Investing is hard. Even if you had all the time in the world, matching the judgment of people who have spent decades deploying real capital across every kind of market is nearly impossible on your own.
But here’s the thing: many of the best investors alive are sharing their thinking publicly. Some post real-time portfolio moves. Others write long-form memos that are better than anything you’d get in a finance MBA. A few show you the actual deal economics behind investments most people don’t even know exist.
This isn’t a list of finance influencers with big followings and small portfolios. Every person on this list manages or has managed real money at scale, has a verifiable track record across multiple market cycles, and shares content that will actually make you a better investor if you pay attention.
The Best Investors to Follow Right Now
#1 – Howard Marks
What he does: Co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, which manages over $190 billion, primarily in credit and distressed debt.
If you only follow one investor from this list, make it Howard Marks.
Marks has been writing investor memos since 1990, and they’ve become some of the most widely read documents in professional finance. Warren Buffett has said that when a Marks memo arrives, it’s the first thing he opens. That’s not marketing. That’s one of the greatest investors ever made telling you exactly where to get your investment education for free.
The memos don’t tell you what to buy. They teach you how to think about risk, cycles, and the psychology that causes investors to repeatedly blow themselves up. His December 2025 memo “Is It a Bubble?” was one of the most thoughtful analyses of AI investment mania published anywhere. His November 2025 piece “Cockroaches in the Coal Mine” broke down the early cracks in private credit markets before most people were paying attention.
Read his books The Most Important Thing and Mastering the Market Cycle if you’re serious about getting better at this. They’re the kind of books you reread every few years and get more out of each time.
Best for: Literally everyone. Whether you trade options or buy rental properties, Marks will make you a better thinker about risk.
Where to follow: Oaktree Memos (free, subscribe by email). He also has a podcast version if you’d rather listen.
#2 – Stanley Druckenmiller
What he does: Runs Duquesne Family Office, a $4.5 billion portfolio. Previously managed Duquesne Capital (averaged 30% annual returns for 30 years with no down year) and served as lead portfolio manager for George Soros’s Quantum Fund.
Druckenmiller might be the greatest living macro investor. His track record at Duquesne Capital is almost absurd: 30% annualized returns over three decades without a single losing year. He’s the guy who, alongside Soros, “broke the Bank of England” in 1992 by shorting the British pound.
You can’t subscribe to his content the way you can with Marks, but his quarterly 13F filings are a goldmine. Druckenmiller’s portfolio moves tell you a story about where he thinks the economy is heading 12 to 18 months from now. In late 2025, he dumped Nvidia and Palantir, opened positions in Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta, and started loading up on financials and emerging market ETFs. That’s not random. He’s positioning for a specific macro view about where liquidity and growth are going.
He also does occasional long-form interviews that are worth watching in full. His recent Morgan Stanley conversation included this gem: “I think contrarianism is overrated.” Coming from him, that’s a real education in how the best macro investors actually think. They’re not trying to be smarter than everyone. They’re trying to figure out what’s going to change and get there first.
Best for: Investors who think about markets in terms of macro cycles, liquidity, and big-picture positioning. Also valuable for anyone interested in how the best allocators adjust their portfolios ahead of major shifts.
Where to follow: 13F filings via HedgeFollow or Dataroma. Watch his long-form interviews when they surface.
#3 – Bill Ackman
What he does: Founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management (~$15.5 billion AUM). Took his management company public in April 2026 via a $5 billion IPO.
Ackman is the most transparent hedge fund manager on social media. Full stop. He shares detailed investment theses, explains his reasoning in real time, and is genuinely candid about his mistakes in a way that almost nobody in finance is.
His fund has generated cumulative net returns exceeding 2,600% since 2004, versus roughly 836% for the S&P 500. He returned 20.9% in 2025, beating the index. In early 2026, he publicly disclosed a new position in Meta at a time when the stock was under pressure, laid out his valuation case, and then watched it go against him. Instead of going quiet, he continued to explain his thesis.
That willingness to show the full picture is what makes Ackman worth following. Most fund managers only talk about their winners. Ackman gives you the whole portfolio, including the positions that are underwater, and explains why he’s holding or adding. If you want to learn how professional concentrated investing actually works (not the Instagram version), follow Ackman.
His concentrated approach (fewer than 10 positions, with individual stocks sometimes representing 15%+ of the portfolio) means every move carries real conviction. His activist strategy of taking large stakes and pushing for governance changes adds another dimension you won’t get from most investment content.
Best for: Anyone interested in concentrated investing, activist strategies, or just wants to see what it actually looks like when a professional investor is wrong and keeps going.
