He terminado de leerme Margin of Safety de Seth A. Klarman. El libro cuesta 1600 dólares en Amazon.En su día se editaron poco libros. En 1991 cuando Seth escribió el libro era un gestor de fondos poco conocido. Hoy en día es una figura más reconocible y uno de los mayores exponentes del Value Investing.
Tras haberme leído su libro y tras observar su portfolio actual, considero a este inversor un fiel seguidor de las doctrinas de Benjamín Graham. Seth busca comprar euros a 50 céntimos. En el Value Investing hay diferentes corrientes y ésta es una de ellas. En mi caso no precisamente la que más me atrae. No es un libro de finanzas imprescindible, ni siquiera puedo afirmar que sea de los mejores que me he leído. Pero es un libro interesante. Tampoco es un libro adecuado para introducirse en el mundo de las finanzas ni del value investing, dada su complejidad. Aquí dejo algunas frases que he recopilado del mismo.
Individual and institutional investors alike frequently demonstrate an inability to make long-term investment decisions based on business fundamentals. Whereby temporary price fluctuations become the dominant focus.
Most investors are primarily oriented toward return, how much they can make, and pay little attention to risk, how much they can lose.
Valuation is an imprecise art, the future is unpredictable.
The most beneficial time to be a value investor is when the market is falling.
Speculators are obsessed with predicting the direction of stock prices. Trying to predict it is a waste of time.
Investors are able to distinguish Pepsico from Picasso and understand the difference between an investment and a collectible.
Successful investors tend to be unemotional, allowing the greed and fear of others to play into their hands. By having confidence in their own analysis and judgment.
When bond yields are low, share prices are likely to be high.
The value of a company selling a trendy product depends on the ability of the company to replicate its current success.
In investing, there are times when the best thing to do is nothing at all.
Value investors will not invest in businesses that they cannot readily understand.
Coca-Cola. Will it sell more than this year? Pretty definitely, since it has done so every year since 1980.
Institutional selling of o lowpriced small-capitalization spinoff, for example, can cause a temporary supply-demand imbalance, resulting in a security becoming undervalued.
Y por último una interesante anécdota extraída del libro.
There is the old story about the market craze in sadine trading when the sardine disappeared from their traditional waters in Monterey, California. The commodity traders bid them up and the price of a can of sardines soared. One day a buyer decided to treat himself to an expensive meal and actually opened a can and started eating. He immediately became ill and told the seller the sardines were no good. The seller said "You don´t understand. These are not eating sardines, they are trading sardines."
