The Greatest Investors of All Time and Their Strategies

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There is no single greatest investor of all time, because the people usually named won in different ways and over different stretches of history. Benjamin Graham turned stock picking into a discipline built on value and a margin of safety. Warren Buffett applied and extended those ideas through Berkshire Hathaway over more than half a century. John Templeton bought when others despaired, Thomas Rowe Price Jr. paid up for quality growth, Peter Lynch found big winners in familiar companies, and George Soros made leveraged bets on currencies and economies. Jack Bogle took the opposite path and argued that most people should simply own the market at low cost.

How to judge who belongs on the list

“Greatest” can mean several things, and the answer changes depending on which measure you use.

• Return versus a benchmark. Beating the market matters more than a large raw return. A fund that gained 12% a year when the S&P 500 gained 14% underperformed.
• Length of the record. Three brilliant years can be luck. John Neff’s 31 years at the Windsor Fund or Buffett’s decades at Berkshire carry more weight.
• Size of the money managed. Beating the market with $18 million is easier than with $14 billion, because large funds cannot move in and out of small stocks without pushing prices.
• Survival. An investor who compounds steadily and never blows up can end up richer than one who earns spectacular gains and then loses everything.
• Influence. Graham wrote the textbooks. Bogle built the index fund that millions of savers now use.

Keep these measures in mind when comparing headline return figures. Reported returns come from different time periods, fee treatments and sources, so two figures for the same manager can disagree.

Benjamin Graham: the father of value investing

Benjamin Graham (1894 to 1976) was an investment manager and teacher whose ideas still define how fundamental investors think. He wrote Security Analysis (1934, with David Dodd) and The Intelligent Investor (1949), and he taught at Columbia Business School, where Warren Buffett became his student.

The strategy. Graham’s core idea was simple: an investment should be worth substantially more than you pay for it. He looked for companies with strong balance sheets or little debt, above-average profit margins and ample cash flow, then compared what the business was worth with the price the market was asking.

Margin of safety. Graham’s best-known concept is the gap between a stock’s estimated intrinsic value and its price. If you estimate a company is worth $50 a share and buy it at $33, you have a cushion of about one-third, which protects you if your analysis was too optimistic or the business has bad luck.

Mr. Market. In The Intelligent Investor, Graham described the market as a moody business partner who offers to buy or sell your shares every day at prices that swing with his emotions. You are free to ignore him when his prices are silly and to trade with him when they are attractive. The point is that market prices serve the investor; they do not instruct him.

Why he matters. Graham gave investing a method: read the financial statements, estimate value, demand a discount, diversify across many bargains and stay unemotional. Almost every value investor since, including Buffett and Neff, builds on that framework.

Warren Buffett: Graham’s ideas, compounded

Warren Buffett (born 1930), the “Oracle of Omaha,” is the investor most people name first. He started investing as a boy, studied under Graham, worked for Graham’s firm, ran his own investment partnerships and then took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile company, in the 1960s. He turned it into a conglomerate that owns businesses outright and holds large stakes in public companies.

How his strategy evolved. Early Buffett bought statistically cheap stocks in Graham’s style. Under the influence of his longtime partner Charlie Munger, he shifted toward buying excellent businesses at fair prices rather than mediocre businesses at bargain prices. The key features of that approach:

• Economic moats. Buffett looks for companies with durable competitive advantages, such as a strong brand, low costs or a hard-to-replicate network, that protect profits from competitors over time.
• Quality management. He favors managers who are capable, honest and treat shareholders as partners.
• Long holding periods. Buffett’s ideal holding period is often described as “forever.” Long holds let returns compound and keep trading costs and taxes low.
• Patience in volatility. He has consistently bought when others were fearful, including during market crises.

The record. Berkshire’s annual shareholder letters show its per-share market value compounding at roughly 20% a year since 1965, about double the S&P 500’s rate. A $10,000 investment in 1965 has grown into billions of dollars.

Is Warren Buffett the best investor of all time? On the combination of return, length of record, size of capital and influence, he has a strong claim. Other investors have posted higher annual returns over shorter periods or with smaller sums. Few have kept market-beating results going for so long with so much money.

John Neff: value with a contrarian edge

John Neff (1931 to 2019) is less famous than Buffett but belongs among the top value investors in history. He joined Wellington Management in 1964 and stayed for more than three decades, managing three funds. His best known was the Windsor Fund.

The strategy. Neff was a value investor with a contrarian streak:

• Low price-to-earnings ratios. He favored stocks that the market priced cheaply relative to their earnings, often because they were out of favor.
• Dividend yield. Strong dividends gave him a return while he waited for the market to re-rate the stock. He often judged a stock by its expected earnings growth plus its dividend yield, relative to its P/E.
• Indirect routes into popular themes. Rather than buy the most fashionable names in a hot industry, he looked for less obvious companies that would benefit from the same trend at lower valuations.

