Jean-Marie Eveillard - Value Investor Insight - May 30, 2008
Money and Finance

Jean-Marie Eveillard - Value Investor Insight - May 30, 2008


JME: For the past 30 years we’ve sort of floated in style between Ben Graham and Warren Buffett. Graham’s approach is static, quantitative and focused on the balance sheet. There’s no attempt to look into the future and judge the more qualitative aspects of the business. He’d love the Japanese net-nets today, for example.

Buffett’s major idea was to also look more qualitatively for those few businesses with apparently sustainable competitive advantages, where the odds were fairly high that the business would be as successful ten years from now as it is today. In those situations, one makes money not so much from the elimination of the discount to intrinsic value, but more from the growth in that intrinsic value.

When I started out in 1979, both in the U.S. and Europe, there were many Ben Graham-type stocks to uncover after the dismal stock performance of the 1970s. As we grew and markets changed, we’ve moved more to the Buffett approach, but not without trepidation. If one is wrong in judging a company to have a sustainable competitive advantage, the investment results can be disastrous. With the Graham approach, the very large discount to static value minimizes that risk. Overall, I’d like to believe we’ve learned well from both Graham and Buffett and that we own securities that would attract each of them.

Most of the time the short-term outlook stinks for the companies we end up buying, for company-specific or cyclical reasons. The best opportunities tend to be when the company now facing a lousy short-term outlook was not long before considered a darling of growth investors, and when the problems are now perceived to be more permanent. If you think those problems aren’t really permanent, you can make very attractive investments if you turn out to be right.
-
....................
-
Value Investor Insight
-




- The Question Warren Buffett Used To Ask Every Ceo...
From Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor: Munger is a believer in the investment approaches and ideas of Philip Fisher. Fisher was a successful investor based in California who wrote an influential book entitled Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits,...

- Filters
Below is an investment letter I wrote in February of last year. The essence of what I was trying to get at is essentially what Sanjay Bakshi was saying (though more clearly and elegantly than I did) in his recent interview with Vishal Khandelwal...

- Safal Niveshak: Value Investing, The Sanjay Bakshi Way 2.0 – Part 2
For Part 1, which was a great overview on MOAT investing, go HERE. A big thanks to Vishal Khandelwal for doing these brilliant interviews. Link to interview: Value Investing, the Sanjay Bakshi Way 2.0 – Part 2Excerpt: As a disciple of Ben...

- Berkshire Hathaway And Geico: An M&a Case Study
In striking contrast to the problematic M&A track record of many firms, financier Warren Buffett, the Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, has been a remarkably successful acquirer. There can be many reasons for this contrast, but a key one is...

- 5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Buying A Stock
1. What do I know about this stock that other investors don't?  Every investor who has ever bought a stock believes it to be undervalued or under-appreciated by the market, but before you press the "buy" button it's absolutely critical to...



Money and Finance








.