Famous Stock Traders (Part 2)
It’s time for the second part of our two-part series that looks at stock traders who have rocked the investment world. If you’ve missed Part 1 it can be Read Here
Warren Buffett
Buffett is known as the Sage of Omaha, and he’s one of the very richest men in the world. As of 2015, his personal worth is around $72 billion – putting him only $7 billion behind Bill Gates. However, Buffett isn’t a traditional trader – he is a long-term investor. His Berkshire Hathaway empire has built its fortune on finding undervalued companies with strong management and long-term sustainable growth potential. Although Buffett does sell companies as well as buy them, he usually only divests when a company no longer has the potential that he bought it for.
Peter Lynch
Lynch is one of the world’s most productive fund managers. Although he’s only worth about $350 million, he’s a legend in the stock markets. In his time with Fidelity Investments’ Magellan Fund between 1977 and 1990, he managed to deliver an annual return of nearly 30% – more than two times the return on the S&P 500. This made Magellan Fund the world’s best performing mutual fund when he was in charge. Lynch has also written a number of books on investment, including one where he lays out some of his most successful investment strategies.
David Dreman
Originally from Canada, Dreman is a contrarian investor who is chairman of Dreman Value Management. He claims that he lost 75% of his value early on by following the crowd, and ever since has looked for opportunities that run the other way. His company manages the assets of high net-worth individuals, as well as those of pension funds, mutual funds, foundations and endowments. He’s also the author of numerous scholarly articles, as well as four books on investment strategies.
Sir John Templeton
You’ve probably heard of Franklin Templeton Investments. That’s Templeton as in Sir John Templeton. He started out in the 1930s during the Great Depression. He bought 100 shares in every company on NYSE that was trading at less than one dollar a share, and then made huge profits by selling again when the US economy recovered dramatically during World War II. He went on to become a billionaire by being the first to set up a globally diversified mutual fund – the Templeton Growth Fund. Templeton died at the ripe old age of 95 in 2008, but not before he managed to make the Sunday Times Rich List. Interestingly, Templeton was a strong opponent of technical analysis, sticking to fundamental analysis when choosing stocks.
John Neff
Neff is widely regarded as one of the best mutual fund investors of the last 40 years, and is noted for his value investing approach and contrarian style. For many years he managed the Vanguard Windsor fund, where he took a very basic investment strategy – he invested in companies that had low P/E ratios and good dividends. He steered away from companies that experience cyclical downturns, looking for companies in expanding markets with a good investment case. Neff is known for telling investors to sell when fundamentals get worse, or when a stock hits its target price.
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