It's a good question, and it's not a new one — there's an entire cottage industry of newsletters and apps built on exactly this idea. Most of them are lazy about it: they show you one manager's top holding from three months ago and call it a strategy. I wanted to actually test it, properly, with real filings and real prices, before I told you whether it works. Short answer: yes, sort of — and the "sort of" is the interesting part.
Is That Even Legal?
Wait — is that even legal? Don't they have to keep their positions secret?
No, and this is the part most people don't know. Any fund managing more than $100 million in U.S. stocks has to file a form with the SEC — a "13F" — every quarter, listing every position above a small threshold. It comes out about six weeks after quarter-end, so you're never seeing it live, but you are seeing the real thing: actual shares, actual dollar values, filed under penalty of perjury.
So the raw material to copy a manager is sitting in public record. The hard part was never access. It's figuring out which managers are worth copying, and what "copying" should even mean.
Which Managers, and Why
Okay, so copy all of them?
I started from a list of about twenty managers with a genuinely long record — 25 years of beating the S&P 500, not a lucky five-year run. Then I cut hard, on one test: can this actually be cloned from a quarterly filing?
A lot of famous names fail that test immediately. Citadel, Millennium, Point72 — these run thousands of small, hedged positions across independent trading desks. Their 13F shows you fragments of a machine, not a set of convictions. Copying their top ten holdings tells you nothing about what actually made them money. So those came out, along with anyone whose book is too spread out to say any one position was a real decision.
What's left is twelve funds that are both disclosed and concentrated: Berkshire Hathaway, TCI, Himalaya Capital, Baron Capital, Duquesne, Appaloosa, Elliott Management, Viking Global, Lone Pine, Baupost, Coatue, and Third Point. Different styles — value, activist, growth, macro — but each one you can point to and say "that's a real bet," because it's a big enough slice of what they own.
The Rules of the Clone
Fine — but how do you actually "copy" twelve different people at once?
Rules, and I kept them boring on purpose. Split $100,000 evenly across the twelve — $8,333 each. Within each fund's slice, only positions worth 3% or more of that fund's own book count as a real conviction; smaller stuff is noise and gets ignored. Every quarter, when the new filing lands, reset that fund's slice to its newly disclosed weights — sell what they sold, buy what they bought, in the same proportions they hold it. No judgment calls, no "I think this one's smarter than the filing suggests." Just following the paper trail.
Then I ran that, for real, from the third quarter of 2022 through the second quarter of 2026 — four years, sixteen quarters, fifteen rebalances — and compared it to simply buying the S&P 500 and holding it.
Did It Beat the Market?
And? Did it beat the market?
Yes — consistently, not just at the finish line.
$100,000, three ways — Q3 2022 to Q2 2026
The twelve beat the S&P in eleven of the last fifteen quarters — not one lucky year, a consistent edge from following disciplined stock-pickers instead of the index. It even beat the Nasdaq-100 more often than not, in eight of those fifteen quarters. But look at the third line: a handful of enormous Nasdaq quarters — including the one that just closed, +27.7% — were enough on their own to still pull it out ahead cumulatively. That's the honest part of this answer, and I'll come back to it.
What It Would Actually Own, Today
So what would this actually own, right now, today?
As of the most recent filings, all twelve slices are fully invested — nothing sitting in cash. Here's the combined book, each name's share of the full $100,000:
The combined book, Q2 2026 filings
The Catch
You keep saying "sort of." What's the catch?
A few, and you should hold all of them in your head at once, not just the headline:
- You always see it late. A 13F comes out roughly six weeks after quarter-end. By the time you know what a manager bought, they've owned it for a month and a half already. This test assumes you traded the day the new weights appeared — a real investor is always a step behind that.
- It's not free of risk. This basket moved around more than the index — a deeper worst-quarter drop, more up-and-down along the way — for that extra 17 points of return. That's a fair trade in my book, but it's not a free lunch.
- It still loses to just owning big tech, cumulatively. The last four years were unusually good for a small number of enormous companies. A basket of stock-pickers, even good ones, holding real positions across energy, healthcare, industrials and financials alongside their tech bets, wins more quarters than not against the Nasdaq-100 — but the index's occasional monster quarters do outsized, compounding damage to that lead. Beating the S&P is the right bar for a diversified equity strategy. Beating the Nasdaq-100 cumulatively over a stretch like this one almost requires being the Nasdaq-100.
- Concentration cuts both ways. More than half this book sits in fifteen names. If any one of Duquesne's or Elliott's biggest convictions goes badly wrong, you feel it a lot more than you would in the index.
So — can you just copy the best fund managers and beat the market? On this evidence, yes, doing it properly and sticking with it beat the S&P consistently over the stretch I tested. But "beat the market" was never really the finish line you were picturing. The finish line is a portfolio you understand, can stomach through a bad quarter, and would still be holding five years from now. Whether that's this, the index, or something simpler is the next letter.
This page is for general information only and does not constitute investment advice. Full methodology — fund selection, the 3% rule, data sources and caveats — is in the companion research note.