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.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

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”.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

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.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

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.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

In this episode with Tom Slater of Baillie Gifford, managerof the £10bn Scottish Mortgage investment trust, we cover a lot of ground. Of course, we discuss his current thoughts on China and the Mag 7, including why he has trimmed Nvidia but still likes Meta and his thoughts on Elon Musk. Tom explainshis investing philosophy, what growth managers do differently from traditional value managers and how the firm’s culture has made Baillie Gifford such a successful manager.

Tom explains how he remains calm in the roller coaster rides of many of his stocks, with drawdowns of 60-70% common, notably Nvidia in 2022 on its way to that $3tn capitalisation; why he favours technical founders who can advantage their companies in the AI age; what Elon Musk said to him in 2013 and why that has stayed with him; the difference betweeninvesting in quoted companies and those in private markets;  and why he and colleagues don’t pitch stocks to the team, which he believes gives them an important behavioural advantage.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

When it comes to credit, few people have better credentials than Greg Peters, co-CIO of PGIM, with AUM of $700bn. In this fascinating conversation, we discuss the differences between investing in equities and credit, the legacy of the zero interest rate period, why PGIM uses scenario based forecasting in preference to single point estimates, why covenants have gone out of fashion and why that’s dangerous, ad much more. Listen to the end for an update on the outlook for markets in 2025.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

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.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a forensic accounting and fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives into how real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.For show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Timesand probably the only journalist on the planet to have interviewed Presidents Obama, Trump and Putin. Under his stewardship, the FT  metamorphosed from a newspaper into a digital subscription business, and was sold to the Japanese company Nikkei for 44xearnings. And as editor, Barber fully backed up former guest Dan McCrum in his investigation of Wirecard.I was delighted when Lionel agreed to come on the show to talk about his new book, Gambling Man, a biography of Masa Son, founder of Softbank and creator of the $100bn Vision Fund. I have long been curious about Son, who for 3 days at the peak of the dot.com boom was the richest man in the world.Barber spent 3 years writing his meticulously researchedbook for which he interviewed 150 subjects, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, as he explains in our discussion. Some of his stories, including his description of Son’s inner sanctum, are marvellous.If you enjoy this episode, head over to our Substack, (sign up button on https://behindthebalancesheet.com/), take the monthly paid option and get exclusive additional content, including Steve's interview with Alok Sama, former CFO of Softbank International.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives intohow real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.

For full show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our website.
If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

Bill Nygren has been at Harris Associates for over 40 years and considers himself a value investor. Yet his portfolio has owned Netflix, Amazon and Meta recently, while Alphabet is his largest position. Bill explains his unusual but highly effective approach to value investing.

Harris has also constructed a unique organisational methodology to handle investing mistakes – I have never encountered a process in which the analyst is changed when the stock doesn’t go to plan. Bill explains why and other techniques in this fascinating discussion. Steve was so looking forward to this conversation and Bill didn’t disappoint.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives intohow real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.

For full show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠website⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.

Peter Oppenheimer is chief global equity strategist and head of Macro Research at Goldman Sachs in Europe and the author of two books on market cycles.

His first book, the Long Good Buy is sub-titled Analysing Cycles in Markets. His follow-up book Any Happy Returns, is sub-titled Structural Changes and Super Cycles in Markets and looks at longer term secular trends and the future outlook for economies and markets. Our discussion covers both.

Our episode title refers to Peter’s study of cycles inmarkets, but amusingly for a partner at Goldman Sachs, he arrived for our recording on a bike, not their usual mode of transport.

Behind the Balance Sheet is a fundamental investing podcast for serious investors. Each episode dives intohow real‑world investors source ideas, build conviction and manage their portfolios.

You’ll hear frameworks for analysing industries, understanding business models, and thinking about risk, behaviour and incentives, so you can refine your own process rather than copy stock tips.

For full show notes, transcripts and additional resources, visit our ⁠⁠website⁠⁠.

If you value thoughtful, process-driven investing discussions, follow the show and consider leaving a short review, or just a 5* rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please help spread the word.