The Next Generation of Would-Be Buffetts May 24th, 2021
Courtesy of Barron’s, a look at the next generation of would-be Buffetts:
Every generation puts its own spin on tradition. Recipes are adapted. Wedding ceremonies evolve. Vacation-photo slide shows become Instagram stories. And the era of traditional value investing, pioneered by Benjamin Graham as the U.S. was emerging from the Great Depression, has quietly undergone a sea change that most investors have yet to notice.
Graham’s version of value has long been considered sacrosanct. His two seminal books, 1934’s Security Analysis and 1949’s The Intelligent Investor, laid the groundwork for a generation of contrarian investors who eschewed macroeconomic trends and market patterns, and instead focused on a company’s fundamentals, looking for cheap stocks that they would hold for an uncomfortably long time. Legends such as Irving Kahn, John Templeton, and Warren Buffett (who named his first son after Graham, his favorite professor) have made value investing synonymous with successful investing for decades.
But the world, and the markets, have changed. Many of the biggest names—Buffett, Jean-Marie Eveillard, Bill Miller, Mario Gabelli—are in their 70s or 80s (or, in Buffett’s case, 90). As value stocks emerge from a 15-year slump—during which the Russell 3000 Growth index returned, on average, 12.7% a year, trouncing the 8% of its Value counterpart—it’s natural to look to the next generation of value investors to see how they’re managing money.
Yet when Barron’s asked veteran investors about the next generation of classic value managers who are at least a decade or two from retirement age, there were some awkward pauses. Some sheepishly admitted they had no idea—perhaps a result of the willful ignorance of contrarians practiced at ignoring groupthink. Others worried that the brutal stretch of value’s underperformance, compounded by the popularity of passive investing, may have left a talent vacuum. After a little prodding, some would reveal names they’re keeping an eye on, but few would say so on the record.
Value investing is about looking at things differently, and recognizing quality amid detritus. So, Barron’s took a similar approach when looking for some of today’s best minds in value investing. We chose seven to highlight as part of this article, and will introduce you to others in the near future. Their names and styles may be a surprise—these aren’t your father’s value managers.
Today’s managers have had to adapt to very different economic and market dynamics than those of their predecessors, and have their own definition of value. The purists should relax: Value has always existed on a continuum. Buffett himself broke with Graham’s hyperfocus on low-valuation stocks—those cheap based on metrics like price-to-book or price/earnings. Early in his career, Buffett favored these “cigar butts,” companies so beaten-down that they traded below the value of the company’s assets. But over time, he decided that buying a “wonderful company at a fair price” was better than buying a “fair company at a wonderful price.”
Buffett, of course, has spawned another generation of acolytes and value adherents, and many have continued to build on his pivot. Quality remains a focus—shorthand for strong management, strong financials, and a strong competitive advantage. But this generation focuses more on the durability of a company’s strength, especially its competitive advantage in the face of intense disruption, and that often means an even greater focus on a company’s management and culture.
Knowing how to value growth and assess qualities like competitive positioning is much more central to success as a value investor today, says Bruce Greenwald, who has taught generations of value investors at Columbia Business School and is a senior advisor to First Eagle Investment Management’s Global Value Team. The classic mandate of finding good companies trading below their intrinsic value is difficult today: The free flow of information, ease of screening for metrics like low price/earnings, and the rapid pace of change all increase the chances that a cheap stock is a value trap and not a hidden gem. “The fact that deep-value stocks have been sources of more risk than return impacts this cohort I’m in,” says Samantha McLemore, who works with Bill Miller at Miller Value Partners and runs her own firm, Patient Capital Management.
Today’s value managers are as patient and disciplined as past generations, but they are more flexible in how they think about value. Many are focused on “compounders”—companies with strong, but often moderate, growth that can continue for years. Compounders have the financial strength and real earnings often lacking in highflying growth companies, and their management is investing with an eye toward slow and steady growth, not a big boom 10 years out if a singular innovation comes to fruition.
The modern investor, Greenwald says, includes industry specialists and activists, investors willing to work with management to create long-term value, and who won’t make a quick exit. There’s also a small crew of traditional value investors exceptionally savvy at analyzing the replacement value of assets. And then there are those adept at valuing the growth of franchise businesses, which make up a much larger share of the stock market’s value than in the past.
