Recently read Peter Cundill book. Its an excellent book but might not appeal to everyone. Mr. Peter Cundill use to practice deep value investing style of Benjamin Graham. Peter suggest to buy stocks only when they are out of favour and he mostly seem to have invested in net net situations.

After watching Price’s interview, I did some digging to try and get a better idea of what his returns were like while he ran his mutual fund and more recently, his hedge fund. I didn’t come across exact figures, but I did find a lot of old interviews from the 90′s early 2000′s (in large part thanks to Value Walk’s resource page on Price) I also found a more recent interview from 2011 at Graham and Doddsville’s newsletter.

In that interview, Price mentioned his investment style was basically two thirds value stocks (a diversified basket of cheap stocks relative to the value a private owner would pay for the business… sounds much like Graham, Dodd, and Schloss style stocks), and one third special situations. He described how his methods resulted in close to 20% annual returns for a long period of time, with his worst year (before 2008) being 5% down. He was only down twice in 35 years prior to 2008.

He said in 08 he was down 30%, but quickly bounced back. But he also said in the last decade or so his strategy is yielding closer to 15% rather than 20%. However, he still feels this method of diversification, 67% value stocks, 33% special situations is a great way to compound money over time.

His returns are not going to be as high as more concentrated value investors, but his style seems to resemble a more quantitative approach similar to Graham and Dodd.

As you mentioned in the post, it’s interesting to consider all the different styles of value investing and how different they can be, yet still be effective.

Yes, when a person deposits their money in a bank checking deposit it is a loan that can be immediately called from the bank. But I bet that not 1 in 20 people believes/knows that. They think that their checking deposit is their property not the bank’s.

But that aside, banks due to maturity mismatching are INHERENTLY INSOLVENT. Or think of it this way how can you the depositor AT ALL TIMES remove your deposit while AT THE SAME TIME, the bank has use of the demand deposit?
No wonder there are bank runs. Any fiduciary media created above the real pool of savings inevitably causes/contributes to a boom and bust because it will distort the originary interest rate. Explain why there have been banking crises all through history?

But if banks and their customers want to have fractional reserve banking, then fine, but allow for a free market of bank redemption, specie as currency and no central bank.

Central planning doesn’t work. Fractional reserve banking within the central bank system is inherently insolvent. Not one bank in the US today could immediately pay out all their deposits on demand. A fraudulent promise to their depositors. Ego, we suffer recurring booms and busts with taxpayers picking up the tab–socialized risk for private profit or crony capitalism galore.

Go to CEF Connect and study CEFs.

I will post on this.

Also, some (not all) of the miners do not need higher gold prices, they need a greater spread between costs and gold prices. But if they don’t get it, then the strong will survive.