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The Stock Market Food Chain

Top Dogs of the
Stock Market

Five investors who sit at the top of the food chain for a reason. Here’s who they are, how they got there, what it cost them when they were wrong — and what they’re holding now.

Holdings come from public Form 13F filings — a dated snapshot of certain long U.S.-listed positions, not a live or complete portfolio. Each investor’s note below explains what his filing leaves out.
WB
The Oracle of Omaha

Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway
19.7%
a year, 1965–2025
vs. 10.5% for the S&P 500

Took control of a failing New England textile mill in 1965 and turned it into a roughly $1 trillion conglomerate. From 1965 through 2025, Berkshire’s per-share market value gained 6,099,294% — against 46,061% for the S&P 500.

Why he’s at the top

Durability rather than any single brilliant trade. Six decades of buying businesses he understood, holding them indefinitely, and — the harder discipline — sitting in cash and doing nothing when nothing looked cheap. Trained under Benjamin Graham in classic cheap-asset investing, then pushed by Charlie Munger toward paying fair prices for genuinely good businesses, which became Berkshire’s real engine.

Where he is now

Handed the CEO role to Greg Abel on December 31, 2025, and stepped down as Chairman on September 18, 2026. He is now Chairman Emeritus and remains a director; his son Howard Buffett is Chairman.

Top 5 reported positions

Q2 2026 13F · $299.25B reported
AAPL22.04%AXP17.14%KO10.86%GOOGL9.41%BAC9.20%

Berkshire’s Japanese trading-house stakes and wholly-owned businesses (GEICO, BNSF and others) never appear on a 13F.

See the full portfolio →
BA
The Activist

Bill Ackman

Pershing Square Capital Management
15.9%
a year net since 2004
vs. 10.7% for the S&P 500

Founded Pershing Square on January 1, 2004 with his own money plus $54 million from Leucadia National. Its core strategy has compounded to a cumulative 2,506% net, versus 851% for the S&P 500. Firm assets are roughly $28–30 billion.

Why he’s at the top

Conviction at scale. He runs eight to fourteen positions, holds them for years, and will campaign publicly to force change at a company he owns. The Canadian Pacific proxy fight returned about $2.6 billion — roughly 4x — and installed a new CEO. In March 2020 a $27 million credit hedge returned $2.6 billion in under a month, about 95x.

The other side

The same concentration is brutal when he’s wrong. His five-year Herbalife short is estimated to have cost $500 million to $1 billion; Pershing never disclosed the figure.

Where he is now

Took the management company public in April 2026, raising about $5 billion.

Top 5 reported positions

Q2 2026 13F · $19.47B reported
UBER12.72%BN12.58%MSFT11.89%AMZN10.49%HHH10.23%

Universal Music Group (Amsterdam-listed) and Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac (OTC) are large Pershing positions that don’t appear on the 13F.

See the full portfolio →
MS
The Visionary Gambler

Masayoshi Son

SoftBank Group
$20M → $100B+
Alibaba, 2000 to peak
among the best venture returns ever

Founded SoftBank in 1981 as a software distributor and built it into the most aggressive technology investor on earth. Net worth roughly $76 billion — the richest person in Japan.

Why he’s at the top

A willingness to be wrong expensively in pursuit of being right enormously. He has never stopped making bets the shape of Alibaba: he bought Arm Holdings for about $32 billion in 2016, listed it in 2023, and still owns roughly 87%.

The other side

The same appetite erased most of his paper fortune when SoftBank shares fell about 99% in the dot-com crash (estimates of the loss run from $59 to $78 billion), and produced the WeWork writedown and a record ¥3.5 trillion Vision Fund loss in FY2022.

Where he is now

Sold SoftBank’s entire NVIDIA stake for $5.83 billion in October 2025 to fund an OpenAI position now committed at $64.6 billion for about 13% of the company.

Top 5 reported positions

Q2 2026 13F · $18.17B reported
INTC66.81%SYM9.85%TMUS9.23%WBTN1.98%INTR1.81%

The 13F is a small fragment of SoftBank. Arm, OpenAI and the Vision Fund book don’t appear on it; two-thirds of what’s shown is a single 2025 Intel trade.

See the full portfolio →
MB
The Big Short

Michael Burry

Scion Asset Management
489%
net, Nov 2000 – Jun 2008
vs. just over 2% for the S&P 500

A medical doctor who left a Stanford residency to invest full time. Scion Capital’s reported 489% net return comes from Scion’s own investor letters, as reported in The Big Short.

Why he’s at the top

One of the great analytical calls in market history. In 2005 he read individual subprime mortgage bond prospectuses that essentially nobody else was reading, concluded the loans would fail, and had to persuade banks to create credit default swaps so he could bet against them. The trade made about $725 million for his investors and made him the central figure of Michael Lewis’s book and the 2015 film.

Style

Deep-value contrarian plus large macro option positions.

Where he is now

Deregistered Scion effective November 10, 2025 and now writes the Substack Cassandra Unchained. He stopped managing outside money — he didn’t stop investing.

Top 5 positions — final filing

Final 13F · Q3 2025 · closed
PLTR66.04%NVDA13.51%PFE11.07%HAL4.45%MOH1.73%

This list is closed and will not update. Options are 95% of the reported $1.38B at notional value — not money at risk. Any “current” Burry portfolio you see elsewhere is relabelled or stale.

See the full portfolio →
MP
The Cloner

Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai Investment Funds / Dalal Street
0 / 6 / 25
his fee structure
no fee unless investors earn 6%+

An IT entrepreneur who sold his company and launched his first fund on July 1, 1999 with $1 million from eight investors. Won the 2007 charity lunch with Buffett alongside Guy Spier for $650,100, and wrote The Dhandho Investor (2007).

Why he’s at the top

He made a virtue of not being original. His openly stated “cloning” method is to copy the best ideas of investors he admires rather than generate his own, paired with the Buffett Partnership fee structure — no management fee at all, 25% of returns above a 6% annual hurdle, so he earns nothing unless his investors do. His framing: “heads I win, tails I don’t lose much” — very few bets, researched to the floor, sized large.

The other side

His record includes a roughly −59% year in 2008, which he has never hidden — a useful example of what concentration costs in a bad year.

Top 5 reported positions

Q2 2026 13F · $326.75M reported
HCC43.32%RIG30.53%AMR26.11%KSPI0.05%

This is only the US-listed slice. Most of his capital sits in Indian equities and other non-US markets a 13F doesn’t cover.

See the full portfolio →

Learn from the top dogs. Trade your own plan.

None of these five got to the top by copying a headline. Join us live to learn the simple, repeatable dividend strategy we use every week.

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For educational reference only. Biographical figures and holdings are transcribed from the investor files supplied by James and have not been independently verified. 13F data reflects positions as of the quarter-end shown, not current holdings. Dividend and options data as of September 22, 2026. Nothing here recommends buying or selling any security. Trading involves risk, including loss of principal.

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