“The next generation is not as recognizable for people with a standard view of what a value investor is,” says John Heins, editor-in-chief of newsletter Value Investor Insight. “They are more eclectic, focused more on special situations. Some have the head of a growth investor and the heart of a value investor.” Among the better-known members of this cohort are Li Lu, who heads Asia-focused Himalaya Capital and manages some of Charlie Munger’s money; activist Paul Hilal at Mantle Ridge; and Matthew McLennan, who oversees $89 billion at First Eagle.
Barron’s identified seven other managers as part of this next generation of value; some more traditional, others less so, and all with impressive track records that demonstrate an ability to spot value.
Pierre Py, co-founder, Phaeacian Partners
Pierre Py, co-founder of Phaeacian Partners, is an unapologetic value investor. When he left First Pacific Advisors and launched his own firm last year, he ignored those who suggested that he drop the word value from the name of the two funds, Phaeacian Global Value (ticker: PPGVX) and Phaeacian Accent International Value (PPIVX), he has been co-managing for a decade.
The 44-year-old’s approach to value has been influenced by the veterans he has worked with: building on the process he learned from Oakmark International’s David Herro; adopting the obsession with downside risks from FPA veterans Bob Rodriguez and Steve Romick; a wariness of leverage from Artisan Partners ’ David Samra and Dan O’Keefe; and a preference for high-quality growth stocks from Select Equity’s Chad Clark.
In keeping with the mythical Greek people that the firm is named after—Phaeacians were world travelers who helped Odysseus return home—Py and his team scour the globe for quality businesses selling at big discounts, ideally 30%.
Py purposely built a team with backgrounds and interests beyond finance, such as art and architecture. “It’s about ‘culture’ in Jean Paul Sartre’s meaning—having the means, knowledge, and experience to understand the world around us, and where it is going,” he says.
Corporate culture is also important in the companies he invests in. Much like Buffett, Py believes the biggest risk to a business is bad leaders. Watching his father, “a quintessential example of an operational manager,” gave him a view of good management at an early age. Py and his team travel extensively, building local networks and identifying executives who have transformed their businesses. “Steve Romick always talked about emotional intelligence: A business is a group of people, and understanding how they interact is very important to determining the success of management,” Py says.
Py likes good companies that have an improving corporate culture after a run of poor management. Years of keeping tabs on executives with strong records has helped lately. When Giles Schnepp, previously chief executive of Legrand, and “one of the best managers in France,” joined the board of Danone (BN.France), Py spotted a possible turnaround in the making. Indeed, Danone just named Antonie de Saint Affrique, an executive Py praises for his record at chocolatier Barry Callebaut, as CEO. “Ultimately, good businesses won’t be run by underperforming management teams forever,” he adds.
That’s also the case at Swedish telecom-equipment maker Ericsson (ERIC) after a trio of insiders, led by CEO Börje Ekholm, took the helm and improved its cost structure and refocused its once-sprawling research-and-development investments. That enabled the company to update its products and gain market share in fast-growing areas like 5G. “The quality and strength of the new and improved Ericsson is still misunderstood,” says Py.
Py is choosy and, in the $414 million Accent International, prefers to hold cash if he doesn’t find cheap enough stocks, unlike some of his peers. The fund had 13% in cash at the end of the first quarter, higher than late last year but nowhere near the 46% in early 2020, when the team’s research into the outbreak in Wuhan, China, led them to decide that some businesses were simply unownable. That cash was quickly deployed when markets fell last year, and another pullback could provide the same opportunity. The fund has averaged an annual return of 13.5% over the past five years, beating 99% of its peers, according to Morningstar.
Investors are ignoring risks—inflation in particular—Py says, which makes today’s high valuations and big borrowing all the more troubling. “How many trillions of dollars have been created out of thin air? It’s mind-boggling, almost incomprehensible, what the implications may be.” Even more reason to focus on management quality, he says.
Mark Cooper, co-founder and chief investment officer, MAC Alpha Capital Management
Mark Cooper, who co-founded MAC Alpha Capital Management in January 2020, is a fixture in the traditional value investing community, and isn’t shy about his value bona fides.
Cooper has been teaching the next generation of investors at Columbia Business School in his Applied Value Investing course for 17 years. He began teaching alongside his former professor, Greenwald, and now often invites friends and mentors, such as Berkshire Hathaway investment officer Todd Combs, Eagle Capital Partners’ Meryl Witmer, and Eveillard, who retired from First Eagle, to be guest speakers.
