James Wolfensohn - Former World Bank President

I found what James Wolfensohn had to say consistent with something that James Meyhew (Chairman of JP Morgan Cazenove) mentioned in his talk. There is a change coming. One of the things that David Meyhew said was that politicians were nor being straight with us that there was this change coming. We [in the western world] will have to adjust to having less.

James Wolfensohn sets out what he sees as quite a different wealth distribution - rather than having 80% of the worlds GDP this will shift to 35%. In China and India there will be a huge growth in the middle class.

James covers and joins together many different threads in this speech at Stanford and with it is an underlying inescapable logic, including he observation that economic power and military power are inevitably linked.

The speech is close on an hour in duration including questions. It is well worth listening to.

John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) - Venture Capitalist

Another great interview - this one from John Doer in 2009. John is the head of a Kleiner Perkins a venture capital company that invests in high tech. His insights are fascinating.

Here are a small number of things that stood out to me:

• 1/2 of the US energy is wasted.
• US has a tiny investment in renewable energy (wind, solar and battery) compared to the rest of the world. Only 13% of the companies come from the US.
• Importance of company culture. He identified missionary and mercenary culture as being the two cultures that he finds to be successful. My experience of working is that culture is incredibly important and very difficult to change. My observation is that if you do not find the culture of a company "right" you should get out. How you evaluate culture in a company in which you invest - I don't know. If you want an example of mercenary culture then check out the Bill Browden Interview and his account of working for Salomon Brothers.
• Ideas are easy, execution is everything, and in everything worth doing it takes a team.

The interview is a good one and covers far more than the few points that I broke our. I recommend listening to it.

Heidi Roizen - Stanford Interview

I am endlessly amazed by the quality and variety videos that are avaiable on YouTube. I am slowly working through some of the ones published by Stanford University. This is one from Heidi Roizen who I "know" from her time as the head of developer relations at Apple. Though I did not meet her personally I had a lot of respect for her.

A particularly interesting point made by Heidi: More that 75% of all board of director positions do not go through a headhunter and are filled by people "in the loop".

William Browder (Bill Browder) - Stanford Interview

This is a longer and earlier interview with Bill Browder that the one I posted recently. It is a fascinating interview covering his early life as well as what happened next. I really recommend it - though the short documentary at the end is not that good compared to Bill's own account of it.

William Browder (Bill Browder) - Activist Investor

This is one of he most interesting and unsettling of the accounts of Active Investment. Activist investment is basically taking a badly run company and creating change so that it would be run better. Bill Browder did the whole thing on steroids - he invested in companies that were being criminally embezzled, exposed the scams and created value for the owners by stopping them from being robbed blind. Fantastic idea - just good. A win win for the government, the owners - everybody except for those doing the stealing.

The unsettling thing is when the tables turn, when power rests with the criminals the game changes. The fate of one of the lawyers involved is truly horrific.

Francois Bonnin - Asset Liquidity & Information

Not often that I post a part 2 of a video - but here in part 2 there was a really interesting opinion from Francis Bonnin.

The greater the liquidity of an asset the greater the amount of information that is embedded in the price.

To me this is both logical and really interesting. There are a couple of strands to it.

• What kind of information is in the price. Is it the right information, can it be relied on.
• With a value investor hat on - should you avoid the information that is in the price, is it the kind of information that you should be interested in?

Basically both points are the same thing - are liquid stocks more likely to be priced correctly. It is also a close relation to the observation that you are less likely to find miss pricing in well researched stocks. You can well imagine that well researched stocks are less liquid.

Anyhow here is Francois Bonnin's interview. YouTube will serve up part 1 as well if you look for it.

Walter Schloss - Value Investor

Here is a video of Walter Schloss, one of the value investing greats. Walter started off by reading "The Intelligent Investor", took a couple of his courses and went on from there. Over the life of his investment firm walter averaged 15.3% between 1955 and 2000. More details as ever on wikipedia and can be found here.

The video quality is not great but the sound is clear enough. Here is the first of five parts.

I found what walter had to say very interesting. His approach was to buy shares that were undervalued and sell them whenever they had gained 50%. He did not seem to be particularly bothered about buying particularly good companies in the Buffett sense.

Ron Hosen - Value Investor

Here is another video from Ron Hosen. I very much appreciate Ron's contribution to the value investing community. I think that he approaches investment with a great deal of logic and insight. His video is delivered in two parts. The first part deals with investment, the second is much more devoted to Ron's view of the world.

Seth Klarman - Value investor

This is a talk given by Seth Klarman - the quality of the video delivery is a bit rubbish - but what Seth says is really interesting. There is no problem at all in following what he says. This is the first of six videos.

Mark Mobius Interview

An interesting interview with mark Mobius. Some interesting points aboit mexico.

• Crime does not affect his investment - he has no feedback from the companies that he deals with that the security is a problem.
• The crime in mexico is a result of the economic disparity between the US and mexico and the fact that the economic growth does not keep up with population growth. He believes that a loosening of govt. regulation & structures to make small business prosper, reform in labor to make labour more flexible - all of which would ave a positive impact on the economy.

You can get to the video here.

Mohamed El-Erian - Interview

A fascinating interview from El-Erian chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co. This is one of the few interviews that succulently expresses some important ideas Europe. Europe is a two speed economy - on the inside there is Germany and France on the outside Spain, Portugal, Ireland etc. As a result the ECB's job is tricky - it needs monetary policy and support for the banking system.

Spain is improving Spain is not Greece and need not be Ireland. It has a banking issue but not a government debt problem. It could, like Ireland take on liabilities of the [savings] banking sector or it can try and force as many savings banks as possible to raise capital merge etc. It is trying to fore it to get the private sector to take care of the problem. As a result it is significantly outperforming Greece and Ireland. Greece and Ireland are using liquidity to address solvency and growth problems - and approach that can not continue indefinitely. The underlying issues need to be addressed. They need to restructure the debt like Uruguay, also structural reforms to allow them to grow.

For reasons that I don't fully understand but are probably due to copyright I could not embed the video but you can get it from here.

Motley Fool - ValueInvesting

Here is a short interesting article on Value Investing "Trawling for Bargain Shares" published on the Motley Fool. Enjoy!