Investing Philosophies
Investors disagree about where returns come from, and those disagreements are old, specific and worth understanding. Each page below explains one school of thought: what it claims, how its practitioners actually make decisions, and where the approach runs into trouble.
All investing philosophies
- Value InvestingBuying a business for less than a conservative estimate of what it is worth, and treating the gap as protection against being wrong.
Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger 9 investors 8 guides - Quality InvestingOwning businesses with durable competitive advantages and paying a fair rather than a bargain price for them.Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Philip Fisher 7 investors 6 guides
- Growth InvestingBuying companies whose earnings are expanding quickly, on the view that the growth will justify a price that already looks high.
Philip Fisher, Peter Lynch, Cathie Wood 4 investors 6 guides - Index InvestingOwning an entire market at the lowest possible cost instead of trying to select the parts of it that will do best.
Jack Bogle, Eugene Fama, William Bernstein 7 investors 8 guides - Contrarian InvestingBuying what the market has abandoned and selling what it has crowded into, on the view that extremes of sentiment produce the best prices.
John Templeton, Howard Marks, Seth Klarman 5 investors 6 guides - Macro InvestingPositioning around economies, credit conditions, currencies and policy rather than around individual companies.
Ray Dalio, George Soros, Stanley Druckenmiller 6 investors 7 guides - Quantitative InvestingFinding statistically measurable edges in data and executing them systematically, with position sizing treated as a mathematical problem.Ed Thorp, Jim Simons, Eugene Fama 5 investors 5 guides
- Behavioural InvestingTreating the investor, rather than the market, as the main problem to be managed.Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler 8 investors 6 guides
- Efficient Market TheoryThe proposition that prices already reflect available information, and the long argument about how far that actually holds.Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller, Jack Bogle 5 investors 6 guides
- Bitcoin InvestingTreating a fixed-supply digital asset as a long-term holding, and the arguments over what it is actually for.
Satoshi Nakamoto, Michael Saylor, Hal Finney 7 investors 6 guides
From belief to practice
A philosophy decides what you are trying to own and why. A strategy decides how much, how often and when you stop. These are the strategies that name each school of thought as part of their reasoning.
- Value InvestingBuy and Hold Concentrated Investing Factor Investing
- Quality InvestingBuy and Hold Concentrated Investing
- Growth InvestingConcentrated Investing
- Index InvestingThe 60/40 Portfolio Buy and Hold Core and Satellite Target-Date Investing
- Contrarian InvestingThe Permanent Portfolio
- Macro InvestingThe 60/40 Portfolio The Permanent Portfolio Risk Parity
- Quantitative InvestingFactor Investing Risk Parity
- Efficient Market TheoryCore and Satellite Factor Investing
How to use these pages
These are explanations rather than recommendations. Each page sets out where an approach came from, how its practitioners decide what to own, how they think about risk, and the specific situations in which it has performed badly. None of them is presented as the right answer, because the honest position is that serious investors have disagreed about this for a century and still do.
Most working investors borrow from several. Warren Buffett is usually described as a value investor and holds positions a quality investor would recognise, while recommending index funds to almost everybody else. Reading two philosophies that disagree is often more useful than reading one that sounds convincing.
Keep exploring
A philosophy is what an investor believes. These directories cover what they did about it, and who they were.
Get smarter about investing
Clear market insights, useful tools, and beginner-friendly investing education.
Educational content only. These pages explain how different investing approaches work. They are not recommendations, not investment advice, and not a judgment about which approach suits your circumstances.