The hedge fund manager runs an international small-cap equity strategy and a global long-short strategy at his new firm, building on lessons gleaned from the investors he has met in a career that has taken him across asset classes, managing money at Omega Advisors, Pimco, and First Eagle, where he co-managed an institutional international small-cap value strategy for five years.
“There’s a very limited number of genuine value investors. When value is fashionable, there are many, but once it’s unfashionable, they disappear,” says Eveillard, who invests with Cooper. Eveillard cites Cooper’s willingness to hunt in overlooked markets abroad, and his patience and knowledge that value will have its dry spells.
Cooper, 52, leans more toward Buffett in his preference for good businesses at fair prices than the cheap stocks associated with Graham. He looks further afield, concentrating on off-the-radar, small companies that he often follows for years before investing in, and draws on his deep network of foreign executives and investors to identify local trends and standout managements. That led him to companies like Pilot Corp. (7846.Japan), a little-followed Japanese pen maker that just began releasing its financials in English, so few U.S. investors knew it has generated free cash flow for 20 straight years. Business for its higher-end pens dried up during the pandemic as schools and offices closed, and its stock is down 50% from its three-year high, but Cooper sees revenue bottoming and a gradual improvement in the business.
The strategies typically own 70 stocks across 25 countries. Cooper also shorts stocks to boost returns; targets are money-losing companies without much of a competitive edge and aggressive accounting, and those often run by managers more concerned about short-term sales growth than profitability.
Though stock-picking excites his students the most, Cooper stresses that it’s not sufficient. The enthusiastic stockpicker also spends a lot of time on portfolio construction and risk management, with an emphasis on capital preservation and smooth returns. While many value managers focus on company fundamentals to the exclusion of anything else, Cooper says the recipe for “monster performance” is the trifecta of a cheap business seeing internal improvements that also gets a boost from the macroeconomic cycle or secular changes. “You can’t be an ostrich and say you only dig under the sand for ideas,” he says.
Cooper also uses big data and his background in currencies, fixed income, and commodities to find stocks that can act as “free hedges” to one another—putting together a stock tied to an economic reopening, for example, with another that would hold up better if there are more lockdowns—or companies that react differently to a weaker dollar.
Low interest rates and the magnitude of government stimulus could eventually mean a weaker dollar, and make Cooper more defensive. “The faith in modern monetary theory scares me to death because nothing like it has ever worked in human history,” he says.
Add in the frenzy around cryptocurrencies and the high levels of leverage at hedge funds, and Cooper is relying even less on leverage—and hunting away from even other value investors. Europe is popular among value managers, for instance, but Cooper says valuations aren’t that cheap and quality isn’t that high.
Instead, he is finding better opportunities in the United Kingdom and Japan, often amid industrials, a sector where competitive advantages can last longer than in consumer or technology businesses. Senior (SNR.UK), a British industrial supplier to aerospace and defense companies whose shares fell almost 75% last year as the pandemic disrupted commercial air travel, is the type of business that Cooper gravitates toward. Run by good operators he has followed for decades, the company should see an improving outlook as its investments in the supply chain for the next generation of aircraft pay off and air travel recovers, he says. There’s also a potential macroeconomic boost: currency appreciation.
Samantha McLemore, founder, Patient Capital Management
Samantha McLemore has spent her entire career working alongside noted value investor Bill Miller, first at Legg Mason and now at Miller Value Partners. While her approach to value bears many similarities to her famous co-manager, the past two decades have left their own mark on the 41-year-old.
Growing up in Vermont in a family where money was tight, trying to get the most for it was second nature. McLemore is also comfortable being the odd person out, attending a Southern college as a Northerner and making her way in a male-dominated industry. Both offered a good setup for value investing.
“Samantha has exactly the characteristics Warren Buffett said he would look for in an investor—independent thinking, emotional stability, and a keen understanding of both human and institutional behavior,” Miller tells Barron’s. “She is patient, long-term oriented, and she doesn’t let the market’s behavior corrupt her thinking and decision making.”
McLemore launched her own investment firm, Patient Capital Management, last year, and still co-manages the $2.7 billion Miller Opportunity Trust (LGOAX), which has returned an average annual 23% over the past five years, beating 99% of peers. Miller Opportunity owns Amazon.com (AMZN) and Uber Technologies (UBER) and can invest up to 15% in Bitcoin—which may raise traditionalists’ eyebrows, much the way Miller’s early investments in tech stocks did in the 1990s.
