The 9 Best Investors of All Time
The best investors, ever.
In every field of human endeavor, an elite few shine brighter than the rest. Some disciplines don't lend themselves well to objective comparisons. Who are the best baristas, traffic cops and psychiatrists of all time? It's rather tough to say. But in areas like sports, box office results, book sales and yes, investing returns, the results are plain as day. It's truly fascinating to see how the best investors of all time built their fortunes, so here are the nine best investors ever, in all their glory.
David Swensen
As chief investment officer at Yale University, David Swensen is a financial all-star with a unparalleled track record. Swensen took control of Yale's endowment in the mid-1980s, and over the next 30 years generated annualized returns of 13.9 percent, beating its benchmark by 4 percent per year, and easily surpassing the returns of domestic equities, which earned 10.7 percent annually. His brilliance was in pioneering modern portfolio theory, which focuses on diversified exposure to different high-return asset classes. Swensen details his approach in his book, "Pioneering Portfolio Management."
Peter Lynch
Peter Lynch didn't just post eye-popping returns at Fidelity's Magellan Fund, he also penned two classic investing books, "One Up on Wall Street" and "Beating the Street." What gave him authority was his 13-year tenure at Magellan, where Lynch's growth-focused fund earned 29.2 percent annually, crushing the 15.8 percent average return of the Standard & Poor's 500 index. Lynch took Magellan from $18 million to $14 billion. If you would've invested $10,000 in Magellan in 1977, it would've turned into $280,000 by the time Lynch retired.
Carl Icahn
Carl Icahn has been a Wall Street icon since the 1980s, when he and T. Boone Pickens ushered in the age of corporate raiders and activist investors. Unlike Pickens, Icahn is still a mover and shaker 30 years later. In recent years, Icahn has made billions on big-time bets on Netflix (ticker: NFLX) and Apple (AAPL). That's helped his holding company, Icahn Enterprises (IEP) return 14.6 percent annually over the last 15 years, while the S&P 500 has returned just 5.6 percent annually over the same period.
John Templeton
John Templeton pioneered the use of diversified mutual funds and had consistently impressive returns over 60 years. In the depressed market of 1939, Templeton borrowed $10,000 and bought 100 shares of every stock under $1 on the New York Stock Exchange. All but four stocks would be profitable, and four years later he sold them for over $40,000. An investment of $10,000 in the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 would've turned into $2 million by 1992. Templeton died in 2008.
Bill Miller
Bill Miller has done something that many of the greatest investors ever have never accomplished: Over a 15-year period (1991-2005), Miller's Legg Mason Value Trust beat the S&P 500 index every year. Morningstar.com named him the "Fund Manager of the Decade" in 1999. Between 1990 to 2006, Miller turned his fund from $750 million to more than $20 billion in assets under management. An unconventional value investor, Miller believes high-growth stocks can be value stocks if they trade for the right price.
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett is widely considered the single best investor of all time, and that's simply because his numbers are so otherworldly. Since taking the helm at Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) in 1965, Buffett has returned 20.8 percent annually for shareholders, while the S&P 500 index returned less than half that -- 9.7 percent per annum. The duration, consistency, and magnitude of these exceptional returns are literally unmatched, and helped earned early (and even late-coming) shareholders a fortune.
Kirk Kerkorian
Kirk Kerkorian wasn't a stock market guru -- but he was a legendary investor all the same. Born to immigrants, he saved his earnings as a pilot during World War II, bought a $5,000 Cessna, and briefly flew commercially before buying the small Trans International Airlines for $60,000 in 1947. He grew it dramatically and sold it for $104 million in 1968. He parlayed his riches into Las Vegas and Hollywood, building several massive resorts and casinos and acquiring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Upon his death in 2015, Kerkorian was worth $4 billion.
John Bogle
John "Jack" Bogle is the only investor on this list who made his fortune merely trying to match the returns of the overall market. His groundbreaking idea was the low-cost index fund, a passive mutual fund that seeks to replicate the returns of benchmark indices through buying and holding its components. He founded The Vanguard Group in 1974, and the flagship Vanguard 500 index fund was opened in 1975 as the first index mutual fund. Today, Vanguard operates about 170 funds with more than $2 trillion in assets under management.
Jerry Buss
Like Kerkorian, Jerry Buss has an enviable rags-to-riches story -- and he didn't use the stock market. As a child, Buss worked odd jobs shoe-shining and ditch-digging to get by. After college, he and four other investors put down $6,000 and borrowed $100,000 to buy a 14-unit apartment building in 1959 that would morph into a $350 million real estate business within 18 years. He bought the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers, the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, the Forum, and another property for $67.5 million in 1979. Buss died in 2013.
John Divine is an investor, freelance financial writer and assistant editor at InvestorPlace.com. Follow him (at your own risk) on Twitter @divinebizkid or spam him with email at jdivine@investormedia.com.
