Kennon-Green & Co. Global Asset Management, Wealth Management, and Investment Advisory

Bill Ruane Value Investing Sequoia

Bill Ruane Value Investing Strategy

In 1950, William Ruane, or Bill Ruane as he was known, took a course on value investing taught by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia University despite having graduated from Harvard Business School. One of his classmates was Warren Buffett, with whom he formed a friendship. Years later, when Buffett dissolved his investment partnership, he recommended that any partners still interested in value investing put their money with Ruane, who had launched his own firm, Ruane, Cunniff. The flagship value investing vehicle of the new firm was the Sequoia Fund, an open-ended mutual fund. Over the next 38 years, the Sequoia fund outperformed the S&P 500 by compounding at 15% per annum versus 13% for the broader index.

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Walter Schloss Wikipedia Image Fair Use

Walter Schloss Value Investing Strategy

Walter Schloss, a legendary value investor who learned directly from Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, never graduated from college and was hired as a runner on Wall Street in 1934, at the age of 18. Schloss enrolled in the New York Stock Exchange Institute, where he took courses from Benjamin Graham on how to value businesses, find value stocks, and manage money. Using the lessons he learned there, Schloss launched his own value investing fund in 1955, with a starting balance of $100,000, eventually growing to manage money for as many as 92 investors. For more than 50 years, he earned a 15.3% compounded annual rate of return, turning a $10,000 initial investment into $12,344,268, far outstripping the 10% return offered by the S&P 500 during the same period, which would have resulted in only $1,173,909.

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Benjamin Graham Value Investing Strategy

Benjamin Graham Value Investing Strategy

In addition to penning several of the most important value investing books in history, Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, was one of the two partners in the Graham Newman Corporation, the investment fund through which he put money to work. It was at this firm that Warren Buffett worked early in his career, learning from the master. As he amassed an astounding investing record, Graham divided his portfolio into several categories, or “operations”. These served value investing students well for more than seventy years and some still have value today.

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Kennon-Green & Co. Global Asset Management, Wealth Management, and Investment Advisory