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Superb Investors You Never Heard Of


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I think this would be a great thread to start. Lets us assemble a list of investors in the public domain, who have audited, or tangible results, who have generated fantastic returns and who have received very little press attention. There is much to be learned from such investors.

 

Categorize by Name, Age, Type of Investor (Private, Fund Manager, or Public Company Executive), and Performance.

 

I am going to start with one, his name is David Moradi and he runs a fund called Anthion Global in New York. He's only 29 years old, previously worked for Soros then Pequot. Since starting his fund in 2008, hes compounded at over 15% and has not had one down year, and earned himself over $30 million personally. Current AUM is nearly $700 million. Nice guy nobody has ever heard of that keeps quietly hitting the ball out of the park.

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Good idea for a thread, moore.

 

I don't know how much of a secret he is, but anyone know anything about gobi capital? It's ran by Bo Shan who is recommended by Mike Burry.

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Richard Chandler

I found his information on another thread on this board. He and his brother have turned a family fortune from $10 Million to $5 Billion within 20 years of investing globally without outside money and almost zero leverage .

 

Interview with II before he and his brother split the fund and went solo.

http://www.iinews.com/site/pdfs/IIMagazine_March_2006_Secrets_of_Sovereign.pdf

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Richard Chandler

I found his information on another thread on this board. He and his brother have turned a family fortune from $10 Million to $5 Billion within 20 years of investing globally without outside money and almost zero leverage .

 

Interview with II before he and his brother split the fund and went solo.

http://www.iinews.com/site/pdfs/IIMagazine_March_2006_Secrets_of_Sovereign.pdf

 

Awesome article! Thanks for posting.

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Richard Chandler

I found his information on another thread on this board. He and his brother have turned a family fortune from $10 Million to $5 Billion within 20 years of investing globally without outside money and almost zero leverage .

 

Interview with II before he and his brother split the fund and went solo.

http://www.iinews.com/site/pdfs/IIMagazine_March_2006_Secrets_of_Sovereign.pdf

 

Interesting thanks for posting. That magazine has amazing production values, I love the paintings.

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Another investor I would like to mention is Nivate Hemwachirawarakorn . He is unknown outside Thailand. But domestically ,he is very well-known individual investor.  He wrote an investment column regularly in the newspaper and also share his investment view on television and free seminar. It was him who introduced value investment concept to Thailand as well. His resource is abundant in Thai but none in English. When I first started investing almost ten years ago , it was his book that inspired me on value investment concept as well.

 

He is an individual investor so his track record is unaudited. But he shared his performance on his books which is publish annually. It is a compilation of his investment columns on newspaper for each year.  Here is this track record from the last 15 years.  He started earlier than that but he said he applied value investment framework since then. He is 58 years old now.

http://i50.tinypic.com/34owx2v.jpg

 

I think his track record is reliable because his positions is visible to public when he acquires more than 0.5% of total share outstanding in public companies.  From his book, he started with 10 million baht ($300,000) which is 100% of his net worth that time.  15 years ago. And he grew it to about 1,500 million baht ($50 million). He uses zero leverage and just doing a simple buy&hold strategy. He owns 6-7 stocks as a core investment.  He said he doesn't use conventional valuation matrix such as PE, PB or DCF.  He looks for the high quality companies that can grow strongly within the next 5-10 years. His investments are mostly in retail sector.  He just said last month that his investment success is largely due to very low valuation of Thai Stock Market when he started .And he does not think it is repeatable if he starts today . 

 

 

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Mark Holowesko

 

I don't have his recent performance numbers offhand, but Hamblin Watsa has a $4.5-$5.0 million investment in his fund through Odyssey (beginning with a $3 million commitment at inception a 8 or 9 years ago).

 

One of the best global long/short managers out there with a fantastic team. I have heard him speak three times and it is always extremely enlightening. He began running Templeton's shop at age 27, and eventually broke off and started his own company.

 

13F-HR filing is here: http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1428569/000142856912000001/holowesko13f123111.txt

 

Though be careful when rooting through these as many of these could be paired with a short position.

 

Old video of him speaking here: http://www.bengrahaminvesting.ca/Teaching_Applications/Guest_Speakers/2005_speakers.htm

 

He was recently interviewed on Consuelo Mack's Wealthtrack, but the discussion was totally dumbed down relative to how he speaks to investors/MBA groups.

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strange.. i think he probably got wiped out on this one?

 

He bought after the decline, I believe around 6 CAD the article said...