McLemore notes that Buffett has long viewed growth as an input into the value equation. And like Buffett, McLemore is willing to pay closer to fair value for a company if she is confident in its long-term prospects. That’s just as attractive as a really cheap company with huge potential gains, but also has more risk, she says. This is different from her partner and mentor: Though Miller has made most of his money by being extremely early in some companies, notably Amazon, he has long loved high-reward, high-risk, deep-value stocks. “When I launched the Patient Capital strategy, I bought Google, and I couldn’t convince Bill to put it in the Opportunity fund,” McLemore says. “It didn’t have enough juice or upside to make it exciting for him, but I thought its long-term compounding potential was attractive.”
Buffett stressed the importance of investing in what you know; McLemore says it’s equally important to expand that “circle of competence” and think more broadly about how the world is changing. That leads her to growthier companies like Farfetch (FTCH), which provides a marketplace for luxury goods. It has strong management, an underappreciated Amazon-like technology-services business, and the potential to increase revenue sustainably at a double-digit pace while improving margins.
If this sounds too growth-y to be value, McLemore says, it’s important to remember her lens is valuations. “Unlike Cathie [Wood, of ARK Invest], who has strong views of innovation in the next five years,” McLemore says, “I’m more comfortable with businesses whose economics I can assess and analyze through a range of outcomes to see what is the downside and how much I can lose.”
Perhaps one of McLemore’s most controversial investments is Bitcoin, especially after its volatility this year. Though initially more skeptical than Bitcoin bull Miller, McLemore added it to her Patient Capital portfolio last year as interest among financial institutions and investors grew and it became viewed more widely as digital gold. Signals from the Federal Reserve that it may be patient with inflationary pressures made it an attractive inflation hedge, with the potential to be more.
The money manager always expected Bitcoin to be volatile, as the recent plunge demonstrated. But neither Tesla’s decision not to accept Bitcoin because of Elon Musk’s concerns about the energy needed to mine it nor China’s expanded cryptocurrency ban derails the investment case for it as digital gold, says McLemore, who views the recent selloff as a buying opportunity. Bitcoin, she adds, is less energy-intensive than mining gold, and China is pushing its own digital currency. The authoritarian country’s pushback against Bitcoin, which can’t be controlled, isn’t surprising.
Valuing Bitcoin requires some mental flexibility. “If you are thinking of it as digital gold, you can look at the capitalization of gold—about $12 trillion. Bitcoin is closer to $735 billion. That’s not a precise estimate, but a proxy for the potential upside if it proceeds along that path.”
One source of concern for the contrarian: A value panel at a conference this year all pitched compounders. “That makes me nervous,” she says, adding that perhaps deeper value opportunities could emerge if no one is looking for them. “That’s why I like the flexibility.”
Clare Hart, managing director, J.P. Morgan Asset Management
Clare Hart, lead manager of the $45 billion JPMorgan Equity Income fund (OIEIX), started her career as a public accountant. She didn’t like making people so nervous that they cried or avoided her, and feeling like she was always on a financial archaeological dig didn’t suit her.
After hearing that equity research analysts did similar number-crunching but cast it into the future, Hart joined Salomon Smith Barney as an associate working on small-cap real estate investment trusts before joining a value team at Fleming Asset Management, which eventually became part of J.P. Morgan.
Hart, 50, has managed JPMorgan Equity Income—described by Morningstar as “the best in breed”—since 2004. Over the past 15 years, the fund has returned an average annual 9.2%, beating 88% of its large value peers.
Hart isn’t the type of value investor whose approach has been shaped by Graham or Buffett. “Everyone handed me those books, and I spent years going to [Buffett’s] annual meetings. He was fascinating as a human being, and I read bits and pieces of the books. But it was more that it was interesting, like how you might read a book of quotes from Churchill or Kant.”
Deep value stocks don’t appeal to Hart; she favors “quality” businesses that may be pricier but could look cheap in hindsight as their earnings consistently meet or surpass expectations. “Value, for me, is about when, not if,” says Hart. “I look at some value stocks, and there are a lot of ifs—if this doesn’t happen, X won’t go bankrupt. If rates stay low, they can delever and be OK. I try to find the ‘whens’ in the market.”
