What's Your Investment Philosophy?
In mid-December, we sent Bespoke’s client base a survey to capture the current thinking of experienced investors on markets, the economy, policy shifts, and portfolio positioning heading into 2026 and beyond. Last week, we published our 2026 Investor Sentiment report with a detailed summary of the survey’s results. If you aren’t currently a client, you can start a trial here to view the full report and start receiving everything else we publish on a daily basis.
There were a number of fascinating findings across our entire survey about investor positioning, but one of the more basic questions we asked was for participants to “choose which sentence best describes your overall investment philosophy.”
As shown below, while “buy wonderful companies and hold them essentially forever” ranks as the single most popular philosophy, it still captures less than one-fifth of respondents, and no single approach dominates. Opportunistic strategies, trend and momentum following, passive indexing, and concentrated high-conviction investing all cluster closely together, each attracting a meaningful share of investors.
Even approaches like macro and thematic investing, deep value/mean reversion, absolute return, and systematic factor-based strategies are well represented.
We think the dispersion in responses is the key takeaway here: investors don’t converge around one unified framework, but instead express a wide range of beliefs about how risk and return are best managed. Every trade reflects a difference in opinion, time horizon, or risk tolerance, and there is no single “right” way to invest. Different strategies work at different times, and markets function because participants bring varied views and approaches to the table.
This mix of philosophies is what drives liquidity, price discovery, and ultimately “makes a market.”
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