A MONKEY throwing darts will, often as not, outperform seasoned investment professionals when it comes to picking shares. This is a sobering reminder of the fickleness of financial markets. However, there exists an elite band of investors which succeeds in consistently outperforming average market returns, delivering handsome profits for those whose money they manage.

These investment gurus, men with the Midas touch, can move markets with a single investment decision and are in constant demand, both with professionals and ordinary investors keen to learn the secrets of their success. Their recipes vary - some are value investors, bargain-seekers who ferret out those companies whose shares have fallen on hard times or which have hidden assets.

Others are growth investors who look for companies with strong sales and earnings growth, operating in sectors which are showing a strong growth trend. Some opt for newer approaches, like the momentum investors often associated with the Nasdaq and the burgeoning technology sector who ride trends, buying stocks in a strong upward price move and staying with them as long as the upward move continues.

But common to all of them is the careful way they do their homework, assiduously researching each company, its management and prospects.

Warren Buffett is, of course, the best known of these investment gurus.

The legendary US stock-picker, christened the Forest Gump of finance by Vanity Fair, was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1930. He still prefers to operate from the corn-belt town rather than the rumour mill of Wall Street. "With enough inside information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year," he has said.

Rejected by Harvard, he studied science and economics at Columbia instead and became a protege of the famous securities analyst, Benjamin Graham, author of a seminal 1934 work on value investing. His investment vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, is famous for its investments in blue-chip companies such as CocaCola and Gillette.

Mr Buffett has made his loyal shareholders seriously wealthy - buyers of A shares in the company have seen them rise in value from $100 (€91.67) some 20 years ago to $73,000 at the close of business last Friday.

Even some of Mr Buffett's dodgier decisions, which he himself had dismissed as mistakes, have since turned up trumps. His troubled investment in Salomon turned to gold when Travelers Group bought the Wall Street investment bank for $9 billion in 1997, while US Airways, another embarrassment, has also come good.

His decision in late-1997 to shift about $2 billion out of shares into bonds sent ripples through the market as dealers and analysts fretted that Mr Buffett's move signalled his belief that stock markets were over-priced while his decision to snap up 20 per cent of the world's supply of silver prompted a stampede into the precious metal.

Addicted to Cherry Coke, he drinks five each day, doing his bit for the sales of a company which has rewarded him well. Mr Buffett is known for his down-home folksy investment advice and his annual letter to shareholders is now legendary. On how long he holds shares, he has said, "My favourite time frame for holding a stock is forever." On which stocks to pick, he says: "You should invest in a business that even a fool can run because some day a fool will." Above all, he tells investors to "be greedy when others are fearful, and be very fearful when others are greedy".

But behind the wit, there lies a tried and tested investment philosophy. His views on diversification, for instance, are interesting as he advocates an approach known as focus investing.

For those who are able to understand business economics and to find five to 10 sensibly priced companies that possess important long-term competitive advantages, conventional diversification makes no sense, Mr Buffett believes.

"Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing," he has said.

Another high profile investor to have emerged in recent years is George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist widely known as the man who broke the Bank of England. By betting against sterling's survival in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992, Mr Soros made more than £1 billion and established himself as a legendary figure in financial markets.

However, while Mr Soros's insights on global financial markets remain of interest in professional and academic circles, many of his profits have been made from the ebb and flow of the international currency markets, beyond the realm of most ordinary private investors.

In addition, his credibility has been somewhat tarnished in recent months by the heavy losses suffered by his hedge funds in the Asian and Russian crises. His famous call for a modest devaluation of the rouble had unintended consequences and is blamed by some for triggering the slide which led to the currency's all-out collapse, leaving Mr Soros's funds nursing losses of more than $2 billion.

Another well-known US investor, though his profile is lower on this side of the Atlantic, is Peter Lynch, the former manager of Fidelity's Magellan Fund. During his 13 years at the helm, he outperformed the stock market average at least fivefold, turning Magellan into the largest mutual fund in the US. Anyone who put $10,000 into the fund in 1977, the year he began to manage it, would have seen their stake grow to $280,000 by the time he retired 13 years later.

Born in Boston, his father died when Mr Lynch was 10 and, to help out at home, he got a job caddying at his local golf club - an experience he shared with a number of other investment gurus, including Mr Buffett and "Super Mario", better known as Mario Gabelli, another Wall Street legend known for his value approach to investing. It was on the golf course that Mr Lynch first started to learn about the stock market and he too had interesting advice for investors.

Rather than spend all their time poring over numbers, he advises people to go and hang out at a shopping mall and see what stores and what products are doing well. "There's a 100 per cent correlation between what happens to the company and what happens to the stock," he says. Mr Lynch also notes that one of the most difficult aspects of investing is being a believer when everything around you looks ominous and gloomy.

Nor is guru status confined to men. In his book Investment Gurus, Peter Tanous profiles Laura Sloate. Blind since the age of six, Ms Sloate has run her own investment firm, Sloate, Weisman, Murray & Company, for the last 25 years, using electronic equipment and a guide dog to establish a level playing field.

A value investor, she manages more than $1 billion in funds and has consistently beaten the market, delivering net returns of more than 24 per cent annually in the five years to 1995.

Finally, there are investors like Driehaus, little known outside the investment industry but considered by many to be the father of momentum investing. A Chicagoan, Driehaus began as a coin collector before moving on to invest in stocks, particularly small stocks with market capitalisations of less than $500 million.

Discipline, he says, is the key to his investment philosophy. "It's not so much finding and buying the winners, it's the ability to retreat, to sell. . . This is not a game of muscle, it is a game of survival," he says.

While studying these money managers and their investment philosophies can provide a road-map to wealth, particularly for those keen to try their hand at picking stocks themselves, it is worth remembering Driehaus's observation that there are no easy or instant solutions. "Everybody wants to be rich but few want to work for it," he says. "It's a lot of work and effort. It's a 24-hour-a-day commitment."