books on investing, “The Intelligent Investor.” Graham is known as the “father of value investing,” which is probably why he became Warren Buffett’s mentor. Graham was never a huge risk taker when he made investment choices; he used solid financial analysis to pick great companies.

In 1951, Buffett took a class at Columbia University that was taught by Graham.3 He said there were three important things that Graham taught him:

• A stock is the right to own a little piece of a company. The value of the stocks you own is only as valuable as the company as a whole.
• You need to use a margin of safety when investing. It’s important to buy into a company when the market price of the stock is below the company’s intrinsic value.
• Mr. Market is your servant, not your master. It’s important not to get wrapped up in everything that is going on with the markets. Instead, focus on your own research into a company.

Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch is most well known for managing the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990. During this span, the fund returned an average of 29% per year to its shareholders. It beat the S&P 500 in 11 of those 13 years.

Lynch is known to be able to adapt his investment style to whatever was working during certain market conditions, so it makes sense that people started calling him the “chameleon.” Even though he might have lived by an ever-changing style, he always applied a set of eight different principles to the companies in which he invested.

The World's Greatest Investors

The 11 Greatest Investors

Great money managers are like the rock stars of the financial world. The greatest investors have all made a fortune off of their success and in many cases, they've helped millions of others achieve similar returns.

These investors differ widely in the strategies and philosophies they applied to their trading; some came up with new and innovative ways to analyze their investments, while others picked securities almost entirely by instinct. Where these investors don't differ is in their ability to consistently beat the market.

Benjamin Graham

Ben Graham excelled as an investment manager and financial educator. He authored, among other works, two investment classics of unparalleled importance. He is also universally recognized as the father of two fundamental investment disciplines—security analysis and value investing.

The essence of Graham's value investing is that any investment should be worth substantially more than an investor has to pay for it. He believed in fundamental analysis and sought out companies with strong balance sheets, or those with little debt, above-average profit margins, and ample cash

John Templeton

One of the past century's top contrarians, it is said about John Templeton that he bought low during the Depression, sold high during the Internet boom, and made more than a few good calls in between. Templeton created some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds. He sold his Templeton funds in 1992 to the Franklin Group. In 1999, Money magazine called him "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century." As a naturalized British citizen living in the Bahamas, Templeton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his many accomplishments.1

Thomas Rowe Price Jr.

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Thomas Rowe Price Jr. is considered to be "the father of growth investing." He spent his formative years struggling with the Depression, and the lesson he learned was not to stay out of stocks but to embrace them. Price viewed financial markets as cyclical. As a crowd opposer, he took to investing in good companies for the long term, which was virtually unheard of at this time. His investment philosophy was that investors had to put more focus on individual stock-picking for the long term. Discipline, process, consistency, and fundamental research became the basis for his successful investing career.

John Neff

CFA Institute

Neff joined Wellington Management Co. in 1964 and stayed with the company for more than 30 years, managing three of its funds. His preferred investment tactic involved investing in popular industries through indirect paths, and he was considered a value investor as he focused on companies with low P/E ratios and strong dividend yields. He ran the Windsor Fund for 31 years (ending in 1995) and earned a return of 13.7%, versus 10.6% for the S&P 500 over the same time span.2 This amounts to a gain of more than 53 times an initial investment made in 1964.

Jesse Livermore

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Jesse Livermore had no formal education or stock trading experience. He was a self-made man who learned from his winners as well as his losers. It was these successes and failures that helped cement trading ideas that can still be found throughout the market today. Livermore began trading for himself in his early teens, and by the age of sixteen, he had reportedly produced gains of over $1,000, which was big money in those days. Over the next several years, he made money betting against the so-called "bucket shops," which didn't handle legitimate trades—customers bet against the house on stock price movements.3

Peter Lynch

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Peter Lynch managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990, during which the fund's assets grew from $18 million to $14 billion.4 More importantly, Lynch reportedly beat the S&P 500 Index benchmark in 11 of those 13 years, achieving an annual average return of 29%.56

Often described as a chameleon, Peter Lynch adapted to whatever investment style worked at the time. But when it came to picking specific stocks, Peter Lynch stuck to what he knew and/or could easily understand.

George Soros

World Economic Forum

George Soros was a master at translating broad-brush economic trends into highly leveraged, killer plays in bonds and currencies. As an investor, Soros was a short-term speculator, making huge bets on the directions of financial markets. In 1973, George Soros founded the hedge fund company of Soros Fund Management, which eventually evolved into the well-known and respected Quantum Fund. For almost two decades, he ran this aggressive and successful hedge fund, reportedly racking up returns in excess of 30% per year and, on two occasions, posting annual returns of more than 100%.

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Referred to as the "Oracle of Omaha," Warren Buffett is viewed as one of the most successful investors in history.

Following the principles set out by Benjamin Graham, he has amassed a multibillion dollar fortune mainly through buying stocks and companies through Berkshire Hathaway. Those who invested $10,000 in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 are above the $165 million mark today.78

Buffett's investing style of discipline, patience, and value has consistently outperformed the market for decades.

John (Jack) Bogle

Investopedia

Bogle founded the Vanguard Group mutual fund company in 1975 and made it into one of the world's largest and most respected fund sponsors. Bogle pioneered the no-load mutual fund and championed low-cost index investing for millions of investors. He created and introduced the first index fund, Vanguard 500, in 1976. Jack Bogle's investing philosophy advocates capturing market returns by investing in broad-based index mutual funds that are characterized as no-load, low-cost, low-turnover, and passively managed.

Carl Icahn

Carl Icahn is an activist and pugnacious investor that uses ownership positions in publicly held companies to force changes to increase the value of his shares. Icahn started his corporate raiding activities in earnest in the late 1970s and hit the big leagues with his hostile takeover of TWA in 1985. Icahn is most famous for the "Icahn Lift." This is the Wall Street catchphrase that describes the upward bounce in a company's stock price that typically happens when Carl Icahn starts buying the stock of a company he believes is poorly managed.

William H. Gross

Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum

Considered the "king of bonds," Bill Gross is the world's leading bond fund manager. As the founder and managing director of the PIMCO family of bond funds, he and his team have more than $1.92 trillion in fixed-income assets under management.9

In 1996, Gross was the first portfolio manager inducted into the Fixed-Income Analyst Society Inc. hall of fame for his contributions to the advancement of bond and portfolio analysis.10