Are the super investors keeping pace with the magnificent seven?

Show and tell: a phrase that still triggers flashbacks to standing awkwardly at the front of the class with your McDonald’s Happy Meal toy while Tarquin unveils a working miniature nuclear fission reactor. Or if you’re a parent, the creeping dread of discovering the class teddy has been bigging it up at The One&Only Reethi Rah and you’re staring down the barrel of a rainy weekend in Bognor Regis.

But here’s a show and tell worth a front-row seat. 13F filings are Wall Street’s quarterly confession booth, where any fund manager controlling $100 million or more must reveal their US stock picks to the SEC. Yes, there’s a 45-day reporting lag but super investors are in the business of owning quality companies through market cycles and whatever acronym-laden crisis comes their way.

It’s an elite roster, from Warren Buffett and Howard Marks to activist firebrands like Bill Ackman. Think of 13F filings as sanctioned plagiarism from the class nerds: perfectly legal, publicly available and infinitely more useful than taking stock tips from a meme stock pumper who goes by Roaring Kitty.

The most popular stocks with super investors

According to Dataroma, these are currently the 10 most widely-held stocks among super investors:

Despite persistent mutterings about an AI bubble, the Magnificent Seven remains very much in fashion with the smart money, hoovering up the top five spots. Once again Microsoft (MSFT) is the most-owned stock, with 35 super investors owning a stake in the tech behemoth.

That said, there have been some notable movements. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust sold two-thirds of its Microsoft position, ostensibly to free up funds for its philanthropic activities (we’ll give them that). Chris Hohn’s TCI offloaded around $9 billion worth, swinging that capital into a similarly sized purchase of Visa in the opposite direction.

There were also some new faces with Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC making its debut. Value investor Dodge & Cox were among the big buyers, though they trimmed their position after a 70%-plus rise in the share price in the last year – proof that even disciplined value investors aren’t above a spot of opportunistic profit-taking.

Beyond pure technology, the super investors placed meaningful chips on Capital One (COF) and Visa (V), the latter delivering steady earnings growth on the back of the inexorable shift to cashless payments. Fans include Fundsmith’s Terry Smith, Warren Buffett and Chris Hohn – a fairly formidable endorsement.

Drilling down into the portfolio of the most famous super investor of all, Warren Buffet has allocated almost a quarter of his portfolio to Apple, followed by a heavy weighting in financials American Express (AXP), Bank of America (BAC), Chubb (CB) and Mastercard (MA).

Finally, there were interesting developments at Scion, Michael Burry’s hedge fund. Burry had called a “Big Short 2.0,” taking short positions on Palantir (PLTR) and NVIDIA (NVDA). Despite looking like a decent call on Palantir, Burry closed Scion entirely at the end of 2025, posting on X: “Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” Christian Bale may well be quietly relieved he won’t have to learn another script he didn’t understand the first time around.

What stocks are the super investors buying now?

Warren Buffett’s ideal holding period may be forever but recent filings reveal some interesting purchases by the investing elite. These were the top 10 most-bought shares in the last quarter of 2025:

They reveal a strategy that’s less about chasing the next unicorn and more about owning the plumbing – the dominant tech platforms, the silicon that powers them and the payment infrastructure taking a cut every time money changes hands.

At the top end, super investors piled into the Magnificent Seven, or at least the Fantastic Four of Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META) and Alphabet (GOOG). Different business models with the same irresistible appeal of scale, recurring revenues and the market dominance that makes regulators edgy and shareholders very comfortable.

Next came the picks-and-shovels plays on the AI ecosystem. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) makes 70% of the world’s advanced chips, while Texas Instruments provides the unglamorous counterweight of analogue semiconductors powering everyday electronics. Interestingly, there was no room at the inn for NVIDIA (NVDA) – is the big money getting a little shy about the punchy valuation of the AI GOAT?

Finally, the super investors loaded up on financial infrastructure providers: (V) and Fiserv (FI) make money every time someone taps a card, while LPL Financial (LPLA) rides the steady wave of advised assets under management. Not exactly sexy but certainly lucrative.

How to copy the super investors

One option is mirroring the portfolios of the super investors but matching position sizes and time horizons is tricky, while assembling a shopping list of twenty or more stocks requires some serious capital.

Many of the super investor funds are only limited to institutional investors, so what are the options for UK retail investors? Well, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) is the obvious starting point. The A shares carry a stratospheric price tag of around $750,000 each – Buffett has never split them, seemingly for reasons of principle and mild amusement, but the B shares are a far more accessible $500.

Over the past decade, Berkshire tops the leaderboard of available funds with an annualised return of 14.5%, making it the standout performer for long-term compounding.

Source: AJ Bell, based on annualised returns in GBP
Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results

Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial (FFH) deserves a mention for its recent performance, with a remarkable 37% annualised return over five years. Meanwhile Markel Group (MKL), run by Tom Gayner, and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Holdings (PSH) sit comfortably in the middle of the pack. The two UK stalwarts, Terry Smith’s Fundsmith Equity and Nick Train’s Lindsell Train Global Equity, have had a rougher ride of late, despite respectable ten-year track records.

Face the fear and do nothing

Peter Lynch famously observed that “The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.” The super investors, it seems, aren’t done with the Magnificent Seven just yet.

And that’s the real lesson. Not unearthing hidden gems or timing the market perfectly but identifying strong businesses, buying them at sensible prices and then doing the hardest thing of all: nothing. You never know, it might even fund an upgrade to a seafront caravan at Bognor for the class teddy.

All data as at 17/02/2026 unless stated otherwise. 13F filings sourced from Dataroma.