David Samra has been in the investment business for over 30years. He specialises in international value and has beaten his index by over 4% pa for over 20 years, in a period when traditional value has been doing poorly.

That may be why his fund, which has been closed to new investors for most of the last 14 years, has reached $50bn. In this conversation David explains his focus on four factors: owning good companies, buying them at a discount of at least 30% to intrinsic value, and ensuring they have excellent management and a strong balance sheet.

And he discusses several of his stocks, sharing some impressively detailed knowledge.

Dave Iben is the founder and CIO of Kopernik GlobalInvestors, a $6bn global value investment shop which prides itself on independent thought and is comfortable with contrarian positions.

Steve invited Dave on the podcast because at a recent NewYork conference, Dave was cheerleading that value was back, and Steve wanted to discuss the rationale for his enthusiasm, given value’s massive underperformance in the last 15 years. Luckily Dave was spending the summer in London looking for cheap UK stocks, and they could record in person.

Gary Channon is one of the UK’s better known valueinvestors. He runs a value fund, a closed-end fund and a private equity vehicle.  He runs a highly concentrated portfolio. The top 5 positions are over 50%, and he holds no more than 15 stocks.

I asked him on the podcast because he is really thoughtful about his process – he only buys stocks selling for <50% of intrinsic value, and if he can monitor the business performance independently of the company's communications. He is then prepared to hold them for extended periods, as long as they remain cheap.

His framework for evaluating a stock includes parameterslike the depth of work completed and confidence levels, he has instructed his entire research team to become AI experts and he has already seen significant benefits; he thinks AI means sellside analysts will be more or less gone in twoyears; and we talked about his techniques for interviewing management which include spending 4-6 hours preparing for a 1 hour meeting.

Jennifer Wallace is a value investor. She learned her tradefrom a series of luminaries, studying under Bruce Greenwald at Columbia, before going to work for famed value investor Bob Bruce (who used to hang out with Warren Buffett).

Today she is the CIO of Summit Street Capital Management, and only invests in high quality companies with modest leverage when they are super cheap. This means she will often find stocks with issues that are hopefully temporary.

But she has found a winning formula, having delivered a 7.8x return to investors since 2009. Around a quarter of her investee companies have been acquired. She explains why, her rationale for having a 25-30 stock equally-weighted portfolio and why you should not befriend CEOs - "if you want a friend, get a dog”.

In his youth, George Michelakis, was a top 3 global under-20chess player. No surprise he is pretty good at investing too and runs a $2bn long short equity hedge fund out of London. Since 2006, he has compounded capital at a rate of 5.35x vs 3.43k for the MSCI world, on net exposure of 30-45%. That’s an impressive record but astonishingly, he entered his longest-running short position 10 years ago.

We talked about his investing philosophy, his theory about alifestyle recession, why shorting is critical to performance, how he manages the fund and the team, why he focuses on management and why, as in chess, man plus machine or analyst plus AI will beat the lone human, which has profoundimplications for investors.

Dan Rasmussen is the founder and CIO of Verdad Advisers, an unconventional quantitative investment boutique. In this conversation, Steve and Dan agree that private equity and credit look highly risky for the next decade. They debate the value of forecasting, where they have very different views. They similarly disagree on forecast horizons, with Dan favouring near term accuracy and Steve thinking longer term forecasts are more likely to be accurate. They also debate the persistence of growth and discuss Dan’s favourite financial metric.

Steve and Dan have different perspectives on many issueswhich leads to apparently contradictory conclusions but in reality, they don’t disagree – the issue is base rates versus marginal opportunities. Steve and Dan view markets through different lenses, which makes for an interesting discussion.

In this episode with Tom Slater of Baillie Gifford, manager

Anthony Bolton is best known for Fidelity Special Situationsfund’s 19.5% pa returns, 6% above his benchmark, over a 28 year period. He was not only a highly accomplished investor but was both revered and liked by his colleagues. Pragmatic, unfailingly courteous, courageous, and universally popular, he exhibits none of the arrogance that is sometimes exhibited by successful investors with far inferior performance.

In a first for this podcast, this interview was recorded live at the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh on November 21, 2024, in front of an audience of investors, professional and amateur.