Instead of using discounted cash flow models popular among traditional value investors, Hart favors free cash-flow yield, which requires fewer long-term assumptions that neither the company nor the analyst can make. Still, Hart, a pragmatist, is quick to sell when assumptions begin to fall apart. “Just because it’s in your portfolio doesn’t mean you have to retrofit your investment thesis. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong.”
The fund is meant to act as a ballast in portfolios, with Hart especially attuned to what can go wrong—something that carries over at home when she starts thinking about valve turnoffs as gardeners work on her yard. “My husband asks me why I always go to the worst-case scenario,” she says.
Despite comparisons often made between now and the late-1990s bubble, Hart’s worst-case radar isn’t flashing red. “Companies then didn’t have the earnings and cash flow that today’s growth stars do,” she says. “It’s different in a healthy way for the overall market.”
As the economy recovers, new habits cemented during the pandemic—such as online shopping—will continue, benefiting the likes of VF Corp (VFC), Best Buy (BBY), and Gap (GPS). Capital One Financial (COF) stands to benefit from increased consumer spending but also from stimulus helping individuals and small businesses pay down debt, and improving credit quality.
Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., Hart wasn’t wealthy, and one of her persistent worries is about the part of the population that’s struggling. “At some point, the question is how [income inequality] connects to the market—whether through higher taxes or new requirements on companies to reduce income inequality through things like training,” she says, adding that there could also be opportunities. “Managed-care stocks, for example, could help with expanded healthcare coverage.”
Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey, Durable Capital Partners
Photograph by Guerin Blask
Henry Ellenbogen and Anouk Dey of Durable Capital Partners aren’t your typical value investors. But their approach embodies the type of flexibility, willingness to embrace disruption, and long-term view that Tano Santos, director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing at Columbia Business School, says is the future of value investing.
After an early career working in politics, Ellenbogen joined T. Rowe Price in 2001 as an analyst covering internet, media, and telecom companies. He got a close-up view of how disruption can erode the durability of business models. In 2010, he took over the T. Rowe Price New Horizons fund, building a record as a star stockpicker and becoming among the first mutual fund managers to invest in private companies like Twitter and Grubhub. At Durable, the hedge fund he founded in 2019, Ellenbogen, 48, builds on that background, investing in smaller public and private companies that have the potential to become much bigger—in other words, compounders.
After an injury ended her competitive ski-racing career, Dey, 35, moved to the Middle East to work with refugees and eventually wrote a paper for a think tank about Twitter’s role in the Arab Spring, which led to meeting Ellenbogen. In 2012, Dey joined T. Rowe Price as an analyst, focusing on small-cap growth stocks. She took a compounders investing course at Columbia Business School, where she saw parallels to her international-relations background, looking for patterns from critical moments in history. She now co-teaches that class.
Durable, which has $11 billion in assets, defines compounders as companies that generate total returns of 20% annually, on average, over a decade. But the path is rarely linear; data show that compounders suffer a one-year stock decline of 60%, on average, in any given 10-year period. That’s why Dey says it’s crucial to have a time horizon of three years or more. The firm typically makes 10 new investments each year, with the hope that two or three of each draft class will become compounders over the next decade. While growth managers often favor companies with double-digit revenue growth, Ellenbogen says they’re satisfied with even 5% to 7%. The durability is the draw.
Management is key; the duo wants to see companies run by managers with an owner’s mind-set, fixated on making their core business better, and investing to extend their competitive moat. But Ellenbogen and Dey take it a step further, advising companies on how to infuse lessons the money managers have gleaned from other investments into their DNA early in companies’ life cycles. That could include, for example, helping private companies identify board members, advising them on processes or systems, or investing directly in the companies at crucial points. Don’t confuse them with activists, though: “If we don’t think someone is going to make good decisions such that we would have to advocate change, we would just sell,” says Ellenbogen.
During the pandemic, Durable made private investments in public equities, or PIPEs, into holdings like antibody supplier Abcam (ABCM) and Canadian real estate service company FirstService (FSV), which Ellenbogen describes as a “case study of excellent operating culture.” He notes the company’s portfolio of strong brands, treatment of front-line employees, and record of disciplined investments, with management moving quickly during the pandemic to bolster its commercial restoration business. That value-minded action is a draw: “If you can get assets or make investments when others aren’t, you get more advantage over time,” says Ellenbogen, who sees the company set up for years of strong growth.
