Investment success like the masters

[stock guru]

Investment success like the masters
12 September 2006

George Soros and Warren Buffett are the world's most successful investors. Can ordinary investors learn anything from their investment habits? John McCrone finds out.

Two more different approaches to investing could hardly be imagined. One plays the markets, the other ignores them. One can be in and out of deals over a weekend, the other likes to buy and hold forever.

Yet the pair are the world's most successful investors. Some may have more wealth from starting businesses or inheriting riches, but none – till corporate raider Carl Icahn finally snuck into their ranks in 2004 – have earned more from wheeler-dealing in the markets.

Warren Buffett, a 76-year-old from Omaha in midwest America, has made more than US$44 billion (NZ$69 billion) with his Berkshire Hathaway Group through an uncanny knack for spotting bargain companies.

Mr Buffett has averaged 25 per cent a year growth since he first started managing funds in 1956, having just one losing year compared with the 13 years of negative returns in the United States stockmarkets.

George Soros, a Hungarian Jew born in the same year just 18 days apart from Mr Buffett, has amassed a more modest US$7 billion, having started rather later in his career as a speculator in the currency and futures markets with his Quantum Funds.

Mr Soros – the man who broke the Bank of England when he gambled on the devaluation of the pound in 1992 – has averaged a return of over 28 per cent a year and $1000 invested with him in 1969 would have been turned into $5 million today.
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