We Cloned the 8 Most Famous Investors for a Decade. Together They Matched the Index — Not Beat It.

Every "smart money" service sells the same fantasy: the legends know something you don't, so buy what they buy. We have the clone-performance machinery to test it literally — so we cloned the eight most famous investors in the game, mechanically, for ten years, and measured the result against a cheap index fund.

The names need no introduction: Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, Stanley Druckenmiller, David Tepper, Dan Loeb, Michael Burry, and Nelson Peltz.

The method

For each manager we build a daily clone NAV from their 13F filings:

• Holdings: each fund's top-20 reported US equity positions.
• Rebalance: only on filing dates — you hold what was last disclosed, so the 45-day reporting lag is baked in and there's no lookahead.
• Group: equal-weight across all eight, rebalanced daily, over the common window all eight share — 2016 to 2026, a full ten years.

Then we compare the blended clone to the S&P 500 over the identical window.

The result: a decade, and a rounding error

Over those ten years the eight-legend clone returned +320.8% total (15.2% a year). The S&P 500 returned +327.9% (15.4% a year) — the clone came in 0.2 points a year behind, with a slightly smaller worst drawdown (−32% vs −34%).

Ten years. Eight of the most celebrated investors alive. A verbatim copy of their disclosed books. And the result is indistinguishable from having bought the index and gone to sleep.

Why: two winners, six losers, one disaster

The group average hides how lopsided the individual records are.

Six of the eight trailed the S&P as clones over three years:

The decade-long tie is carried almost entirely by Druckenmiller and Tepper, whose macro-driven books beat the index enough to offset Icahn's −29-point collapse and a long tail of near-misses. Take out the top two and the "legends" underperform outright.

That is the whole lesson in one table: fame is not alpha. The names most likely to get a copy-trade pitch built around them — Buffett, Ackman, Burry, Icahn — were, as clones, below the index over the recent window. Buffett's genius is real, but it lives in insurance float, private deals, and holding through decades — none of which survives a top-20-equities clone. Icahn's returns come from control positions and activism a 13F copier can't replicate.

Three reasons this is even worse than it looks

1. The lag is fatal for traders. Druckenmiller turns his book over constantly; by the time his 13F is public, the position may be gone. The clone captures his style, not his timing — and for a fast manager the timing was the point.
2. You'd never have equal-weighted them ex ante. Knowing to overweight Druckenmiller and underweight Icahn in advance is the entire skill — and it's exactly what the "just follow the legends" pitch tells you not to bother learning.
3. Survivorship flatters even this. These eight are still famous because they survived. The graveyard of once-celebrated investors who blew up isn't in the sample.

Run it yourself

This isn't a number to take on faith — it's one click in our Clone Backtester. That link loads the exact eight-legend group; add or drop names and watch the line move. Try the "Highest alpha" preset for the funds that did work — then notice you could only have known which those were after the fact.

The honest takeaway isn't "the legends are frauds." It's that their edge doesn't transfer through a 13F. Cloning the average famous investor matched the market for a decade. Picking the two who beat it, ahead of time, is the only move that mattered — and it's the one no filing can hand you.

Methodology and code: scripts/build-fund-performance.ts and the daily clone NAV series behind /backtest, no lookahead, equal-weight over the common 2016–2026 window. Clone = top-20 US equities per 13F; options, foreign lines, private holdings, and cash are excluded — which is precisely why a Buffett or Icahn clone understates the real fund. Past performance does not predict future returns. Not investment advice.