If you read my 2025 piece Shameless Cloning 2.0, you know I have spent years refining how I track the best capital allocators in the world.
I used to fall into the classic retail trap of opening Dataroma every quarter, pulling up 13Fs for dozens of famous managers, and pretending that monitoring an ocean of multi-billion-dollar portfolios was a good use of my time.
It was not.
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Most individual investors misunderstand the entire premise of cloning. It was never meant to be about mindlessly mirroring someone else’s portfolio. Intelligent cloning is an exercise in discernment – knowing who to study, understanding how they analyze businesses, and recognizing when their framework simply does not apply to your own constraints.
Over time, I realized that tracking the traditional market giants offers diminishing returns. When a fund manages $10 billion, its universe shrinks drastically. It cannot buy a promising $400 million business, regardless of how attractive the economics are. In fact, they might not even be able to initiate a properly weighted position in a $5 billion market cap company.
Liquidity constraints force those managers into mega-cap stocks where the market is ruthlessly efficient most of the time and mispricings are rarer.
What you end up seeing are the exact same crowded ideas recycled across dozens of quarterly filings.
As private investors, we enjoy a massive structural advantage:
Unlimited flexibility.
We have no minimum market-cap requirements, no mandate constraints, no geographic constraints, and no institutional benchmark pressure (time arbitrage).
To truly leverage that edge, I realized I needed to stop monitoring managers who are constrained by their own success and focus on a different class of capital allocators entirely.
Tracking 30 More Agile Managers
So last year, as outlined in the article I mentioned above, I overhauled my coverage universe. I built a refined list of 20 hand-picked fund managers who run leaner, more agile pools of capital. This week I added ten new funds to the list based on recommendations by peers who I respect a lot, bringing the total to around 30.
Many (but not all) of these managers operate one-person shops, invest a substantial portion of their own net worth alongside their LPs, and write directly as business owners rather than corporate PR departments. Because they often operate below the radar of Wall Street’s massive institutional capital – some of them are not even crossing the $100 million 13-F threshold – they routinely uncover exceptional opportunities in under-researched corners of the market.
To bring this update to life, I combed through the latest quarterly letters and regulatory disclosures from all 30 funds. Finding the signal inside that mountain of text was a massive effort. I used NotebookLM to streamline the process, synthesizing the raw commentary to isolate every single newly initiated position and notable addition across their portfolios.
Overall, the required effort was much bigger than I anticipated, to be fully honest (adding business summaries, formatting everything properly, adding charts). In total, 158 position entries representing 126 unique individual companies were discovered.
To make all of this more manageable, I decided to split this into three parts. This is part 1.
The goal of this briefing is simple: save you dozens of hours of research (picking the right funds to track, finding the latest publications, going through all filings to discover new bets, etc.) while giving you an immediate look at where some of the sharpest, unconstrained minds in the market are allocating capital right now.
If you enjoy these kinds of summaries, please let me know in the comments, and I will try to do so once every quarter or once every half a year.
For every position where a manager provided meaningful commentary, you will find a very brief overview of the thesis, comments on competitive moats, the valuation rationale, and primary risk factors (all of that only if available, of course). I added a brief one-paragraph business overview to each of the stocks.
To make your initial screening process as efficient as possible, I also included distinct visual charts for each business spotlighted:
Price Action: A visual snapshot of the stock’s historical price movement and recent trajectory to get a feel for the current market perception and sentiment. Moreover, the market cap is displayed as well.
Valuation, ROIC & Margins: Key metrics tracking profitability trends alongside current multiple expansions or contractions.
Growth: A clear view of historical top-line and bottom-line 5-year CAGRs.
You will also find direct links to each fund’s website and their public letter archives in the write-up that I will link once again below, allowing you to easily review the original source material whenever an idea catches your eye.
Shameless Cloning 2.0: Pabrai’s Idea, Upgraded for 2026
A few of my most recent investments – Timee and InPost – started with me doing something many investors quietly do but few admit: shamelessly copying others.
And with that, let’s take a look at the transactions and see where these 30 managers are placing their bets.
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