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How a bridge champ beats the market! (Awesome)

January 11, 2011 | About:
Fun read especially for fellow value investors. I don’t agree with the macro calls at the end, but the bit about bridge and investing is interesting.

Tag line “Brad Moss, a star bridge player, uses his gaming skills to make his hedge fund prosper. Here’s how he does it.”



Excerpt (Via Adam Lashinsky @ Fortune)



Moss is a minnow in the investing world — his two funds total about $30 million in assets — but a giant in the world of bridge. A 10-time national champion, he has a fearsome reputation among the game’s elite. “He’s a tough, intense competitor,” says Robert Hamman, a legendary bridge champion who runs a business in Dallas that manages promotional contests for corporate clients. Moss also is known as something of a bridge princeling among top-level competitors. His bridge-teacher mother, Gail Greenberg, is a former world champion, and his stockbroker father, Mike, is a former national champion.

The connection with bridge, says Moss, is the ability to decide what data matter, and then to have the judgment to act on it. “In bridge and investing, you are constantly being bombarded with an enormous amount of information,” he says. “The key is seeing all the possibilities.” There’s more. In bridge, an opponent’s tempo of play will tell an expert more than an amateur. Similarly, in investing, knowing which market indicators to monitor, and when, is more critical than watching every piece of information.

A natural math nerd, Moss takes a two-pronged approach to investing. On the one hand, he’s a classic trader, placing bets on minute pricing dislocations. “I can look at a board and tell you the cheapest option by comparing them to each other mathematically,” he tells me during an interview at his home office in a sprawling house in the San Francisco suburb of San Anselmo. On the other hand, he’s a traditional value investor who prefers low-P/E stocks. “I’m more Cisco (CSCO) at $19 than Salesforce.com (CRM) at $135,” he said in mid-November. He owns Cisco, which he calls a world-class player with a “shockingly” low valuation considering it has $5.50 of net cash per share on its balance sheet.

Click Here To Read: How a bridge champ beats the market! (Awesome)

About the author:

Miguel Barbosa is founder of the multidiscplinary blog SimoleonSense.com. SimoleonSense examines value investing through a lens of behavioral finance, complex systems, psychology, philosophy, and neuroeconomics. Miguel's heros are his parents, Charlie Munger, Charlie Rose, Warren Buffett. Miguel Barbosa holds a Masters of Science in Management and a Masters of Arts in International Business. Miguel received his Bachelors of Liberal Arts and Sciences (with a concentration in Cognitive Psychology) from the University of Florida. Currently, he is working on obtaining his CFA designation (passed the first level in 2009)

Visit Miguel Barbosa's Website

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