Jean-Marie Eveillard is a successful pioneer in global value investing. In this book he explains that the universal principles of value investing were responsible for his success on a global scale. He shows, how using Benjamin Graham’s concepts, in 1982 he first started buying Bank of International Settlements, traded over the counter in Basel, Switzerland, thereby getting a dollar of assets for 50 cents. Then, based on Warren Buffett’s strategy of finding good companies in good businesses, Jean-Marie invested in Swiss chocolate maker Lindt & Sprungli. These and other similar investments were what contributed to the outperformance of his fund. Equally important what he did not own also helped considerably, for instance, Japanese stocks in the late 1980’s, technology, media and telecom stocks in the late 1990’s and bank stocks in the years before the 2008 financial crisis.
He also shows that value investing is not as easy as it appears, discussing the pain he felt as investors deserted his fund during the Internet bubble years of the late 1990s, on grounds that his old fashioned method was out of tune with the exciting new paradigms of investing based on customer « eyeballs ».