The record. Neff ran Windsor for 31 years, ending in 1995. The fund earned an average annual return of 13.7% over that period, compared with 10.73% for the S&P 500. That margin of about three percentage points a year sounds small, but over 31 years it compounds into a large difference: at 13.7% a year, a 1964 investment grew more than 53 times.

John Templeton: buying at maximum pessimism

Sir John Templeton (1912 to 2008) was one of the past century’s leading contrarian investors and a pioneer of global investing at a time when American investors rarely looked beyond U.S. stocks.

The strategy. Templeton’s guiding rule was to buy “at the point of maximum pessimism.” Contrarians assume that markets overreact in both directions, so the assets everyone avoids can be priced well below their worth. His approach included:

• Buying during crises. In 1939, as war broke out in Europe, he famously borrowed money and bought shares in a large number of companies then trading for under a dollar. Many had been written off, and most of them later recovered. He also bought European companies during the darkest days of World War II, when many investors believed Europe would not recover.
• Global diversification. Templeton searched the whole world for bargains and helped bring international equity markets into the mainstream. His Templeton Growth Fund, launched in the 1950s, became one of the best-known international funds.
• Selling into euphoria. The rule works both ways. He sold his technology holdings before the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.

In 1992 he sold Templeton Funds, by then among the largest international fund groups, to the Franklin Group for $913 million.

What it demands. Contrarian investing sounds simple but is psychologically hard. You buy when the news is terrible and your friends are selling, and you may stay wrong for a long time before prices turn. Templeton combined that nerve with careful research into whether a cheap asset was cheap for temporary or permanent reasons.

Thomas Rowe Price Jr.: the father of growth investing

Thomas Rowe Price Jr. (1898 to 1983) built his philosophy during the Great Depression, a period when many investors focused on buying cheap, beaten-down stocks. Price took the opposite view and founded his firm, T. Rowe Price, in 1937.

The strategy. Price believed in buying high-quality, well-managed companies with strong potential for long-term earnings growth and holding them while that growth played out. Growth investors accept higher valuations than value investors do, because they expect rising earnings, sales and market share to justify the price over time. His criteria included:

• Quality management
• Leadership in research and development
• High profit margins
• Industries in a growth phase rather than in decline

Discipline over excitement. Price paired growth with deep research and a long-term perspective. That was unusual in an era when many market participants chased quick trading profits. He also argued that companies, like living things, go through life cycles, and that investors should sell when a company’s growth phase matures.

The firm that bears his name became a globally recognized mutual fund and investment management company, and his approach shaped how modern growth funds operate.

Peter Lynch: invest in what you know

Peter Lynch (born 1944) managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990. During those 13 years the fund’s assets grew from $18 million to $14 billion, and Lynch beat the S&P 500 in 11 of them. His average annual return is commonly reported at about 29%; some calculations put it nearer 27%. Either figure places his run among the best in mutual fund history.

The strategy. Lynch is often described as flexible. He would buy whatever type of stock offered the best opportunity, whether fast growers, cyclicals, turnarounds or steady dividend payers. What stayed constant was how he picked individual stocks:

• Invest in what you know. Ordinary people often spot promising companies before Wall Street does, by noticing a crowded store, a product everyone is buying or a service they rely on at work.
• Do the homework. Familiarity was the starting point, not the decision. Lynch insisted on checking earnings, debt and valuation before buying.
• Look for tenbaggers. He used this term for stocks that rise tenfold. A few of those in a portfolio can outweigh many small losses.
• Understand the story. He wanted to be able to explain in a couple of sentences why he owned a stock and what had to happen for it to succeed.

His books, including One Up On Wall Street (1989), made his methods accessible to individual investors.

Jesse Livermore: brilliant trader, cautionary tale

Jesse Livermore (1877 to 1940) appears on lists of famous stock traders for both his triumphs and his failures. He had no formal education in finance and learned from his own wins and losses.

His rise. Livermore began trading in his early teens and reported gains of more than $1,000 by age 16. He made money in “bucket shops,” which did not execute real trades; customers simply bet against the house on price movements. Later he moved to real markets and became known for short selling and market timing.

His biggest win. During the 1929 crash, Livermore shorted stocks and reportedly made about $100 million, a sum worth billions in today’s dollars. His trading life became the basis for Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), a thinly fictionalized account by Edwin Lefèvre that traders still read.

His downfall. Livermore went bankrupt at least three times. He developed detailed trading rules, such as cutting losses quickly and waiting for the market to confirm a move, but he often broke them when emotion took over, especially with oversized bets. He died by suicide in 1940.

