30 superinvestors, 7 distinct investing styles
ConvictionScore tells you what each manager is buying. Style tells you why. A value investor's 7% position is a different signal than a long-short manager's 7% — both are conviction, but they answer to different math. Below: every tracked manager grouped by their dominant style. Click through to see which managers cluster together and which positions are signal-by-style.
Value
9 managersBuy below intrinsic value. Hold for re-rating or compounding. Margin of safety dominates the position-sizing math.
Examples: Warren Buffett · Seth Klarman · Li Lu · +6 more
Activist
4 managersBuild concentrated positions in companies where a specific catalyst (board change, capital allocation, divestiture, M&A) can unlock value the public market hasn't priced in.
Examples: Bill Ackman · Carl Icahn · Chris Hohn · +1 more
Growth
8 managersPay full price for businesses compounding above the cost of capital. The math: a high-quality compounder at 30× earnings beats a 10× value trap once the time horizon stretches.
Examples: Stephen Mandel · Chuck Akre · Terry Smith · +5 more
Macro
2 managersTrade themes that cross asset classes — currencies, commodities, sovereign rates, equity indexes — based on top-down reads of monetary policy, geopolitics, and cycle position.
Examples: Stanley Druckenmiller · David Tepper
Long-Short
4 managersHold conviction longs and conviction shorts simultaneously. Generate alpha on both sides; control net exposure to manage market risk.
Examples: David Einhorn · Andreas Halvorsen · Lee Ainslie · +1 more
Contrarian
1 managerBuy what the market hates. Sell what the market loves. Often deep-value, often shorting bubbles. Tolerates being early, which is indistinguishable from being wrong on a 1-year view.
Examples: Michael Burry
Special Situations
2 managersTrade the technical structure of corporate events: spin-offs, mergers, bankruptcies, distressed credit, recapitalizations. The edge is process: legal, accounting, and price-discovery work most managers won't do.
Examples: Joel Greenblatt · Howard Marks
Why style matters for ConvictionScore
ConvictionScore is style-agnostic by construction — it only sees position size, multi-quarter trend, and consensus across managers. But the signal value of a given ConvictionScore varies by style:
- A value manager's 8% position is built over years and rarely trimmed; high signal, slow decay.
- A long-short manager's 8% long is half the story — the matched short matters too; signal needs context.
- An activist 8% is a pre-announcement of a corporate-action thesis; high signal, time-bounded.
- A macro manager's 8% equity position is unusual; macros usually express via futures and FX, so an 8% stock is a louder commitment.
Reading positions through the style lens beats reading them as commodity holdings.
Related
Style classifications are editorial and reflect the manager's most-publicly-known posture. Some managers operate across multiple styles; this taxonomy uses the one most observable in their 13F-disclosed long-only equity book.