Laura Geritz, founder and CEO, Rondure Global Advisors
Listening to stories about her grandparents, who endured the Great Depression and Dust Bowl in Kansas, left an imprint on Laura Geritz. Her frugality and aversion to debt shows up in her personal life (she has been debt-free since age 30) as well as in her global portfolios (which eschew companies that are reliant on others for funding). She founded Rondure Global Advisors in 2016 after a decade of building an outstanding record as a globe-trotting investor, particularly among the emerging markets, at Wasatch Advisors.
The dangers of leverage were reinforced early in her career when she was pulled from her usual duties at a brokerage to help manage the flood of calls from retail investors on the day that Long Term Capital Management blew up and the market plummeted. “I can remember one story so acutely: It was a man who had a wife and two kids who had gotten a stock pick from a [friend] and had mortgaged his house and lost everything— and was $90,000 in debt,” says Geritz.
Geritz describes herself as a “quality contrarian” in the manner of Buffett’s current approach to value. Her team starts with 1,000 of the strongest companies in the world —the “Popeye-like” companies that have been eating their spinach to create strong franchises and bolster their competitive position, and are adept at turning net income into free cash flow. Among these companies, Geritz looks for those that can generate double-digit returns, even after stress-testing them for a host of scenarios.
A voracious learner, Geritz is as likely to pepper conversations with tidbits from a just-completed course on sustainability or one of the multiple books she has devoured that week, as she is a lesson from Graham. She takes an out-of-the-box approach to opportunities and risks.
And she sees risks piling up: Years of low interest rates have encouraged companies to borrow too much and caused other distortions. “If you had Enron come out of 1999-2000, what’s going to come out of this?” Geritz asks. “Global GDP is going to be high, but the quality is abysmal. It’s the combination of every single bubble we have ever seen. At some point, the Fed is going to lose control, and when that blows, the stuff that’s underowned will hold up better.”
Another risk: Competitive advantages are harder to maintain amid a rush of companies going public in emerging markets and as Chinese regulators knock internet powerhouses, which is one reason that Geritz, 49, has had a lighter allocation to China than peers for the life of her firm.
Geritz’s caution tends to pay off in downturns, but the $234 million Rondure New World’s (RNWOX) 7.5% average annual return over the past three years puts it in the middle of its peer group, and the $32 million Rondure Overseas fund’s (ROSOX) 8% average annual return trails the MSCI AC World index by 2.9 percentage points. Raising capital for cautious foreign funds during a raging U.S. bull market hasn’t been easy—though it’s easier to stay the course at her own firm. “I just tell clients the truth: It’s the most speculative of the speculative stuff [that’s] working now. I’m content to sit that out.”
Geritz lately favors “boring growth” companies like President Chain Store (2912.Taiwan), a Taiwanese convenience-store operator with strong governance and a juicy dividend that trades at nine times cash flow. While e-commerce companies get rewarded for gobbling up retail, Geritz says the reverse doesn’t hold; the convenience store hasn’t received credit for its investments in faster delivery and being an Uber Eats-like company.
Occasionally, Geritz spots a classic value stock, like low-cost Indonesian noodle company Indofood CBP Sukses Makmur (ICBP.Indonesia). “As wealth goes to the top of the pyramid everywhere in the world, the ‘rising middle class’ story itself has been a cigar butt,” says Geritz. Indofood, she says, has a strong operating record and could benefit from global stimulus and a commodities boom that may help Indonesia’s economy.
But the pace of markets means speed is increasingly important: “That’s the problem with value,” Geritz says: “If you’re not fast, you miss i
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Global Buffetts is dedicated to compiling a compendium of elite international money managers & investors. While the U.S. is indeed home to a number of world-class financiers, the rapid economic development and dynamic rise of financial acumen around the world has changed the playing field in the past decades. There are now a number of global "Buffetts" plying their trade & demonstrating their expertise in their own markets. Often, however, there is little written about such individuals as most popular media is focused on the big names in U.S. investing. This personal interest blog is one individual's attempt to uncover other elite money managers from around the world.
Educated at Yale University (Bachelor of Arts - History) and Harvard (Master in Public Policy - International Development), Monty Simus has lived, worked, and traveled in more than forty countries spanning Africa, China, western Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Southeast & Central Asia, and his personal interests comprise economic development, policy, investment, technology, natural resources, and the environment, with a particular focus on globalization’s impact upon these subject areas. Monty writes about frontier investment markets at www.wildcatsandblacksheep.com and geopolitical pressures in the global agricultural sector at www.seedsofarevolution.com.