To succeed at investing, sometimes it pays to copy the strategies of the smartest guys in the room.

That includes sages like Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn, and institutions like the Yale University endowment and the California Public Employees' Retirement System.

William Baldwin, an investing columnist for Forbes magazine, examines their investing styles to demonstrate the variety of portfolios that match such considerations and time and risk-tolerance.

“How much of your savings should be tossed into the stock market casino? Just about all, if you think like Warren Buffett. None, figures a panic-prone colleague of mine who just sold off his last share,” he says. “Bonds? These days they yield not much more than nothing. Maybe you should own not a single one.”

Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, prefers a heavy weighting in stocks, which pretty much accepts the idea that the market will experience periods of declines – in which case, it’s good to have cash on hand for bargain-hunting.

”In a letter to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, he explained that instructions in his will have the money being left to his wife invested 90 percent in a stock index fund and 10 percent in short-term government bonds,” Baldwin says. “Is this mix right for you? Maybe—if you can shrug off the next 50 percent crash.”

Meanwhile, Buffett and Laurence D. Fink, head of asset manager BlackRock, this month published a set of what they called “common sense” recommendations for public companies to improve their corporate governance and relations with shareholders.

Suggestions include urging publicly traded companies to refrain from short-term earnings forecasts, embracing corporate transparency and pushing for independent boards, Bloomberg News reports.

“We share the view that constructive dialogue requires finding common ground — a starting point to foster the economic growth that benefits shareholders, employees and the economy as a whole,” according to the letter. “To that end, we have worked to find common-sense principles.”