 

The II article on Chandler was great.  He has a history of getting into situations with poor corporate governance and fraud and hanging in there, pushing for reform until things (usually) get better.  Most of his successes have been in beaten down large caps with government sanctioned monopolies like banks, oil cos and telecos that have a lot of visibility where it's in the national interest for the government to help root out the fraud or where a change in government policy can turn the situation around as with a change in monetary policy.

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I have a feeling that when the JOBS Act regs making it legal to advertise are released we'll find out about a few managers we've all never heard of that have amazing performance and haven't been in the public eye at all (like you're kind of supposed to do as a fund manager).

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I'm not much for confrontation but I do believe moore-capital54 is spot-on with this one.

 

Also the following manager has done ok.

 

Returns as at March 31, 2012:

 

YTD  18.8%

1 yr  10.1%

2 yr  6.2% per yr.

3 yr  18.8% per yr.

4 yr  13.8% per yr.

Since inception (Oct 1, 2007) 13.1% per yr.

 

Source: www.theglobeandmail.com (globe investor - funds section)

Name: ROMC Fund

 

Hey, no self-serving pitches!  ;D  Cheers!

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I have a feeling that when the JOBS Act regs making it legal to advertise are released we'll find out about a few managers we've all never heard of that have amazing performance and haven't been in the public eye at all (like you're kind of supposed to do as a fund manager).

 

It's happening.  Got an unsolicited piece advertising a new opportunity to invest in the environmentally friendly "Ben Franklin" method of capturing enormous amounts of electricity from the air.  ( Run a wire up on a balloon instead of a kite and voila! There you go: free electricity!)  Now isn't that a good idea.

 

Full disclosure: their chief scientist is a recent graduate with a BS degree from The Colorado School of Mines.

 

              ::)

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I have a feeling that when the JOBS Act regs making it legal to advertise are released we'll find out about a few managers we've all never heard of that have amazing performance and haven't been in the public eye at all (like you're kind of supposed to do as a fund manager).

 

It's happening.  Got an unsolicited piece advertising a new opportunity to invest in the environmentally friendly "Ben Franklin" method of capturing enormous amounts of electricity from the air.  ( Run a wire up on a balloon instead of a kite and voila! There you go: free electricity!)  Now isn't that a good idea.

 

Full disclosure: their chief scientist is a recent graduate with a BS degree from The Colorado School of Mines.

 

              ::)

 

You are talking about SEFE we are short it.. we short those all the time...FYI Anson is short the name as well..

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I think there is an important discussion to be had here, out of this whole Meson Capital debacle and it is the following:

 

Why do we all follow the principles of Graham & Dodd? Is it because we enjoy the academic exercise of analysing securities?  For me it was always because Graham & Dodd was the only process which made sense of investing, but more importantly it had a record ofproducing the best results over a long period of time.

 

Personally, if Graham & Dodd didn't work so well, I would not have gravitated towards it as an investment process. I wonder if some of you ask yourselves that question... Are you a value investor because it makes you feel really good intellectually or because you sincerely believe it is the best way to outperform over-time...

 

This is an extremely important question to ask yourselves in this day and age because I see a lot of distractions popping up which appear to have one goal and that is to extract money from "wannabe" value investors. Let me give you an example:

 

http://www.valueconferences.com/

 

Why in the world are these managers, if they are so damn good and make so much money managing their funds charging, not 50-100$ but $1,000 mostly to wannabe, and newbie value investors just so they can hear them present an academic thesis over the internet?

 

It just doesn't make sense...

 

What Parsad did at the Fairfax Dinner provides more value to a newbie investor than any online conference no matter who is hosting it, and Parsad does this at a cost which simply covers his expenses (from my understanding).

 

To charge $999 for an online conference is nothing more than a money grabbing exercise, and its wrong, for if these phenom managers truly wanted to preach the Graham & Dodd approach they would simply provide the conference free of charge or at their marginal cost of delivery. I love how they have an "early bird special" at "only" $298... lol Why is that? Why do you need to entice people prior to the conference? What would be the catalyst to do so, its not like your renting out a space or anything you are simply delivering a voice and video over the internet? The only reason I can think of is so that they can convince the managers: "hey look we have 1,000 early birds, we can split $50k each if you come speak"...

 

I feel the same way about the Manual of Ideas, why charge people 1,200 a year if they are all supposed to be providing ideas as part of a community? Why isn't it like the Value Investors Club where a good idea earns you access... Because in the age of the internet if 1,000 idiots sign up you can make $1.2 million a year, with very little overhead... Think of how many investors are on this board, with no marketing at all...

