Friday, March 18, 2011

Value Thoughts From A Value Manager

Tim McElvaine is a value investor based out of Vancouver (incidentally, that's where I am based as well) who manages about $300 million. Recently, he spoke at the Richard Ivey School of Business (incidentally, that's where I graduated from) to a keen group of students studying value investing. Many of the topics he covered are of interest to readers of this blog, based on the e-mails I receive from you guys. I often don't know the answer to many of the questions you ask (such as "When should I sell a stock?" or "What percentage of my portfolio should I allocate to a position?") but McElvaine adds some interesting thoughts to these and other topics.

Some of the topics that I know many readers will find interesting are as follows:

- A couple of current stock ideas were offered, including Makita and RHJ International
- Discussion of changes in both the supply and demand of gold over the last decade
- Job seeking advice for those aspiring to work for value managers
- How to deal with tough years, where you underperform the market significantly
- The strong effect that position sizes have on returns; you can have a good batting average and still perform poorly depending on position sizes.

You can watch the talk here, but if you're short on time, you may want to re-visit later as it is over an hour long.

Disclosure: Despite the above-listed "incidentals", I have no affiliation with McElvaine Investment Management, and nor do I know Tim McElvaine, or any member of his firm, personally.

2 comments:

Paul said...

Saj,

Have you checked out his long term returns after fees? I know he gets quite a bit of hype (perhaps because of his returns before fee). I could see how people could learn a thing or two, but I don't see why anyone would want to invest with him. Maybe I'm missing something!

His net return is 8.3% vs 8.2% for the index.

Here is annual report:
http://mcelvaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/2010-Annual-Report-for-website.pdf

Paul said...

Oh yeah, if we look at his performance before 2007, it was much better...but so were most of us! :P