Ronald Chan: The Value Investors: Lessons from the World’s Top Fund Managers

Abstract

Ronald W. Chan’s motivation to write this book is that as a value fund manager himself, he has never felt that an investment skill set alone is the determining factor in beating the stock market. Therefore, he decided to write a different kind of value investing book looking at a more personal side of value investing when compared with previous books. In his viewpoint, value investing is not an old-fashioned discipline but rather a dynamic and re-invented investment strategy. Investment legend Warren Buffett once said that “success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. once you’re above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing”. Chan’s book is exactly elaborating on this kind of personal characteristics by interviewing 12 of the world’s leading value investors, including those from Europe and Asia. The book brings together a set of thorough and rigorous portraits of a comprehensive range of noticeable value investors from multiple generations, countries and with different investment approaches. The focus of the book is on how a personal background, culture, and life experiences shape the investment mindset and strategy. The book is of practical value for experienced and less experienced value investors by giving the reader the opportunity to profit from those experiences by reading personal biographies of different value investment legends. The most important lesson one might take away is that value investment success depends more on character than on mathematical or technical abilities. The different chapters in the book are each based on the story of an outstanding value investor. The author highlights the most important events in the life of the respective investor, followed by a summary of the personal success factors and investment mindset of the investor. The book starts with 95-year-old Walter Schloss (described by Warren Buffett as the “super-investor from Graham-and-Dodsville”), followed by