Where to follow: Twitter/X (extremely active), Pershing Square annual letters, quarterly 13Fs
#4 – Travis Jamison
What he does: Travis Jamison is one of the most active search fund and independent sponsor investors sharing insights publicly. He runs CapitalPad, a private equity co-investment group focused on lower middle market acquisitions. Has been building, buying, and investing in companies for over 17 years.
Most of the investors on this list operate in public markets or venture capital. Jamison is here because he provides a window into something entirely different: the economics of buying small private businesses.
His investment thesis is straightforward. Towing companies, dry cleaners, HVAC businesses, painting contractors. Companies that are boring, profitable, and resistant to disruption. He buys them at reasonable multiples, improves operations, and targets 20-30%+ IRR through cash distributions rather than speculative appreciation.
Jamison got here through a path that most finance people don’t take. He built and sold multiple companies across SaaS, ecommerce, and services over 17 years. Tried venture. Got disillusioned with the speculative nature of it. And pivoted to what he calls “hard to kill” businesses: profitable, cheap companies with durable demand that have been around for decades. Not sexy. But the cash distributions are real, the returns are strong, and the deals exist in a market that’s almost entirely invisible to anyone who only pays attention to public stocks or crypto.
For investors who’ve heard about the search fund model or the independent sponsor path but don’t know where to start learning, Jamison’s content is the most accessible entry point available. He explains the deal economics, the capital structures, and the operator dynamics in plain language, without the jargon that makes most private equity content impenetrable.
Best for: One of the best accounts to follow if you’re interested in search fund investing, SMB acquisitions, or independent sponsor deals. Also valuable for accredited investors exploring alternatives to public markets, aspiring acquisition entrepreneurs evaluating their first deal, and anyone who’d rather collect quarterly cash distributions than wait for a speculative exit.
Where to follow:
#5 – Liz Ann Sonders
What she does: Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab.
If you invest in equities and you’re not following Liz Ann Sonders, you’re doing it wrong.
She posts annotated charts of economic data all day. Inflation prints, employment reports, Fed policy signals, housing data, earnings trends, consumer spending. And she doesn’t just post the chart. She tells you what it means and why it matters for how you should be thinking about your portfolio right now.
Most macro commentary is vague hand-waving. “Markets could go up or down depending on the Fed.” Sonders is specific. She’ll post real retail sales growth data and explain exactly why it matters for consumer discretionary names this quarter. She’ll share yield curve movements and tell you what historically follows. The fact that she does this for free, from an institutional strategist seat at a firm that manages trillions, is genuinely remarkable.
Best for: Anyone who invests in stocks and wants to actually understand the economic context behind market moves. Her content is the fastest way to get smarter about macro without getting a Bloomberg terminal.
Where to follow: Twitter/X (this is her primary channel and it’s excellent), On Investing podcast
#6 – Fred Wilson
What he does: Co-founder of Union Square Ventures. Early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, Kickstarter, and Coinbase (co-led the Series A in 2013).
Wilson has published on his blog AVC.com almost every single day since 2003. That is over two decades of real-time thinking from one of the best venture capitalists alive. Let that sink in.
His posts cover specific investment decisions, portfolio company lessons, observations about the technology landscape, and the actual mechanics of how venture capital works as a business. He’s also one of the few prominent VCs who actively engages in his comment section, responding to readers and creating a genuine dialogue.
If you want to understand how a top-tier VC actually evaluates companies, structures deals, and thinks about portfolio construction, there is no better free resource on the internet. Not a course, not a book, not a newsletter. AVC is it.
Best for: Founders deciding whether to raise venture capital, aspiring VCs, and anyone curious about how early-stage technology investing actually works behind the scenes.
Where to follow: AVC.com. Bookmark it.
#7 – Naval Ravikant
What he does: Co-founded AngelList. Angel investor in Twitter, Uber, Foursquare, and dozens of other companies at the seed stage.
Naval is on this list for a different reason than everyone else. He won’t give you a stock pick or a portfolio update. What he gives you is a framework for thinking about wealth creation that most people never develop on their own.
His core insight is the distinction between activities that build lasting equity (things involving leverage, specific knowledge, and judgment that compounds) and activities that simply trade time for money. That sounds abstract until you apply it. Then it changes how you evaluate every career move, business decision, and investment opportunity.
His writing on Nav.al and his podcast appearances are worth consuming even if you never make an angel investment. The mental models are transferable to everything from picking stocks to deciding whether to start a company.
Fair warning: he’s less active now than he was a few years ago. But the archive is deep and the ideas are durable.
