"Investing Made Easy: Buy Great Companies"

In a Fortune article, authors Bethany McLean and John Campbell explain how Goldman Sachs' John Campbell, director of Goldman Sachs' Private Client Investment, an advisory service usually reserved for brokerage customers with $5 million or more in their accounts, beats the S&P 500 index with a simple approach to the market. Campbell's portfolio of top shelf blue chips has returned 36.45% annually over three years.

Some of his secrets:

Keep it simple: Invest in the best companies with the best managements at reasonable prices and over the long haul your stocks will beat the market.

When selecting companies, choose one you understand, which has sustainable competitive advantages.

Look for companies where management owns a lot of their own stock so they are, in effect, working for themselves and more sensitive to building shareholder value since they are significant shareholders.

Campbell likes big companies:" Scale is an enormous competitive advantage these days. Big companies can invest the most in information technology, in research and development. They have the best global distribution. A prospect told me recently that when he was in a remote province in China, the only things he recognized were Proctor and Gamble products."

Campbell, is "a former securities lawyer who joined Goldman Sachs as a research analyst 25 years ago".