Tuesday, May 5, 2009

An Investor with a bright future

Value investing is a discipline that is thoroughly practiced by very few money managers and the fact the performance of any given fund is measured quarterly while value investing is an approach that is long-term oriented.

In Canada, I have heard of very few “to the core” value investors. The most infamous of them is certainly Stephen A. Jarislowsky, who has been involved in money management for almost half a century, providing his clients with outstanding returns and at the same time becoming one of the few billionaires of the country.


The second notable value investor in Canada is Vivan Prem Watsa, the chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial, a company I have talked about in another article that can be found here and that is advantageously positioned to make a lot of money on investment income in the coming years!


Curiosity is a big plus when you want to use the value investing method and as I was going through a MoneySense magazine in 2007; I fell on an article talking about a young money manager in Toronto, named Jim Chuong, who had accomplished a compounded average rate or return of roughly 20% on his investments! I decided to take a look at his website and I was simply astonished by the amount of value investing wisdom that was available there. For the whole period he has been investing, he wrote an annual letter to his partners... pretty much like Warren Buffett did in his early days. The following graph shows how 10000$ invested with him when he began investing in 1997 would have fared compared to the S&P500:



As you can see, he did not achieve such results by sheer luck. His performance has been affected by the broad market meltdown of 2008, but it is normal, since very few managers showed positive returns for the year. If you want to learn more about him and his strategies, his website www.ticonline.com

Friday, May 1, 2009

Chrysler should have been avoided by investors a long time ago!

The news of the bankruptcy of Chrysler or the financial difficulties of GM (NYSE: GM) or Ford (NYSE: F) never came to me as a surprise in any shape or form. Companies in the conventional automotive industry or even worse in the airlines industry have failed to show a consistent pattern of profitability over long periods of time.

So let’s take a look at General Motor’s most recent publicly available annual financial statements, it is astonishing to notice that the last time their balance sheet was carrying a positive number in the retained earnings section was back in 2006, fame thing for Ford. At the end of 2008, the accumulated deficit had reached 70 billion dollars... and 16 billion for Ford. That’s steep value destruction!

Ford seems to be in a better condition than its competitors, but looking at the respective market share of each of those companies; but it is pretty obvious that GM (NYSE: GM) and Ford (NYSE: F) are in a much better shape than the third counterpart of Detroit’s Big Three. Considering those facts, value investors must have fled Chrysler a long time ago. I know for sure I wouldn’t have invested in those companies, no matter the buzz in the financial community.


Full disclosure: the author has no position in GM, F or Chrysler