Twelve Legendary-Investor Strategies in One Place — Meet QMA Compass

Around the turn of the millennium, Mohnish Pabrai turned one million dollars into many times that. Nick Sleep beat the market over the long run. Joel Greenblatt posted high returns for two decades. These people are not geniuses with a secret algorithm — they have rules: specific criteria by which they evaluate companies.

QMA Compass does one thing: it rewrites those frameworks into measurable criteria and evaluates them regularly across thousands of stocks. This article explains what it's for — as a description of an analytical tool, not a current recommendation.

Why twelve approaches, not one

No single approach is best for every market regime. A rising market rewards momentum, a falling market deep value, a sideways market quality compounders. A large fund has dozens of strategists; a retail investor has only themselves. Compass shows all 12 approaches side by side and how many names each currently identifies — which itself says something about market mood.

The twelve approaches — who and what

Approach	Methodology (after whom)	Horizon
Multibagger Main	Pabrai-style concentrated value-growth	years
Insider Conviction	insider buying + growth	months
Turnarounds	crisis firms with a reversal catalyst	months–years
Focused Mousetraps	strong moat, weak competition	years
Uber Cannibals	aggressive buybacks	years
Hidden Value	Greenblatt-style high ROIC + low price	years
Mayer 100 Baggers	smallcap quality with long-run potential	years
Flywheel Compounders	Sleep-style "scale economics shared"	years
Activist Targets	undervalued with an activist catalyst	months
Fear-Buy	Marks-style quality in a panic	months
Quality Compounders	Smith-style "buy great companies and hold"	years
Forecast Stars	Rochon-style earnings forecasting	years

Each approach has its own page in QMA with the methodology, a historical backtest, and ongoing (live) tracking.

🚨 CORRECTION NOTE (31 July 2026). Specific performance figures (alpha, win rate, sample

size) are being withdrawn from QMA's public surfaces — which is why you will not find them in

this text. They were computed through a historical scores table whose older part was derived from

later prices, and since 31 July 2026 a stricter significance threshold applies, derived from every

trial ever run. The figures are not replaced by lower ones — the input data was never valid as

of the day in question. This text describes what the tool does, not what result it produced.

Only forward tracking since 18 February 2026 is probative.

How this differs from an investing course

A course gives you knowledge, but you still have to do the routine work — screening hundreds of stocks and applying criteria — by hand. QMA automates that second step (screening, scoring, backtesting). You still need to acquire the knowledge (that's what the Academy is for).

Proof, not promises — ongoing tracking

Backtests can be cherry-picked. So alongside a backtest, QMA keeps ongoing (live) tracking: it regularly records selected names for each approach and follows their path versus the index. Over time this builds a transparent record — what the approach actually produced, not what we claimed. We always describe statistical reliability honestly (t-statistic, sample size); not every approach is statistically significant, and where samples are small we label results explicitly as exploratory.

Who it's for

For a beginner it's a way to see how legendary frameworks look in data without reading dozens of books. For an advanced user it saves routine work — they can filter, sort, and inspect per-factor scores themselves. QMA Compass is an analytical helper, not a source of trade instructions.

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This article describes a methodology and historical observations — it is not a current signal, instruction, or a solicitation to buy or sell. Any numbers shown (entries, stop-loss, targets, success rate, holding period) are illustrative and refer to a past backtest window; backtests contain survivorship bias. Past results do not guarantee future ones. Consult a licensed financial advisor before acting. > > QMA has no commercial relationship with the named investors — names are used solely to label the replicated methodology.