I attended most of the London Value Investor Conference last week. It's very much the Rolls-Royce of the investor conference market, not least because the tickets are pricey at £658 (although the £30k profit went to a children's charity called Place2Be), but also because the speaker line-up is top-notch - e.g. Anthony Bolton, Howard Marks, James Montier, etc. So some serious & high-achieving names, most of whom have run £ multi-billion funds.
I took copious notes, but rather than regurgitating the speeches verbatim, which would take much too long, I've decided to skip through the speeches to give a general flavour, but to stop and highlight the key insights from each speech which really stuck in my mind as being useful.
I arrived, as planned, during the mid-morning coffee break, because my day started, as usual with me writing up my morning small cap report here. So I missed the speeches from Michael Price, Gary Channon, and David Harding.
This article is Part 1, and covers the speech from:
Richard Oldfield of Oldfield Partners
Their value investing ethos is nicely summarised here.
Oldfield wrote a value investing book called "Simple Not Easy" in 2007, and in a self-deprecating speech, joked that he had been rash to publish it just before the GFC (Great Financial Crisis). He also indicated that his funds had under-performed recently, so he had therefore decided to use this speech to focus on his mistakes.
A number of examples were given, including the market crash of 1987. Oldfield had been on holiday at the time, and when the market crashed 25% he felt it was a wonderful buying opportunity. However, his big mistake was going back into the office, where in barely a couple of hours he had become infected by the mood of panic amongst his colleagues. In that critical time when they should have held their nerve, and been buyers, they made the terrible mistake of going 40% liquid after the crash.
So the lessons he learned from this episode were;
1. To keep a cool detachment from day-to-day market movements & background noise (he doesn't have a Bloomberg terminal on his desk) in order to think clearly.
2. That large asset allocation changes are nearly always disastrously wrong, as they are too emotionally charged. So only…