The lessons. Livermore’s ideas about trend following, position sizing and cutting losers still circulate among traders. His life shows what happens when those rules are not followed: a trader can be right about the market, still bet too much, and lose everything on the next mistake.

George Soros: global macro and reflexivity

George Soros (born 1930) is the clearest example of a macro speculator, someone who turns views on economies, interest rates and currencies into large, often leveraged positions.

The fund. In 1973 Soros founded Soros Fund Management (initially working with Jim Rogers), which became the Quantum Fund. For almost three decades he ran it aggressively, reportedly earning an average annual return of more than 31%.

Breaking the Bank of England. His most famous trade came in 1992. Britain was trying to keep the pound within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism at a level Soros believed it could not sustain. He built a huge short position against the pound. When the UK government gave up and withdrew from the mechanism on what became known as Black Wednesday, Soros reportedly made about $1 billion.

Reflexivity. Soros’s theory holds that market participants’ perceptions do not just reflect fundamentals; they can change them. Rising share prices can make it easier for a company to raise capital and grow, which then seems to justify the higher price. Falling confidence in a currency can force policy changes that weaken it further. He used this idea to spot booms and busts that feed on themselves, and to judge when they would reverse.

What it takes. Macro trading of this kind depends on leverage, fast decisions and the willingness to reverse a view quickly. It is not a strategy most individuals can copy.

Jack Bogle: the index fund pioneer

John “Jack” Bogle (1929 to 2019) may have done more for ordinary investors than anyone else on this list. He founded the Vanguard Group in 1975 and in 1976 launched the first index mutual fund available to individual investors. It was initially called the First Index Investment Trust and later became the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

The strategy. Bogle’s argument was that most active managers fail to beat the market after their fees, so investors are better off owning the whole market at the lowest possible cost. His ideal fund was:

• Passively managed, tracking a broad index like the S&P 500 rather than picking stocks
• Low cost, because every dollar of expense comes directly out of the investor’s return
• No load, meaning no sales commission to buy or sell
• Low turnover, which keeps trading costs and taxable distributions down

Why costs matter so much. For example, assume two funds both earn 7% a year before costs. One charges 0.05% a year and the other 1.00%. Over 30 years, $10,000 grows to about $75,000 in the cheaper fund and about $57,000 in the more expensive one. The underlying investments are identical; the difference is entirely fees compounding against the investor.

Bogle was mocked at first, and the early index fund attracted little money. Over the following decades, index funds and exchange-traded funds grew into one of the dominant ways people invest. His answer for a typical saver was a diversified, low-cost index fund held for decades.

Carl Icahn: activist investing

Carl Icahn (born 1936) earned the label “corporate raider” in the 1980s, before shareholder activism was mainstream. His hostile takeover of the airline TWA in 1985 established his reputation for forcing change at companies he considered poorly run.

The strategy. Activist investors buy significant stakes in public companies and use their ownership to push for changes. Icahn’s approach combined value analysis with a willingness to fight management publicly. Typical demands include:

• Selling or spinning off unprofitable divisions
• Replacing chief executives or board members
• Returning cash to shareholders through dividends or share buybacks
• Merging with or selling the company to another business

The Icahn lift. Wall Street uses this phrase for the jump in a stock’s price that has often followed news that Icahn is buying. Other investors expect his pressure to unlock value and buy in ahead of the changes.

Through his holding company, Icahn Enterprises, he has taken on some of America’s largest corporations, including RJR Nabisco, Texaco and Apple. Critics argue that activists can push companies toward short-term payouts at the expense of long-term investment. Supporters counter that activists hold complacent managers accountable to shareholders.

Bill Gross: the bond king

William H. “Bill” Gross (born 1944) is the main fixed-income name on most lists of famous Wall Street investors. He cofounded Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) in 1971 and built its Total Return Fund into the world’s largest bond fund for a time, with PIMCO’s assets under management eventually reaching into the trillions.

The strategy. Gross treated bonds as something to be actively managed rather than simply bought and held to maturity. His approach included:

• Forming views on interest rates, inflation and the economy, then adjusting the portfolio’s duration (its sensitivity to rate changes) accordingly
• Moving among government bonds, mortgage-backed securities, corporate debt and foreign bonds based on where he saw value
• Treating “total return,” meaning interest income plus price changes, as the goal rather than income alone

Gross helped bring active bond investing to the attention of both institutions and individual investors. He left PIMCO in 2014 during a period of internal management conflict and then managed bond portfolios at Janus Henderson until he retired in 2019.

