Warren Buffett

Buffett's approach is simple to describe and almost impossible to copy. He buys great businesses at fair prices and then just...

holds them. Forever.

He calls it "buy and hold" but that undersells it — he means hold until the sun burns out. He looks for companies with a real unfair advantage over competitors.

Something that protects them from being wiped out. He calls it a "moat" — like the water around a castle.

Think Coca-Cola. Everyone knows it.

Nobody can replicate it. He puts a LOT of money into a small number of bets — usually his top five holdings make up over 70% of everything.

Most fund managers would have a panic attack at that level of concentration. Buffett calls it being convicted.

His old mentor Graham taught him to hunt for cheap, beaten-down companies and flip them fast. Charlie Munger, his business partner for 45+ years, talked him out of that.

Munger said: just buy the best businesses you can find and never sell. Buffett admits that shift made him hundreds of billions of dollars.

George Soros

Soros doesn't use a fixed strategy. He uses a theory.

He calls it reflexivity — the idea that market participants don't just react to fundamentals, they influence them. House prices going up makes people confident.

Confident people borrow more. Borrowing pushes prices higher.

Until it doesn't. Markets create self-reinforcing loops that diverge from reality for a long time before snapping back.

In practice, this meant making very large macro bets — currencies, interest rates, commodities, whole stock markets — when he believed a loop had gone too far. He didn't diversify to reduce risk.

He concentrated into high-conviction positions and used leverage. He famously said: "It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong."

Warren Buffett

Rule No. 1: Never lose money.

Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No.

1. Buy businesses, not stocks — the distinction matters more than most investors realize.

Let compounding do the heavy lifting and get out of its way. Never use debt to invest.

Be fearful when others are greedy, greedy when others are fearful. Time in the market destroys timing the market in every long enough data set.

For most people, a low-cost S&P 500 index fund will outperform almost any active strategy, including most professional money managers — including, he's said, what most of his estate will go into after he's gone.

George Soros

He believes in fallibility — specifically, that every market participant is operating on imperfect information, including himself. His approach: form a hypothesis, bet on it, watch for signals that the hypothesis is wrong, and change course decisively when those signals arrive.

He is explicitly anti-certainty. He thinks the most dangerous investor is the one who mistakes confidence for competence.

His philosophy of the open society — the political version — applies equally to markets: no position is so right that it can't be challenged.

Warren Buffett

Buffett's whole thing is: do so much homework that the risk basically disappears. He doesn't diversify across 500 stocks to protect himself — he researches 10 companies so deeply that he's more confident about those 10 than most people are about anything.

He never borrows money to invest. Ever.

He keeps a mountain of cash at Berkshire — over $100 billion sitting around doing nothing — specifically so he can swoop in when everyone else is panicking and selling cheap. He once called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction" back in 2002.

Wall Street laughed. Then 2008 happened and Wall Street stopped laughing.

He doesn't predict where the stock market is going. He predicts whether a business will still be dominant in 20 years.

That's it.

George Soros

He had an unusual relationship with physical discomfort as a risk signal. He's talked about trusting his back pain — when a position was going wrong, he'd feel it before he saw it in the numbers.

That's either profound intuition or a good story. Either way, he wasn't a systematic rule-follower.

He made enormous bets and reversed course on short notice when the thesis broke. His risk management wasn't "don't lose money." It was "don't lose so much that you can't play again."

Warren Buffett

Despite a $120B net worth, Buffett still lives in the same gray stucco house in Omaha he bought in 1958 for $31,500. He drives himself to work.

Breakfast is McDonald's — he orders based on his mood: $2.61, $2.95, or $3.17. He plays bridge obsessively, often online with Bill Gates.

He drinks multiple Cokes a day (Berkshire owns a large stake in Coca-Cola; coincidence is left as an exercise to the reader). He has pledged to give away more than 99% of his wealth, primarily to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and his children's foundations.

He takes a $100,000 annual salary from Berkshire. He does not own a smartphone.

George Soros

He lives in New York and his estate in the Hamptons. He donated over $32 billion — more than 80% of his peak wealth — to the Open Society Foundations.

He's been married three times; his third wife Tamiko Bolton is 42 years younger than him. He plays tennis.

He's in his mid-90s and still occasionally publishes essays on markets and geopolitics. He handed chairmanship of the Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander in 2023.

Warren Buffett

Apple. Berkshire started buying Apple in 2016 — late by any tech investor's standard, from a man who spent decades insisting he didn't understand technology.

By 2023, the position had grown to over $170 billion, returning more than 800%. Buffett called it the best business he'd ever seen and admitted he should have bought it earlier.

Honorable mention: American Express in 1963 during the Great Salad Oil Scandal, when he put 40% of the Buffett Partnership into AmEx at distressed prices while the rest of Wall Street was running away.