 

Just remember, Graham & Dodd works so well because its so simple, and all you need to really get a grasp of it is 2-3 books (written by Graham & Dodd) and watching some free internet interviews by great investors. This board has proven  to be an incredible source of value as well, given how most of us nailed the opportunity this past winter in real-time. Some of us were worried and we communicated our thoughts in real time, we even had polls which placed everything into perspective, but at least for me when it came to the financials, this board helped me filter out the noise coming across the bloomberg and cnbc.

 

Thanks, Moore for that great appology for value investing.  :)

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What Parsad did at the Fairfax Dinner provides more value to a newbie investor than any online conference no matter who is hosting it, and Parsad does this at a cost which simply covers his expenses (from my understanding).

 

To charge $999 for an online conference is nothing more than a money grabbing exercise, and its wrong, for if these phenom managers truly wanted to preach the Graham & Dodd approach they would simply provide the conference free of charge or at their marginal cost of delivery. I love how they have an "early bird special" at "only" $298... lol Why is that? Why do you need to entice people prior to the conference? What would be the catalyst to do so, its not like your renting out a space or anything you are simply delivering a voice and video over the internet? The only reason I can think of is so that they can convince the managers: "hey look we have 1,000 early birds, we can split $50k each if you come speak"...

 

Thanks Moore, but let me clarify: 

 

We charge more than the costs for the room, buffet, A/V equipment and any other related costs, but the difference or net profit goes to the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of Canada...although this year was almost breakeven because I had underestimated what the A/V costs were going to be, especially after we had to order a powerpoint projector and screen, and I was already more than half way sold out at the price I had given to everyone. 

 

I do not get a penny, and we don't pay anyone to come and speak or attend.  All of our guests from Fairfax come at Prem's behest, and their own desire to answer any questions Fairfax shareholders may have.  We will never pay anyone to speak, as that completely contradicts the whole premise and culture we have tried to create at our dinner.  No one paid Prem to sit and have lunch with me, or Francis, or Tim, or Mohnish, or anyone else...they did it because that's how they give back, and it's my duty to give back to anyone else...including JoAnn who is no longer with us. 

 

I'm pretty much with Moore on the whole conference thing.  I'm willing to support them if they are giving the profits to non-profits or schools, but I'm not into the whole idea of it being big business...but that's just me!  Cheers!     

 

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I'm not much for confrontation but I do believe moore-capital54 is spot-on with this one.

 

Also the following manager has done ok.

 

Returns as at March 31, 2012:

 

YTD  18.8%

1 yr  10.1%

2 yr  6.2% per yr.

3 yr  18.8% per yr.

4 yr  13.8% per yr.

Since inception (Oct 1, 2007) 13.1% per yr.

 

Source: www.theglobeandmail.com (globe investor - funds section)

Name: ROMC Fund

 

This is the first I heard of your fund, I just visited your website and read all your annual reports. You have done a superb job, and I really enjoyed reading about your performance. This is exactly the type of Fund that belongs in this thread, and the type of fund I would invest in.

 

I highly suggest you get in touch with Jeff Banfield so he can include you in his Hedge Fund Report Card, most of the top hedge  funds in Toronto are included, not sure if you even care about increasing AUM but if you do definitely get in touch with him...

 

Here is an example of one of his reports: http://www.highwatercapital.com/Commentaries/June-2011-Hedge-Fund-Report-Card.pdf

 

Lastly, my favourite quote from your annual reports that coincidentally is very relevant to what started this debate is this one:

 

"It took NO skill to earn a positive return in 2009. I may as well have thrown darts at

the stock pages as give any time to thinking about risk. In fact, ROMC‟s result was worse than

that of some „know-nothing‟ investors: Had  you put your savings in a Canadian  equity index

fund last year, you would have beaten ROMC. Skill, if I may, was required in years prior and

undoubtedly will be handy in future. "

 

Keep up the good work!

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It's happening.  Got an unsolicited piece advertising a new opportunity to invest in the environmentally friendly "Ben Franklin" method of capturing enormous amounts of electricity from the air.  ( Run a wire up on a balloon instead of a kite and voila! There you go: free electricity!)  Now isn't that a good idea.

 

Full disclosure: their chief scientist is a recent graduate with a BS degree from The Colorado School of Mines.

 

              ::)

 

The SEFE video IS pretty amusing! Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

 

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The SEFE video IS pretty amusing! Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

 

 

Sure not, and it took me to this other video ... I could not stop smiling :)

 

 

Lol, anybody took a look at that multimeter voltage at 1:31 in the video. I hope they find a way to harness that incredible 0.008mV!

 

 

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