Other names often counted among great investors

• Charlie Munger, Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, pushed Buffett toward buying high-quality businesses at fair prices and became known for his “mental models” approach to decisions.
• Jim Simons founded Renaissance Technologies and used mathematics and computer models instead of fundamental analysis, a key part of how quantitative investing developed; see Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies.
• John Maynard Keynes is known mainly as an economist, but he also managed investments, including the endowment fund of King’s College, Cambridge; see John Maynard Keynes: Life and Keynesian Economics.
• Cathie Wood founded ARK Invest, which focuses on what it calls “disruptive innovation,” including artificial intelligence, genomics, electric vehicles and blockchain. Her early, public bets on Tesla and bitcoin brought her wide attention.

Why the classic list lacks diversity

The traditional greatest-investor lists are almost entirely made up of men, mostly white men. That reflects history more than talent: for much of the 20th century, wealth, access to capital markets and finance careers were concentrated among affluent white men through exclusionary hiring, unequal access to education and closed professional networks.

That has been changing. Widely followed investors and finance leaders now come from a broader range of backgrounds, including:

1. Abigail Johnson, CEO and president of Fidelity Investments.
2. Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm focused on enterprise software and technology-enabled businesses.
3. Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, a value-oriented firm that often targets overlooked companies.
4. Li Lu, founder of Himalaya Capital, a value investor and a key figure in U.S. and China cross-border investing.
5. Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform aimed at closing the gender investing gap.

The main strategies, side by side

• Value investing (Graham, Buffett, Neff): buy businesses for less than they are worth, with a margin of safety.
• Contrarian investing (Templeton): buy what the crowd fears and sell what it loves.
• Growth investing (Price, Lynch): own high-quality companies whose earnings can rise for years, even at higher valuations.
• Speculative trading (Livermore): use timing, trend and short selling to profit from price moves over shorter periods.
• Global macro (Soros): take large, often leveraged positions on economies, currencies and interest rates.
• Index investing (Bogle): own a broad market cheaply and hold it.
• Activist investing (Icahn): buy a large stake and push management to change the business.
• Active bond management (Gross): manage interest-rate and credit exposure for total return.
• Quantitative investing (Simons): let mathematical models find and trade patterns.

These approaches conflict in places. Graham bought cheap stocks while Price paid up for growth. Bogle argued against stock picking altogether, and Soros traded on short-term macro views that a buy-and-hold investor would ignore. The fact that all of them succeeded is itself a lesson: a strategy works when it is applied consistently by someone suited to it.

What successful investors have in common

Behind the different methods, the same habits keep appearing.

A clear, written-down philosophy. Each of these investors could explain what they bought and why. That clarity let them hold positions through bad periods instead of drifting from one approach to another.

Research before conviction. Graham read balance sheets, Price studied management and markets, and Lynch visited companies and checked their numbers. Even Soros’s macro bets rested on deep study of economic policy.

Emotional control in extremes. Templeton bought during war and panic, and Buffett during crises, while Livermore’s failures came when emotion overrode his own rules. Fear and greed hurt investors most at market tops and bottoms, which is exactly when discipline counts.

Risk management. Graham’s margin of safety, Bogle’s diversification and Lynch’s broad portfolio all limit the damage from being wrong, while Livermore’s bankruptcies show the cost of oversized positions.

Patience. Neff’s edge of a few points a year and Buffett’s long holding periods worked because they had decades to compound. Short-term traders like Livermore and Soros are the exception.

Some luck. Even the greatest investors benefited from timing, such as a long bull market, a well-placed crisis or the right mentor. Luck does not explain decades of results, but it does mean that copying a great investor’s moves will not guarantee their outcome.

Applying their lessons to your own portfolio

The greatest investors offer practical guidance for building a portfolio, even if you never pick a single stock.

1. Match a strategy to your temperament. If you cannot stomach buying during a crash, a contrarian approach will fail you at the worst moment. If you dislike research, Bogle’s index approach may suit you best.
2. Keep costs low. High fees compound against you every year.
3. Demand a margin of safety. Avoid paying so much that everything has to go right for you to earn a decent return.
4. Diversify across companies, industries and, following Templeton, countries.
5. Size positions so a mistake is survivable.
6. Think in years and decades. Most of the records in this guide are measured over 13 to 60 years.
7. Learn from crises. Crashes, from 1929 to the 2008 financial crisis, are when contrarian buyers made some of their best purchases and overleveraged traders were wiped out.

FAQs

The Bottom Line

Anyone choosing an investing approach can learn more from these investors' habits than from copying their trades. Value, growth, contrarian, macro and index methods all worked when applied consistently by someone suited to them. For a typical saver, the shared lessons point to a strategy that fits your temperament, low costs, diversification, positions sized to survive mistakes, and a horizon measured in decades.