Best for: Founders, angel investors, and anyone who wants to think more clearly about wealth, leverage, and what’s actually worth spending time on. Less useful if you’re looking for specific tickers.
Where to follow: Nav.al, Twitter/X
#8 – Reid Hoffman
What he does: Co-founded LinkedIn, partner at Greylock Partners, early backer of Facebook, Airbnb, and OpenAI. COO of PayPal before that.
Hoffman’s value isn’t stock picks. It’s strategic thinking about how technology companies scale. His podcast Masters of Scale is one of the few interview shows that actually pushes founders on the hard tradeoffs they faced during critical growth moments. These aren’t puff pieces. Hoffman has been on both sides of the table (founder and investor) and he asks the questions that matter.
His LinkedIn newsletter Long Reids covers how AI is reshaping entire industries, written from the perspective of someone actively deploying capital into those changes.
Best for: Technology founders, venture investors, and anyone who wants to understand the strategic dynamics behind building companies at scale.
#9 – Tim Draper
What he does: Third-generation VC. Founder of Draper Associates. Portfolio includes early bets on Tesla, Skype, SpaceX, Coinbase, and Baidu. Bought nearly 30,000 BTC at a government auction in 2014.
Draper is the most conviction-driven investor on this list. He takes big positions in technologies he believes will reshape how society works and holds them through extreme volatility. Some of his predictions have been spectacularly right (Bitcoin, Tesla). Others have been spectacularly wrong.
What’s educational about following Draper isn’t his specific calls. It’s watching how a conviction investor builds a thesis, sizes a position, and maintains it when the market is screaming that they’re wrong. That’s a skill most investors never develop because they’ve never seen it practiced in real time.
Best for: Crypto investors, frontier tech enthusiasts, and anyone interested in what high-conviction, long-duration investing looks like in practice.
Where to follow: Twitter/X, Draper University
#10 – Benjamin Graham
What he did: Invented value investing. Literally.
Graham is on this list because every other investor on this list was shaped by his ideas, whether they know it or not.
He developed the distinction between price and value that underpins all of fundamental analysis. He invented the concept of margin of safety. He created the metaphor of Mr. Market as an emotionally unstable business partner who offers you prices every day that you’re free to accept or ignore.
Warren Buffett was his student at Columbia. Seth Klarman named his fund and his book after Graham’s margin of safety concept. Howard Marks’s entire framework for thinking about risk echoes Graham’s principles. The intellectual lineage runs through nearly every serious value investor alive today.
Graham died in 1976, so you won’t find him on Twitter. But if you read one investment book in your life, make it The Intelligent Investor. If you read two, add Security Analysis.
Best for: Everyone. If you haven’t read The Intelligent Investor, start there before you follow anyone else on this list.
How to Actually Get Value From Following These Investors
Following smart investors is only useful if you do it right. Most people do it wrong: they see a 13F filing, copy the top holding, and wonder why it doesn’t work.
Here’s how to actually extract value.
Study frameworks, not picks. When Ackman buys Meta, the position itself is less important than his reasoning. Why does he think it’s undervalued? What’s his variant perception? What would have to be true for the thesis to fail? The reasoning is the education. The ticker is just the example.
Follow investors across different asset classes. If you only follow public equity investors, your mental model of “investing” stays narrow. Add Jamison for private market cash-flow deals. Add Marks for credit. Add Wilson for venture. Each lens reveals opportunities and risks the others miss.
Pay attention to the losses. The most educational content any investor shares is what they got wrong and why. Druckenmiller admitting he sold Nvidia too early. Ackman’s positions that went against him. These are worth 10x more than another “how I picked a winner” thread.
Don’t copy trades. 13F filings are 45 days old. The investor may have different tax situations, time horizons, or risk tolerances. By the time you see the position, the setup that made it attractive may have changed completely. Use the filing to understand their thinking, not to generate trade ideas.
Be patient. The best investment thinking compounds slowly. Read Marks’s memos for a year. Follow Sonders’s charts through an entire economic cycle. Watch Druckenmiller rotate his portfolio across quarters. The patterns only reveal themselves over time.
Your Turn
This list includes a credit investor whose memos Warren Buffett reads first, a macro trader who averaged 30% annually for three decades, a hedge fund manager building a public holding company, an entrepreneur who buys dry cleaners and HVAC businesses, an institutional strategist sharing research for free, a VC who’s blogged daily for 20+ years, and the man who invented value investing.
That range is the point. The best investment education comes from following people who operate in completely different markets and use completely different frameworks. It forces you to think, not just react.
Study their reasoning. Build your own thesis. Do your own work. And remember that every successful investor on this list got there by developing the ability to think independently, especially when it was uncomfortable.
