Ann: Revised December 2018 Trading Update, page-22

@long_haul

I somewhat agree with your sentiment regarding herding of value investors though I am not sure that my skillset compares to @fire_bull who I am sure will have his own fund in the near future (if he wants that!?) ! Harley Grosser at Capital H and Lyall Taylor at LT3000, as well as Claude (and Matt!) at ethical equities are differentiated to some degree.  I really liked Gary Hsui who was at Arowana/CVF but not sure what he is doing now. Matt Joass also is pretty switched on but our on his own these days.

I was very excited when I first joined Twitter, when I suddenly came across a bunch of value investors. Then I quickly realized there was major herding (much more so than HotCopper) and since use the platform a lot less.

Where I disagree with you is that the asset light growth approach is different to value investing. I think true value investors are active- they respond to what others are doing in the market and find ideas that others don’t recognise. Lyall writes a nice article on this on his blog about fishing where the cod are. I think part of the reason Warren B was so successful was that his (and Munger)’s strategy was so different. A lot of people are trying the old school value approach in response to the overwhelming market dynamic of looking for Buffett like compounders. However, i think

If you really want to have superior returns and not be found out, I think you need a strong grasp of:
a) valuation fundamentals
b) technical analysis
c) portfolio allocation and sizing
d) risk management
e) cognitive error and biases
f) probability
g) macroeconomics
h) idea generation

I can see that the crowd are pretty solid on a, e,g and to some extent d, but I have very rarely seen eloquent distillations of strategy with regards to c,f,h and b seems to be ignored entirely by value investors despite the fact that a large number of market participants who influence pricing in a dynamic market who swear by it.  In terms of h, I have observed extreme herding...look at the number of so called value investors that have spent time looking at SDI which is essentially a very average cyclical, on basis of Adams investment here....