Great investors: what they really earned

The one record you can check

Plenty of investors are called great; very few publish their full record. Hedge funds report to their clients, not to the public, and most famous track records live in books and interviews that nobody can audit. Berkshire Hathaway is the exception: its annual report opens with a table of every year since 1965 — the change in Berkshire’s share price next to the S&P 500 with dividends. The latest report, filed with the SEC, runs to 2025, and this article is built on that table.

It is a record of a company’s shares, not of a fund: Berkshire owns whole businesses (insurers, a railroad, utilities) as well as a portfolio of stocks, and its share price is what the market paid for all of it. Warren Buffett ran Berkshire from 1965 through 2025; in the 2025 annual report Greg Abel signs the letter as CEO, and Buffett is listed as chairman of the board.

Every year since 1965: who won, and by how much

Each column is one year. Above the line Berkshire beat the S&P 500 that year; below it, the index won. One brick is 5 percentage points of the gap. Berkshire won 40 of the 61 years and trailed in 21 (34%).

The tallest wall is 1976: Berkshire +129.3%, the index +23.6%, a lead of +105.7 pt. The deepest hole is 1999: Berkshire −19.9% while the index made +21.0% (−40.9 pt). And watch the height of the walls rather than their colour: the dashed line, each decade’s lead a year, sinks from +21.8 pt to −0.8 pt.

What $1,000 became

Put $1,000 into Berkshire in late 1964 and, by the overall gain in Berkshire’s own table (6,099,294%), it was worth about $61M at the end of 2025: ×61K. The same money in the S&P 500, dividends reinvested, grew ×462 to $462K. Berkshire’s pile ends up 132 times bigger — that is what +9.2 pt a year does over 61 years.

The chart uses a log scale: each step up the axis is ten times the one below, otherwise the index would be a flat stripe along the bottom. After inflation (US consumer prices rose ×10.4 over those years), the shares returned 15.2% a year and the index 6.4%: in 1964 dollars, $1,000 became $5.85M and $44.3K.

How long each tenfold took

Another way to see the slowdown: count the years it took the money to grow ten times over, then ten times again. Berkshire’s quickest tenfold took 6 years; the latest, to ×10,000 in 2007, took 14 years. The S&P 500 reached ×100 by 2014.

The edge, decade by decade

Decade by decade, the lead shrinks. In the 1960s (1965–1969) Berkshire’s shares outran the index by +21.8 pt a year; in the 1980s, the best whole decade, by +21.7 pt (39.1% a year against 17.4%). The weakest whole decade, the 2010s, came out at −0.5 pt.

Part of the reason is plain arithmetic: a company worth a few million dollars can double by buying one good business; one worth hundreds of billions cannot. In the 2020s (2020–2025) the shares are behind: 14.3% a year against 15.1%. Over the last 10 years (2016–2025) they returned 14.3% a year and the index 14.8%; over the last 20, 11.3% against 11.0%.

Every 10-year stretch

Take any 10 years in a row — there are 52 such stretches since 1965 — and compare the two. Berkshire came out ahead in 43 of them. It lost 9, and none of those began before 2003; the last stretch it won ran 2013–2022.

The losing years

A 19.7% average hides some ugly years. Berkshire’s shares fell in 11 of the 61 years, the S&P 500 in 13. The worst was 1974: −48.7%, while the index made −26.4%. The best, 1976: +129.3%.

The bad years rarely came together: both fell in only 6. In 7 of the index’s 13 losing years Berkshire still rose, and in 5 of its own 11 it fell while the index climbed. To collect the 19.7%, a shareholder had to sit through every one of them.

Buffett’s bet: an index fund against hedge funds

At the end of 2007 Buffett bet that over the next ten years an S&P 500 index fund would beat a selection of hedge funds once their fees were paid. Protégé Partners took the other side and chose five funds of hedge funds, each spreading its money over many hedge funds. The prize went to charity.

Performance comes, performance goes. Fees never falter.

He won. From 2008 through 2017 the S&P 500 with dividends gained +126%, 8.5% a year, and in that letter Buffett reports that his index fund finished ahead of all five. The twist: his own company would have lost the bet. Berkshire’s shares gained +110% over the same ten years, 7.7% a year, and were ahead of the index at the end of only 1 of the 10 years.

What famous investors hold now

Hedge funds keep their returns private, but not their holdings: every manager with more than $100 million in US-listed stocks files a Form 13F with the SEC each quarter. Here are the latest portfolios of 8 famous investors as fingerprints — one box per holding, sized by its weight, the 5 largest in dark.

Berkshire’s Q2 2026 report lists 29 holdings worth $299B, and the 5 largest make up 69% of it. The most concentrated here is Li Lu’s Himalaya Capital: 95% in 5 stocks. The most spread out is Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office, with 86 holdings. The busiest over the last 4 quarters was Duquesne Family Office (Stanley Druckenmiller): it bought about 142% and sold about 162% of its average portfolio. The calmest, Berkshire Hathaway: 16% bought, 19% sold.