What is Cloning?

"Cloning" simply means creating investing strategies that intelligently apply the publicly disclosed stock ideas of top hedge fund and institutional money managers.

Numerous academic studies have validated cloning or "piggyback investing" as an effective investment research approach that can consistently outperform the overall market by a significant amount over time. Check out our research library for more information.

To assist in this process, AlphaClone offers an innovative online research service that enables investors to create customized "clones" and quickly determine if the strategies have added value over time with instant 10-year backtests.

Once a strategy is selected for investment, users purchase the stocks that the system suggests and rebalance quarterly when new holdings are disclosed. Get started today.

For investors who seek more convenient options that don't require trading, AlphaClone offers a family of Core Strategies that rebalance automatically via our investment accounts. View our Core Strategies.

Clones can be created by following the stock picks of a single manager or a custom group of managers. We currently track over 280 managers in our database.

Our cloning strategies include:
- Top Holdings: invest in largest positions
- Best Ideas: invest in largest NEW positions
- Popularity: invest in positions held by the largest number of managers

Here are a couple of examples:

  • A clone that holds Seth Klarman's ten largest holdings each quarter beat the
    S&P 500 by 223% since 2000 (as of 4/30/2010).
  • A clone that holds the ten most popular stocks amongst our Value Masters
    Fund Group beat the S&P 500 by 287% since 2000 (as of 4/30/2010).
Review our Cloning FAQs for more information.