We had the pleasure of hosting a live online Q&A with value superinvestor Guy Spier in late August. With registrations at maximum capacity of 1,000 people more than a week before the call, Guy was able to get through only a small subset of the many insightful questions asked of him. The one-hour Q&A session ended up lasting nearly two hours.
Via Beyond Proxy
Replay: Ask-Me-Anything Session With Guy Spier
A few highlights:
Don’t get spooked by headline news: “When it comes to which emerging market I like from a macro perspective, Indonesia is really interesting given what’s happened, but I just spent a lot of time in Mexico, the first six months of this year, and despite a lot of problems that Mexico has, it’s on the right path. There’s another thing that happens: For example, Brazil is suffering right now, but one of the things that happens is when people get richer and people, they tend to be more willing to focus on the negatives in their economy and their country. That gets reported in the news and there’s a bit more of a negative spin on that country. The best thing to do is to ignore a lot of that stuff.”
Keep your eyes on what matters: “If you’re landing an airplane… you have to keep your eye on the horizon and let the ground come up in your peripheral vision and fly the plane as you land it. If you look over to see where the ground is, the plane will roll. The plane goes where your eyes go and so the key in investing is to keep our eyes on the lookout for great businesses at discounted prices to survey the portfolio, but without getting into a deep dive or unbalanced dive on something that could lead us to get spooked out of the investment because often some of the investments that work really well have got hairy stuff associated with them.”
“Steal” ideas from smart investors: “The fact that an idea has passed somebody else’s filter is a great positive. It took me a long time to learn that the ‘not invented here’ syndrome is very bad when it comes to investing. You really want to buy the ideas that have been vetted by other people if you can. It’s a much better way to invest.”
See full article here.
