Street Capitalist: Event Driven Value Investments

One of the issues with Street Capitalist is that I don’t think take the time to really introduce new readers to value investing. This can be problematic with someone who is just learning about all of this and feels daunted by the task of somehow soaking it all up. I plan on doing some how-to’s in the future to help with this. For now though, I want to show you some investment cartoons I found from at Mirae Asset Financial Group.

Mirae is run by an investor named Park Hyeon Joo of Korea. I’m always fascinated at finding and learning about value investors who operate in different parts of the world - especially in Asia. Asia in particular is an interesting place for value or even long term investors. Mainly because the region as a whole has a reputation for overwhelmingly favoring short-term investing.

Here’s an excerpt from a Bloomberg article on Park:

The new firm caused a small stir in the business press because its offices didn’t include the wall-sized electronic stock ticker that graces most Korean brokerage offices. In his book, Park says his message to customers was: “Don’t sit around staring at the wall. Let professionals do your investing.” He reeled in clients by lowering the standard fee for stock purchases to 0.029 percent from 1 percent.

In a similar symbolic gesture, Park placed a clock with no hands at the entrance to Mirae Group’s Seoul headquarters — to signify to clients the importance of long-term investment.

Korea’s No. 1 Money Manager Says Genghis Khan Model for Funds (Bloomberg)

The Power of Inactivity

I call investing the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.
- Warren Buffett

Circle of Competence

We don’t handle high-tech business because we have no talent in that area.
- Charlie Munger
There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do.
- Warren Buffett

Contrarianism

Invest at the point of maximum pessimism.
-John Templeton

We invest in stocks because stocks are plunging. Since we can buy stocks at a low rate in a bull market, I am nervous in a bull market. When stock market plunges, I’m happy. Crisis is a good opportunity. I know that more opportunities happen when business is dull and disaster & revolution break out.
-Mark Mobius

The quotes may not be anything new, but it’s nice to see the visual representations of these concepts, even in cartoons. They give you a simple way of conveying some often complex and hard to understand concepts and they’re pretty fun.