Invest Alongside the Superstars

Scraping together enough coin to win the annual luncheon auction with Warren Buffett is probably beyond most investors' means. With the proceeds going to charity, this year's winning bidder forked over $2.63 million for the privilege.

Feast or famine
While we likely can't afford to break bread with the greats, we can peek at their stock ideas through their Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Here, we'll pore over some of the top investors' reports to see which stocks they've chosen as their best investments. We'll then check in with Motley Fool CAPS members to learn whether they agree.

First, a few caveats

• There's a delay between when the stocks were bought and when these investors filed their paperwork, so they might have sold out since.
• These legends may be hot investors now, but that can change in an instant. Bill Miller was a wunderkind after beating the market 15 years in a row. Then he went cold for three. He came back in 2009, but we don't know what 2010 will bring.

Contrary to popular opinion
Fools should definitely do their own further research here. But in the meantime, let's take a look again at famed growth-at-a-reasonable-price investor Steve Mandel, the founder of Lone Pine Capital, who we looked at back in February.

Fund: Lone Pine Capital

No. of Stocks Owned: 52

Top 5 Holdings: JPMorgan Chase, Qualcomm, Cognizant Technology Solutions (Nasdaq: CTSH), Apple, Accenture

Top Sectors: technology, consumer services, financials, industrials, consumer goods

Like a number of the investing legends we've looked at, Mandel has a fairly diversified portfolio. But it's notable that while investing in the financial sector like many of his counterparts, he's also placing his bets with the consumer. So let's look closer at a few of his choices below.

Source: GuruFocus and Motley Fool CAPS.

Price is what you pay
The Transformers movie franchise has been a phenomenal success not only for the film studios that made it, but also for toymakers like Hasbro (NYSE: HAS), which feasts on sales every time Optimus Prime hits the screen. It scored nearly half a billion dollars on the first iteration alone when the movie was released in 2007, which might explain why Activision Blizzard has a lot riding on its Transformers: War for Cybertron video game.

It might not be a big best-seller like Take-Two Interactive's (Nasdaq: TTWO) Red Dead Redemption, but with NPD Group reporting video game software sales plunged 12% in the U.S. last quarter, analysts are expecting game makers to report weak earnings week.

CAPS member djshagggyd says Activision's portfolio of top franchises will carry it through while tron69 looks forward to its new releases this fall to transform its operations. Will Activision rise to the top of your buy list?

Delivering the goods
When FedEx (NYSE: FDX) reported its own earnings last month, it gave the markets a good dose of confidence that we just might be able to stave off this double-dip recession threat. Its raising guidance just the other day along with a string of triple-digit jumps in the market indexes indicates investors felt many of the concerns were overblown, or at least have been capably handled. We can certainly quibble with the conclusion (I'm definitely not in the "all clear" camp), but UPS previously raised its own guidance the week before, and these two delivery companies have always been something of a business climate barometer.

That could be why 86% of the nearly 1,600 CAPS members rating UPS think it will go on to outperform the broad market averages, but you can deliver your own opinion on the UPS CAPS page.

Heightened state of awareness
Annual growth of IT outsourcing in Europe is expected to have grown 40% in the second quarter, a pretty significant uptick in demand. But when it's down 5% from the previous quarter, that might signal some rethinking going on in the boardroom. And the market researchers at Gartner are expecting full-year growth to slow as well as fallout from the sovereign debt crisis to be felt.

That means outsourcing outfits Cognizant Technologies, Infosys, and even Mahindra Satyam (NYSE: SAY) will need to better adjust to the new spending climate. Cognizant has been doing well for the past year, rising nearly 80% following a "growth and crash" strategy. subsurfacemapper thinks Cognizant's move into Europe will be a net plus for the outsourcing leader.

Always liked ctsh-have owned it a couple times. Has moved in to France, has great earnnings, good model, and part of dbd 100 at this time.

Value is what you get
Become an investing legend yourself by starting your own research on these stocks on Motley Fool CAPS. Read a company's financial reports, scrutinize key data and charts, and examine the comments your fellow investors have made, all from a stock's CAPS page.

Sign up today for the completely free service and tell us whether these stocks are as good a value as these investing legends think they are.