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Christopher Risso-Gill, author of There’s Always Something to Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach is a guest blogger at ValueWalk.com.
Peter Cundill’s Last Major Investment Call
Think back to the mood amongst investors at the beginning of 2009 after the decimation of 2008. Practically no-one felt confident in the incipient recovery – certainly not enough to commit precious cash to new investment. Even though cash was returning next to nothing it was safe. If you had miraculously avoided a hammering in the market, you might still have been a victim of the Madoff fraud. It was fashionable to preach extreme caution, which suited the majority of investors who were content to sit tight licking their wounds and hoping that some sort of bounce would materialize and bail them out of such investments as they had left.
At this juncture I had just begun research for my book, There’s Always Something to Do – The Peter Cundill Investment Approach and it involved a lot of discussion with Peter himself. He was very open with me about his personal investments and his current thinking. 2008 had also been pretty painful for him but it had ended with his having accumulated liquidity of over 50%. Fortuitous you might think with hindsight, but actually not for very long. Fortunately Peter was nothing if not a contrarian and an investment vulture. In a macro sense he had come to the conclusion that governments had made broadly the right moves and that financial melt-down had been averted, if only narrowly. If that were the case, he argued, it was now time to commit, but to what? The 50% of his fortune that remained invested was almost 100% in equities through a variety of value funds. He felt that this was sufficient direct exposure to stock markets for the time being.
More about There's Always Something to Do
This book is superb. For a full review of the book, please visit:
http://www.navinvesting.blogspot.ca/2012/05/book-review-theres-always-something-to.html