The 11 greatest value investors of all time have made fortunes recognizing the worth of businesses and how to buy at a discount prices.
Value investing is the idea that investors can profit by buying equities worth more than their current trading value. Investors rely on balance sheets, margins of safety and other fundamental data points to assess whether or not the stock market has mispriced an equity that can be purchased before everyone else notices.
The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time Seek to Receive More Than They Pay
The challenge of value investing is a bit nuanced. Benjamin Graham — the father of modern value investing — says, “A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.”
Benjamin Graham is not the only world famous investor to recognize this. Listed below are the 11 greatest value investors of all time.
The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time, #11: John Neff
The late John Neff became known as a contrarian, although he likely would have questioned the title. Neff described himself as a value investor and saw the most undervalued companies in areas overlooked by the market.
Neff ran the Vanguard Windsor fund for 31 years and averaged 13.7% growth per year, beating the S&P 500 by an average of 3%. He was considered the “professional’s professional.” Despite many of his more contrarian investments, many money managers trusted their personal portfolio to him, believing it would be safer with him than anyone else.
The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time, #10: Peter Lynch
Peter Lynch was an adaptive investor who varied his investment style according to whatever worked at the time. Although he was often described as a chameleon, Lynch consistently allocated funds to companies he saw as undervalued from a technical standpoint.
Peter Lynch had an impressive winning streak: when managing the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990, beating the S&P 500 index 11 of those 13 years. This grew the fund’s portfolio from $18 million to more than $14 billion, averaging a 29% annual return on his investments.
The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time, #9: Marc Faber
Dr. Marc Faber was a Swiss-born investor who received his PhD from the esteemed University of Zurich at the young age of 24. The man rallied against popular opinion to forecast Black Monday in 1987, the Japanese bubble in 1990, the gaming stock crash of 1993 and the Asia Pacific Crisis of 1997. Other predictions and lamentations of his can be found in his publication, The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.
Faber’s is a value investor at heart with a contrarian investment philosophy . His motto is, “Follow the course opposite to custom and you will almost always be right.”
The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time, #8: Bill Miller
Bill Miller is a fund manager, philanthropist and served as the principal portfolio manager of Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust. He heavily invested in Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) , Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Bitcoin, among other things.
Miller took a long-term view about what value an equity provides. This led Miller to diversify his portfolio with several equities often overlooked by traditional value investors, saying, “Sometimes growth is cheap and value expensive. The question is not growth or value, but where is the best value.”
The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time, #7: Jim Rogers
Jim Rogers is an American investor, financial commentator and cofounder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros. The fund had its most successful years shortly after its founding, from 1973 to 1980 — under Rogers’ and Soros’ management, the portfolio grew 4,200%. The S&P 500 grew just 47% during the same time period.Rogers is a notorious bear. While he focuses much of his investments on undervalued stocks and equities, the investor concentrates a significant portion of his portfolio in commodities and “real goods,” which he believes is an undervalued industry as a whole. In line with this philosophy, Rogers has urged many young investors to leave Wall Street and focus their careers on mining, engineering, farming and other industries producing sustainable goods. The 11 Greatest Value Investors of All Time, #6: David Dreman David Dreman is a notable value investor who authored several books on the topic and founded Dreman Value Management, an investment company. Dreman’s approach to value investing is largely […]
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