James Pan Value Investor II

This is a really excellent talk by James Pan. It is a loose-format Q&A and it is fascinating. He covers many things and there is a lot to take away from it. The video is long (an hour and a half) but I recommend that you watch it all. Amongst other things he does some "instant" valuations of a few companies - these are off the cuff valuations that I guess you would use as a basic metric for (presumably) a more detailed look.

Of a huge bag of things he covers here are few snacks:

Value Investing is a time arbitrage and reversion to the mean. I have thought this myself (or maybe I came across the thought somewhere before). As a value investor you are looking for a price anomaly that will correct in time.

Value investors have a longer time horizon than the rest of the market - typically you are judged against the index every quarter. As a value investor you look for a longer timeframe than this - possibly years. James Pan has the particular advantage that he is managing his families money so he really is a ways away from this.

He stresses the importance of what he calls "strong money". This is something that when you think about it is self evident. Five years, or so, ago our boiler broke and needed replacing. My wife, a believer in strong money, had the £1500 in the bank and we bought a new one when we needed it. No fuss, no loans, and we were able to negotiate with the plumber. A business without strong money has little room for maneuver.

The market is like water and will find your weaknesses - feels a little Wing Chun to me. ;-)

Kent Russell on Value Investing

This is an excellent presentation by Kent Russell - who explains, amongst other things, the difficulty of being a professional value investor.