{"id":201560,"date":"2026-08-25T14:14:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/201560\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T14:14:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:14:35","slug":"warren-buffetts-favorite-fund-quadrupled-your-money-in-10-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/201560\/","title":{"rendered":"Warren Buffett’s favorite fund quadrupled your money in 10 years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Warren Buffett<\/a> has spent six decades turning individual stock picks into one of the largest personal fortunes in American history. <\/p>\n

Buy a low-cost S&P 500<\/a>index fund<\/a>, leave it alone, and stop trying to outguess professional traders, he has told shareholders repeatedly. <\/p>\n

Fresh performance data makes it clear that investors who followed Buffett’s recommendation have been rewarded handsomely for their patience over time. <\/p>\n

The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO)<\/a>, the ETF share class of the Vanguard 500 Index Fund that Buffett effectively endorsed in his 2013 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter<\/a> when he wrote “I suggest Vanguard’s,” produced a total return of 303% over the past decade. <\/p>\n

A $10,000 investment made 10 years earlier grew into more than $40,000 as of July 28, 2026, according to data compiled by The Motley Fool<\/a>. <\/p>\n

That growth is striking on its own, but it takes on sharper meaning when stacked against the track record of full-time portfolio managers. <\/p>\n

How the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF turned modest savings into $40,000 <\/p>\n

VOO<\/a> holds every stock in the S&P 500 index, weighted by market capitalization, and charges an annual expense ratio<\/a> of 0.03%. <\/p>\n

That fee amounts to $3 per year for every $10,000 invested, well below the 0.72% average for similar large-cap equity funds, Vanguard data shows<\/a>. <\/p>\n

VOO became the first ETF to cross $1 trillion in assets on June 2, 2026. Combined with its mutual fund<\/a> share class, the underlying Vanguard 500 Index Fund holds approximately $1.6 trillion in total assets, InvestmentNews reported<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

That growth reflects a broader shift into passive index funds; VOO alone attracted more than $69 billion in net inflows in the first half of 2026. <\/p>\n

Robert R. Johnson, Professor of Finance at Creighton University’s Heider College of Business, told U.S. News<\/a> that the cumulative drag of fund fees works against investors over time in the same way that returns compound in their favor. <\/p>\n

The returns of the market have been driven by a small percentage of big winners. For most, trying to pick winners ex-ante is a loser’s game, so the solution is to invest in diversified index funds where you don’t have to pick the winners <\/p>\n

An investor who placed $10,000 in VOO a decade ago and reinvested dividends<\/a> would hold a position worth roughly $40,300 today. That outcome required no individual stock research, no rebalancing, and no management fees eating into annual gains along the way. <\/p>\n

The SPIVA scorecard reinforces Buffett’s case against stock-pickers <\/p>\n

The semi-annual S&P Indices Versus Active Funds report, known as the SPIVA scorecard, measures how actively managed funds perform against benchmarks. <\/p>\n

Story Continues <\/p>\n

The 2025 year-end edition delivered a pointed verdict on the active management industry and its consistency in adding value for investors. <\/p>\n

In 2025, roughly 79% of actively managed large-cap equity funds trailed the S&P 500<\/a>, the SPIVA Year-End 2025 scorecard<\/a> confirmed. That rate jumped sharply from 65% the prior year, making it the fourth-worst showing across the scorecard’s full 25-year history. <\/p>\n

More Warren Buffett: <\/p>\n

“Market regimes characterized by benchmark declines and high volatility<\/a> are supposedly those in which active managers should shine,” said Anu Ganti<\/a>, head of U.S. index investment strategy at S&P Dow Jones Indices, in the SPIVA commentary. <\/p>\n

Over the 15-year period ending December 2025, the SPIVA scorecard found no equity fund category in which a majority of active managers beat their benchmark. <\/p>\n

That pattern has persisted through bull runs, corrections, and volatile periods, reinforcing the difficulty of sustained outperformance even among seasoned portfolio professionals. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> SPIVA’s latest scorecard shows most active fund managers consistently lag benchmarks, reinforcing Warren Buffett’s long-standing case for index investing.Michael M. Santiago \/ Getty Images The S&P 500’s rising concentration introduces a new wrinkle <\/p>\n

Buffett’s 10-year results for VOO are hard to dispute on the numbers, but several Wall Street<\/a> strategists have raised concerns about the index itself.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The S&P 500 has grown increasingly top-heavy, with a small group of mega-cap technology stocks now commanding a disproportionate share of its total weight. <\/p>\n

The index’s 10 largest stocks reached a record 40.7% of total weight at the end of 2025, nearly doubling from about 19% at the end of 2015, according to RBC Wealth Management’s<\/a> “Great Narrowing” analysis of S&P 500 constituent data. <\/p>\n

A selloff concentrated in a handful of dominant technology names could pull the broader fund lower, even if the remaining 490 stocks perform well. <\/p>\n

“We don’t think that the set-it-and-forget-it, S&P 500-only strategy is the right strategy” for investors looking at one-to-three-year returns, Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, told CNBC<\/a>. <\/p>\n

What Buffett’s results mean for long-term investment plan <\/p>\n

Buffett’s core recommendation has stayed the same for more than a decade, and VOO’s 303% total return over that period is the type of result he has pointed to, according to Motley Fool data<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The SPIVA data<\/a> shows that over the 15-year period ending December 2025, no equity fund category had a majority of active managers beat their benchmark. <\/p>\n

Shalett and other strategists have flagged that rising concentration in a few mega-cap names makes the index less diversified than it appears, CNBC reported<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Whether a single-index strategy is right for a portfolio depends on factors like savings rate, investment timeline, and comfort with market swings.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Morgan Stanley<\/a> Wealth Management and other advisers say these factors matter even more today because the S&P 500 is becoming increasingly dominated by a handful of mega-cap companies. <\/p>\n

Related: Warren Buffett’s 2 rules look prescient as S&P 500 slides<\/a> <\/p>\n

This story was originally published by TheStreet<\/a> on Aug 1, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing<\/a> section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warren Buffett has spent six decades turning individual stock picks into one of the largest personal fortunes in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[162],"tags":[90195,90196,50170,19345,90197,8035,669],"class_list":["post-201560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-warren-buffett","tag-equity-fund","tag-equity-funds","tag-fund-managers","tag-index-fund","tag-mutual-fund","tag-voo","tag-warren-buffett"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117156568570509722","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}