A little while ago Portfolio ran this great Felix Salmon article about Chris Wyser-Pratte, a 1972 Stanford MBA grad who spent the next 23 years as an investment banker, and the seven principles he was taught at Stanford Business. When I read through them, I was struck by how timeless they are, and how readily applicable to [...]
Archive for the ‘About’ Category
Seven things value investors used to learn at Stanford Business School
Posted in Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Chris Wyser-Pratte on December 8, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Guest post: Imation Corp (NYSE:IMN) Worth More Sold Than Alone
Posted in Activist Investors, Net Net Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Activist investment, Amit Chokshi, Imation Corp (NYSE:IMN), Kinnaras Capital on November 30, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Amit Chokshi of Kinnaras Capital, an independent registered investment advisor focused on deep-value, small capitalization and micro capitalization equity investing, has contributed a guest post on Imation Corp (NYSE:IMN). About Kinnaras: Kinnaras aims to deliver above average long-term results through application of a deep value investment strategy. As a result, the Firm focuses on the “throwaways” of the equity market, or [...]
Short your national stock market
Posted in Behavioral economics on July 6, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Another one for the annals of behavioral finance. From Handbook of the Economics of Finance, Chapter 18, A Survey Of Behavioral Finance by Nicholas BARBERIS, and Richard THALER, University of Chicago: 7.1 Insufficient diversification A large body of evidence suggests that investors diversify their portfolio holdings much less than is recommended by normative models of portfolio choice. First, investors exhibit a [...]
Michael Mauboussin on WealthTrack
Posted in About, Behavioral economics, Contrarian investment, Value Investment, tagged Behavioral investing, Michael Mauboussin, Value investing on June 28, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Michael Mauboussin appeared Friday on Consuelo Mack’s WealthTrack to discuss several of the ideas in his excellent book, Think Twice. Particularly compelling is his story about Triple Crown prospect Big Brown and the advantage of the “outside view” – the statistical one – over the “inside view” – the specific, anecdotal one (excerpted from the book): June 7, 2008 was a [...]
An examination of the “Profit and Value” strategy
Posted in About, Quantitative investment, Stocks, tagged Book value, Joel Greenblatt, Magic Formula, Quant Investing on June 21, 2011 | 25 Comments »
The excellent Empirical Finance Blog has a superb series of posts on an investment strategy called “Profit and Value” (How “Magic” is the Magic Formula? and The Other Side of Value), which Wes describes as the “academic version” of Joel Greenblatt’s “Magic Formula.” (Incidentally, Greenblatt is speaking at the New York Value Investors Congress in October [...]
Top posts of the year
Posted in About, Stocks, tagged Greenbackd on November 1, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I’m on break for the next three weeks. Here are the top posts for the past 12 months: Mike Burry’s Scion Capital investor letters Guest post: The short case for Berkshire Graham’s P/E10 ratio Tweedy Browne updates What Has Worked In Investing What Montier’s Painting by Numbers can offer to value investors The long and [...]
Donald G. Smith on price-to-tangible book value
Posted in Liquidation Value, Stocks, tagged Donald G. Smith, Liquidating Value, Price-to-book Value on October 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The Fall 2010 edition of the Graham and Doddsville Newsletter, Columbia Business School‘s student-led investment newsletter co-sponsored by the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing and the Columbia Investment Management Association, has a fascinating interview with Donald G. Smith. Smith, who volunteered for Benjamin Graham at UCLA, concentrates on the bottom decile of price to tangible book stocks [...]
Above average odds on The GSI Group (PINK:LASR)
Posted in Activist Investors, Liquidation Value, Stocks, tagged The GSI Group (PINK:LASR) on October 28, 2010 | 6 Comments »
For a period from late 2008 through mid 2009 the GSI Group (PINK:LASR) was prima facie the cheapest stock on my net net screen, but I couldn’t pull the trigger because it was delinquent a few quarterly filings. The company entered Chapter 11 due to the technical default of not filing financial statements and is now [...]
The Small Cap Paradox: A problem with LSV’s Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk in practice
Posted in About, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Lakonishok Shleifer and Vishny, Quantitative investment on October 26, 2010 | 7 Comments »
Yesterday’s post on LSV Asset Management’s performance reminded me of the practical difficulties of implementing many theoretically well-performed investment strategies. LSV Asset Management is an outgrowth of the research conducted by Josef Lakonishok, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny. They are perhaps best known for the Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk paper, which, among other things, analyzed low price-to-book [...]
AVNW update and valuation
Posted in About, Activist Investors, Net Current Asset Value, Stocks, Value Investment, tagged Aviat Networks Inc (NASDAQ:AVNW) on October 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Oozing Alpha has a write-up on the valuation of Aviat Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVNW) (see the post archive here). AVNW is an interesting Ramius activist target trading at a small premium to net current asset value. Here’s the write-up from Oozing Alpha: Investment Thesis AVNW is an excellent opportunity to invest in a leading wireless backhaul [...]

