Investing can be cold and hard. Hence, not all investors can build a track record of high figures on returns consistently. Comparing track records and performance numbers in the financial market is tedious. But after much deliberation, here is a list of five. The list comprises those who have shown quality skills for increasing and multiplying funds across America’s stock market history.

The first person on the list is Benjamin Graham. A British-born influential American investor. He was widely regarded as the father of value investing and security analysis. Graham is the teacher and mentor of Warren Buffet. Graham is said to have made huge money without even taking huge risks on the stock market. His book, The Intelligent Investor, is one of the most famous investing books.

Another name on this illustrious list is the Quant King – Jim Simons. James Harris Simons is an American billionaire hedge fund manager. He was a mathematician who has taught at both MIT and Harvard. At age 44 in 1982, he started one of the most successful quant funds in the world – Renaissance Technologies (Rentech.) By 1988 he decided to use solely quantitative analysis to determine trades.

Simons is joined on the list by George Soros. He is a Hungarian-American billionaire investor. He is popularly referred to as the man who broke the Bank of England. This was an accolade from 1992. He risked $10 billion to short the British Pound. An estimated total trade net of $2 billion shows he was right. Most of his strategies are said to be undefined. Yet, his Quantum Fund generates an average annual return of over 30% while he was the manager.

On number four is David F. Swensen. An American investor and endowment fund manager. David’s talent was said to have helped him figure out what no one could. That is, going beyond the usual stocks and bonds to endowment investing. He was already a history maker before he started managing Yale’s endowment fund with the Yale Model. He orchestrated the first-ever derivatives swap.

To wrap up the list is the Oracle of Omaha – Warren Buffett. One of the most successful investors of all time. He is an American billionaire Investor. Amassing his multibillion-dollar fortune by using Graham’s value investing. He is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate holding company. His simple style of discipline, patience, and value has yielded massive profit over the years.

As an investor, you must learn to forge your path through the not so easy market returns. I hope this list has been insightful for you. Importantly, invest sensibly, suitably, and simply.

E-commerce is an abbreviation for Electronic Commerce. A simple definition will be the act of buying and selling over the internet. It has become conventional in people’s daily life. After all, there is always an everyday need for purchase. E-commerce then steps in to meet the supply of such needs. In America, companies such as Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and others have taken central control of e-commerce. It is, therefore, important to know their money-making strategies and the role of their customers.

E-commerce makes money in a lot of ways. The first investment strategy to be considered here is targeting the right audience. The importance of this is that instead of reaching out to a large audience, they will direct their content towards potential customers.

Another top money-making strategy is using marketing collateral to drive traffics. What e-commerce giants do is to use the customer’s research journey to address the customer’s pain point. With that, the benefits of a product can be quickly communicated to the customer.

There are also automated processes used to deliver goods, services, and follow-up on their customers. Here is a bit of repetition, the law of lasting impression. Not just that, customers can familiarize themselves with the e-commerce service delivery system, delivery is also very fast and efficient.

For the third quarter of 2018, the U. S. Census Bureau shows a domestic e-commerce sales increase of 14.5% from 2017. This increase translated to a total of 5.3% increase in retail sales in the same period. There is no that to the fact that there is money to be made in e-commerce. This can explain e-commerce, taking half of retail growth, especially during the 2020 pandemic outbreak.

Let’s take a peek at Amazon’s drawing board. Amazon is driven by its founder and CEO’s vision “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” There we have it, Amazon’s biggest investment is in its customers.

In conclusion, the points above can be further emphasized with the deep discounting strategy common to e-commerce brands. However, customer service is not e-commerce’s only investment. Other investment strategies would include sellers’ fixed subscriptions, sales commission, logistics and shipping, and reinvesting profits, among many others.

Since the start of the 21st century, household names such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison have been at the top of the billionaire rich list. Therefore, it is important to learn one or two lessons from their distinctive understanding of making money.

Of the over 500 billionaires in the United States, 363 are self-made. The high rank of self-made billionaires is followed by 105 who have achieved the exclusive billionaire status through inherited wealth and hard-earned wealth. The remaining 117 billionaires became wealthy as a result of wealth passed down as an heirloom.

However, the above stat is the most popular one used to justify the wealth of billionaires. Although it is true, it does not fully express popular paths taken by billionaires to make their money. The fact is that billionaires did not just appear with 10 digits. Most of them toiled the critical finance and investment industry.

Given the recent boom in technology, it is easy to think that there are more tech geeks than members of the finance and investing list in the billionaire cadre. Of the top 10 billionaire making industries, finance and investments topped the list with 14%. The second industry on the list is the fashion and retail industry who had 11%. Real estate and technology industries came in as third and fourth, respectively, with 10.4 and 10.0 percent.

Without a doubt, an investment can be in real estate. Hence a whopping 24.4% of the Three Comma Club came about their wealth through one form of investment or the other. Investment is the only money-making strategy that unifies all billionaires. What many of these billionaires do is diversification. They put their money in different places.

Let’s take the tech giant, Bill Gates, as a case study. The former Microsoft CEO owns 54,912,525 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Waste Management, Inc. comes in at second as Bill’s second-largest holding with over 18.6 million shares. Even though speculations say Apple and Microsoft are bitter enemies, Bill Gates bought 501,044 shares in the apple stock.

In conclusion, investment portfolios are what billionaires use to increase their money on multiple fronts. Warren Buffet, the most influential investor of all time, said, “The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself…”