The marks of a great value investor

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平安出了一份保险行业系列报告—寿险估值再讨论：寻找价值底线，可以睇睇

另外，錢先生係OU講ｔａｌｋ 與基金經理探討投資策略

而You'll Never Walk Alone亦出了篇我為什麼喜歡保險股?!

當然贊同啦， 投資係common stocks上比自己做生意（開cafe,hair salon)，,其中一個advantage就係可以參與一些自己力量無可能做到的生意，例如壽險和銀行

壽險公司本身已是一門好做的生意,再加上國企身份,又有保監睇實,個個月出埋數據,利費死差係中國大環境下偏好,我暫時睇唔到有哪門生意比壽險優勝

昨天篇文，見到有回應講ｒｉｓｋ的問題

其實我真的想多講一點關於風險的問題

投資人/生意人所面對的風險,和對沖(arbitrage)所面對的是兩回事

btw,要2628關門,我想到幾個可能性,但對我根本沒用,可知道為何?

有回應再講多點


好啦，入正題，昨天FT的ｌａｓｔ　ｗｏｒｄ　ｃｏｌｕｍｎ，獻給ｓｉｒ　ｔｅｍｐｌｅｔｏｎ，如下：

The marks of a great value investor

By Jonathan Davis

Published: July 20 2008 22:03

The most famous of Sir John Templeton’s market aphorisms was that “the time to buy is at the point of maximum pessimism”, although I believe he has a good claim also to be the true originator of the saying that the four most dangerous words in investment are “this time it’s different”. Does he think that we have reached such a point in the credit crisis? Alas, we shall never hear his views again, following his death two weeks ago at the grand age of 95.

Is there anything to add to the many words of wisdom that have already been written about this remarkable investor turned philanthropist? Too many of the books written about him, in my view, have verged on hagiography, or were written by acolytes in an effort to spread his views about the importance of the spiritual dimension to life, or some other cause he held dear.

Having spent many months researching his life and investment methods with one of his former employees, the Edinburgh fund manager Sandy Nairn, one thing that struck me was how constant Sir John’s investment philosophy had remained throughout his long and distinguished career, initially as an investment counsel in New York and latterly as founder and guiding spirit of the mutual fund business that he sold in 1992, but which still bears his name today.

One of the sources that Mr Nairn and I looked at in our researches were the regular letters to investors Sir John sent to his clients as an investment counsel. In them, from the very beginning of his business in the early 1940s, could be found all the core beliefs that have since come to be associated with his approach to investing. The importance of value, the need for patience, the power of contrarianism are all clearly foreshadowed in these crudely typed but masterfully simple letters.

Another striking item in the archives was a memo to his colleagues, dated 1953, in which he gave 11 tips on how to keep clients happy. For all his idealism and personal humility, Sir John was also a shrewd and profoundly pragmatic businessman. (“Each of us should keep in mind,” he writes, “the strong psychological effect of repetition. Pointing out a good record once does not have nearly the effect of pointing out the same record four or five times.”)

As a stock market investor, what marked him out most, according to those who worked closely with him, was the simplicity and consistency of his value approach, which combined forensic ability at the stock-specific level with an uncanny ability to see the emergence of macro themes.

When Mr Nairn and I visited him in his office in the Bahamas in June 2003, for example, he deflected our questions about the stock market to tell us that his major concern was the emerging “bubble” in real estate. “In most nations in the world, real estate prices are way above the cost of reproducing the building, and that’s dangerous. This is a very big bubble because the amount of money in real estate is several times as big as it is in stocks.”

A good subject for research, he suggested, would be “what governments would do when real estate prices go down 50 per cent”. That was the question that interested him, not least because he was sure it would lead to some money-making opportunities once the bubble burst. It led him on to recall that in the 1930s his father made more money out of “sharecropping”, buying land from bankrupt farmers and giving it back to them in return for a share of the profits, than he did from his day job practising law.

Careful analysis of the performance track record of the Templeton global mutual fund shows that over the course of his 40 plus years in charge of the fund, he outperformed the world index by slightly over 3 per cent a year, a remarkable achievement over such a long period of time, not least because it was achieved with below-market levels of volatility. As so often with genuine value investors, the bulk of the outperformance in his funds came through bear markets and other slow periods.

Many widely held opinions about Mr Templeton’s investment record turn out to have been oversimplifications. For example, while he is famous for buying into the Japanese stock market in the 1960s when no other investors would touch it, less well known is that he sold out many years before the Tokyo market peaked in 1989 – a decision that caused him a lot of soul-searching thereafter.

Equally striking is that, despite his own deep-seated value philosophy he would happily give his own money to other professional investors with ideas and approaches at odds with his own. There was never just one way of doing things. The reason he remains one of the truly great investors of the 20th century is that he never forgot that the money he was managing was someone else’s, and that there are many more important things in life than investment success.

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