13F INVESTOR

Seth Klarman is one of the all time great value investors, having crushed the market indices since the early 1980's. He's famous for his deep bottom up research and his Benjamin Graham "cigar butt" style of finding value. His thoughts on markets are so revered that his out of print book  Margin of Safety  sells for hundreds of dollars on Amazon.  Our backtested strategy cloning his top 20 positions would have beaten the S&P500 by around 4 % points per year going back to 2001. This kind of outperformance would have turned a $10, 000 investment into $51, 000 compared to $26, 000 in the S&P500. You can track his holdings with real money here .   The backtested model portfolio is  here. If you're like me, you are excited by the outperformance but probably wondering how to implement this type of portfolio without getting bogged down in trading fees and spending hours tracking, building, and maintaining the account. If you've done any investi...

Dan Loeb's Third Point hedge fund has been another strong out performer over time. Our backtested portfolio tracking his top 20 holdings has beaten the S&P500 by around 6% points per year since 2001 and would have turned a $10, 000 investment into around $67, 000 compared to $26, 000 in the S&P500 over the same time period.   The backtested portfolio is here. If you're like me, you are excited by the outperformance but probably wondering how to implement this type of portfolio without getting bogged down in trading fees and spending hours tracking, building, and maintaining the account. If you've done any investing in the past, you know that there are fees for each trade which would usually cost around $10 per trade. In this example, running a 20 stock portfolio would cost about $200-400 in trading fees each year to track and maintain depending on the amount of portfolio turnover each quarter. Thanks to innovation in the financial-tech industry,...

Chuck Akre's Focus fund has racked up a nice track record over time, beating the S&P 500 by around 6% points per year. We especially like his focus on "compounders" or companies that have a long runway of growth in their industry ahead of them and have proven they can achieve above average long term returns on capital. Check out our Top 10 equally weighted tracker!   The backtest is  here. If you're like me, you are excited by the outperformance but probably wondering how to implement this type of portfolio without getting bogged down in trading fees and spending hours tracking, building, and maintaining the account. If you've done any investing in the past, you know that there are fees for each trade which would usually cost around $10 per trade. In this example, running a 20 stock portfolio would cost about $200-400 in trading fees each year to track and maintain depending on the amount of portfolio turnover each quarter. Thanks to innov...

It takes a lot of money to get into the top performing hedge funds. David Tepper's Appaloosa Management is certainly one of them. Tepper is especially famous for his recent outperformance and his early bullish calls on Quantitative Easing after the financial crisis when most market participants were still skeptical.    Our equally weighted portfolio tracking Mr. Tepper backtests extremely well, beating the S&P 500 by around 12% points per year going back to 2001. At 18% compounded, this level of outperformance would turn a $10,000 investment into $156,000 cumulative compared to only $26,000 in the S&P 500 over the same period of time.  The backtest is Here. If you're like me, you are excited by the outperformance but probably wondering how to implement this type of portfolio without getting bogged down in trading fees and spending hours tracking, building, and maintaining the account. If you've done any investing in the past, you know that there...

Another value investor we track at 13F Investor is long time value investor and former CEO of GEICO Lou Simpson. Lou put together an investment track record on par with "the Oracle" Warren Buffett during his long tenure at Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary Geico. This Motif seeks to replicate his current portfolio. Following Lou Simpson's portfolio since he begin reporting in 2012 after his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway would have beaten the S&P500 by 1.7% per year annualized as the chart below shows.   source: whalewisdom The backtest is Here. If you're like me, you are excited by the outperformance but probably wondering how to implement this type of portfolio without getting bogged down in trading fees and spending hours tracking, building, and maintaining the account. If you've done any investing in the past, you know that there are fees for each trade which would usually cost around $10 per trade. In this example, runn...

Dalal Street Capital is one of the best performing funds of 2017 that we track at 13F Investor. Dalal is run by Mohnish Pabrai, a well respected deep value investor and author. Mohnish runs a relatively small fund with apx. $400 million assets under management and has written several books revered by the value investing community The Dhando Investor and Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing . We particularly enjoyed the Dhando Investor for its examples of how to select low risk stocks that have typically been beaten down, oversold, or are otherwise under appreciated by Mr. Market. "Heads I Win, Tails I Don't Lose Much" is his motto in the book and it seems to work well over time. As of this writing, our  Motif  tracking Pabrai's fund is up 43% year to date and 63% for the 1 year period. You can invest in our tracker fund or just use it to look up the holdings for use on a different broker's platform. For more research on Pabrai's fund, check out  Guru Focus ...

Do you spend hours trying to figure out which stocks to buy only to sell those same stocks when the market goes down. Sound familiar? Remember that stocks represent actual businesses in the real world, they are not simply pieces of paper that trade around or a series of bits and bytes on a computer screen. Let's face it, you probably never knew anything about those companies in the first place and therefore you had no conviction of whether to buy or sell when the market became manic depressive. A serious investor spends more time, than you or I likely have, researching the best businesses to allocate capital to. Even if you have the time and the aptitude to thoroughly research businesses, you are still left in the unenviable position of competing against some of the smartest people around. That is a harsh reality, but don't feel bad, far less than half of professionally paid money managers beat beat their respective benchmarks in any given year and less than 10% outperform...