Schloss screens for companies ideally trading at discounts to book value, with no or low debt, and managements that own enough company stock to make them want to do the right thing by shareholders. If he likes what he sees, he buys a little and calls the company for financial statements and proxies. He reads these documents, paying special attention to footnotes. One question he tries to answer from the numbers: Is management honest (meaning not overly greedy)? That matters to him more than smarts. The folks runningHollinger International were smart but greedy--not good for investors.
Schloss doesn't profess to understand a company's operations intimately and almost never talks to management. He doesn't think much about timing--am I buying at the low? selling at the high?--or momentum. He doesn't think about the economy. Typical work hours when he was running his fund: 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., only a half hour after the New York Stock Exchange's closing bell.
Schloss owns a prized 1934 edition of Graham's Security Analysis he still thumbs through. Its binding is held together by three strips of Scotch tape. In the small room he invests from now, across the hall from his apartment, one wall contains a half-dozen gag pictures of Buffett (the Omaha sage with buxom cheerleaders or with a towering stack ofBerkshire Hathaway tax returns). Each has a joke scribbled at the bottom and a salutation using Schloss' nickname from the old days, Big Walt.
Read the complete article about Walter Schloss in Forbes.com and how to be a true value investor.
Schloss doesn't profess to understand a company's operations intimately and almost never talks to management. He doesn't think much about timing--am I buying at the low? selling at the high?--or momentum. He doesn't think about the economy. Typical work hours when he was running his fund: 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., only a half hour after the New York Stock Exchange's closing bell.
Schloss owns a prized 1934 edition of Graham's Security Analysis he still thumbs through. Its binding is held together by three strips of Scotch tape. In the small room he invests from now, across the hall from his apartment, one wall contains a half-dozen gag pictures of Buffett (the Omaha sage with buxom cheerleaders or with a towering stack ofBerkshire Hathaway tax returns). Each has a joke scribbled at the bottom and a salutation using Schloss' nickname from the old days, Big Walt.
Read the complete article about Walter Schloss in Forbes.com and how to be a true value investor.