George Soros

September 16, 1992. Black Wednesday.

Soros had been building a short position against the British pound for months. Britain was in the Exchange Rate Mechanism — a system that required it to keep the pound within a fixed band against other European currencies.

He believed the pound was overvalued and Britain couldn't sustain the interest rates needed to defend it. He was right.

The Bank of England spent billions trying to hold the peg. It failed.

Britain withdrew from the ERM. Soros made approximately $1 billion that day.

Total profits in the surrounding weeks were closer to $2 billion. He became known as the man who broke the Bank of England.

Warren Buffett

Buying Berkshire Hathaway. He bought it in 1962 as a cigar butt — a cheap, dying textile company — and then kept it instead of winding it down into a clean insurance holding company.

The C-corp structure meant decades of tax drag. He has estimated this single mistake — triggered partly by spite after the owner tried to lowball him on a buyout — cost Berkshire and its shareholders roughly $200 billion over 50 years.

He also admits missing Google and Amazon, both of which he understood well enough to buy and simply didn't.

George Soros

2000. Soros had been warning about the dot-com bubble for years.

He was right about it being a bubble. But he kept buying tech stocks because he thought the momentum would continue a little longer.

It didn't. The Quantum Fund lost $3 billion in a matter of months.

He later said: "I was too early and then I panicked." That's a remarkable thing for someone of his stature to say. The lesson: being right about the direction of a trade doesn't mean you're right about the timing.

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1930. He bought his first stock at age 11 — three shares of a company called Cities Service.

He paid $114. He was eleven.

By 14, he owned a 40-acre farm and had filed his first tax return. He applied to Harvard Business School and got rejected.

Best thing that ever happened to him, honestly. He ended up at Columbia instead, where he met Benjamin Graham — the guy who basically invented the idea of buying undervalued stocks.

After graduating in 1951, Buffett started his own investment partnership in Omaha with $105,000 from family and friends. He turned that into something much bigger, compounding at around 30% per year for over a decade.

Then in 1969, he shut it down and quietly took over a dying Massachusetts textile company he had bought partly out of spite. That company was Berkshire Hathaway.

What happened next is the greatest investing run in history — and it started with a grudge.

George Soros

George Soros was born György Schwartz in Budapest in 1930. His family survived the Nazi occupation by obtaining forged papers and hiding.

He saw up close what happens when governments go bad. He fled Hungary after the war, worked as a railway porter and waiter in London, and studied philosophy at the London School of Economics — where he became a student of Karl Popper, whose big idea was that open societies are better than closed ones.

That stuck.

He moved to New York in 1956 and spent the next decade working at brokerages and learning the markets. In 1973 he co-founded the Quantum Fund with Jim Rogers.

From 1970 to 2000, the fund averaged roughly 30% annual returns. That's the second-best sustained hedge fund record in history, behind only Jim Simons.

He stepped back from active management gradually through the 2000s and has spent most of his time on philanthropy ever since.

Warren Buffett

His main vehicle is Berkshire Hathaway — a company he took over in 1965 when it was a dying textile mill. He basically gutted the textile business and turned the whole thing into a giant money machine that owns other businesses.

Today it's one of the most valuable companies on earth. On the stock side, his biggest bet is Apple — worth over $175 billion at its peak.

He also owns huge chunks of Bank of America, Coca-Cola (since 1988 — he really doesn't sell), American Express, and Chevron. Then there are the companies Berkshire owns outright.

GEICO, one of the biggest car insurers in America. Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a massive railroad.

Dairy Queen, See's Candies, Duracell. Basically a random collection of boring, cash-generating businesses that he loves precisely because they're boring.

His first fund — Buffett Partnership Ltd. — ran from 1956 to 1969.

He returned around 30% per year while the market did 8.6%. Then he shut it down, said he couldn't find enough cheap stocks, and walked away at the top.

George Soros

Soros Fund Management is the vehicle. The Quantum Fund, which ran under it, returned roughly 30% annually for three decades.

The 1992 trade — shorting £10 billion of British sterling — was the most famous single day in hedge fund history, but the 30-year sustained record is the real story.

He stepped down from managing outside money in 2011 and converted to a family office. He's donated over $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, which funds democracy and civil society programs in over 120 countries.

That's more money than he kept for himself.

Warren Buffett

University of Nebraska–Lincoln (B.S. in Business Administration, 1950).

Columbia Business School (M.S. in Economics, 1951) — the only school that mattered, where he studied under Benjamin Graham and got his only A+.

He also spent two years at the Wharton School before transferring. Harvard Business School rejected him.

He's described that rejection as one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him.

George Soros

London School of Economics, BSc and MSc in Philosophy, 1952. Student of Karl Popper.

He's credited Popper's concept of the open society as the foundation of both his philanthropic work and his investment theory.