This investor has been declared the greatest of all time… and it’s not Warren Buffet

Nobel Prize winner and American economist Harry Markowitz was just placed at the top of the list of greatest investors of all time (GOATs), beating tycoons such as Warren Buffet.

Markowitz, who is also the recipient of the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize, has just one word of advice for investors looking to access the stock market: “diversify.”

The list was compiled by Cullen Roche, founder of Orcam Financial and the Pragmatic Capitalism blogger, according to Market Watch.

Roche put Markowitz at the top of the list, although he’s aware that other high-profile names tend to take the spotlight when it comes to investing’s GOAT.

While the obvious measure of greatness would be to focus just on performance, it is almost impossible to replicate the performance of investors like Buffet, he explains.

“I have found much of Buffett’s commentary to be contradictory,” he wrote. “For instance, he berates active stock pickers, but continues to be an active stock picker. He berates high fee managers, but spent most of the early years of his partnership charging very high fees. It’s hard for me to tell what he really believes when his actions don’t always support his words.”

That’s why Roche says it’s important to consider other merits, such as influence.

“We often think of the greatest investors as those people who simply performed best,” Roche wrote. “But the greatest investors are not merely those whose performance was outstanding, but those people who constructed a process by which more people outperformed thanks to the lessons they provided,” Roche said.

Based on influence, Markowitz was placed on top, followed by John Bogle and Benjamin Graham.

Markowitz, a legendary economist by training, was not technically a professional investor at all. He is a finance professor at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his Modern Portfolio Theory, which has been credited with an investing sea change that resonates on Wall Street to this day.

To learn more about Markowitz, take a look at this video of him discussing the Modern Portfolio Theory, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990: