One of the Greatest Ever

A true loss for the value investing community took place last week when legendary investor Walter Schloss passed away. Without greats like Walter Schloss, there would be no Gad Capital Management, Sham Gad Partners Funds, or anything else I have done related to investing.

About four years ago I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Schloss speak in New York. This was a gem of an experience - I think I was one of maybe 10 people getting to hear the living legend speak on value investing, Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, and many other great stories. My biggest takeaway: schloss's deep disregard for debt. He kept making the comment and I quote "I just don't like debt. There is too much trouble in having debt". Little did I know that Walter's cooments were a timeless lessons that would come to manifest themselves several months later.

I count myself among the lucky few who were able to meet and speak with Mr. Schloss.

Here's a great piece on Schloss from Bloomberg: (I've abridged this...click to go to full article)


From 1955 to 2002, by Schloss’s estimate, his investments returned 16 percent annually on average after fees, compared with 10 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. (SPX) His firm, Walter J. Schloss Associates, became a partnership, Walter & Edwin Schloss Associates, when his son joined him in 1973. Schloss retired in 2002.

Buffett, a Graham disciple whose stewardship of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has made him one of the world’s richest men and most emulated investors, called Schloss a “superinvestor” in a 1984 speech at Columbia Business School. He again saluted Schloss as “one of the good guys of Wall Street” in his 2006 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.

“Walter Schloss was a very close friend for 61 years,” Buffett said yesterday in a statement. “He had an extraordinary investment record, but even more important, he set an example for integrity in investment management. Walter never made a dime off of his investors unless they themselves made significant money. He charged no fixed fee at all and merely shared in their profits. His fiduciary sense was every bit the equal of his investment skills.”

Began as ‘Runner’
To Buffett, Schloss’s record disproved the theory of an efficient market -- one that, at any given moment, assigns a reasonably accurate price to a stock. If companies weren’t routinely overvalued and undervalued, Buffett reasoned, long- term results like Schloss’s couldn’t be achieved, except through inside information. Schloss, who never attended college, began working on Wall Street in 1935 as a securities-delivery “runner” at Carl M. Loeb & Co.

The Schloss theory of investing, passed from father to son, involved minimal contact with analysts and company management and maximum scrutiny of financial statements, with particular attention to footnotes.

Focus on Statements

“The Schlosses would rather trust their own analysis and their longstanding commitment to buying cheap stocks,” Bruce Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul Sonkin and Michael van Biema wrote in “Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond,” their 2001 book. “This approach,” the authors wrote, “leads them to focus almost exclusively on the published financial statements that public firms must produce each quarter. They start by looking at the balance sheet. Can they buy the company for less than the value of the assets, net of all debt? If so, the stock is a candidate for purchase.”

An example was copper company Asarco Inc. The Schlosses bought shares in 1999 as the stock bottomed out around $13. In November of that year, Grupo Mexico SA (GMEXICOB) bought Asarco for $2.25 billion in cash and assumed debt, paying almost $30 a share.

‘Guts to Buy’

“Basically we like to buy stocks which we feel are undervalued, and then we have to have the guts to buy more when they go down,” Schloss said at a 1998 conference sponsored by Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. “And that’s really the history of Ben Graham.” Buffett, in his 2006 letter to shareholders, said Schloss took “no real risk, defined as permanent loss of capital” and invested “in about 1,000 securities, mostly of a lackluster type. A few big winners did not account for his success.”

Edwin Schloss, now retired, said yesterday in an interview that his father’s investing philosophy and longevity were probably related. “A lot of money managers today worry about quarterly comparisons in earnings,” he said. “They’re up biting their fingernails until 5 in the morning. My dad never worried about quarterly comparisons. He slept well.”


Early Lessons

Schloss first met Buffett at an annual meeting of wholesaler Marshall Wells, which drew both investors because it was trading at a discount to net working capital, according to a 2008 article in Forbes magazine. When Buffett joined Graham- Newman, he and Schloss shared an office. While Buffett became a star inside the firm, Schloss was “pigeonholed as a journeyman employee who would never rise to partnership,” Schroeder, a Bloomberg News columnist, wrote in her book.